Last week the New Jersey Assembly Education Committee held a public hearing on a bill, A 4121, which would eliminate the high school diploma qualifying test called NJGPA. Yesterday the full Assembly approved the bill 55-17. 

The only Education Committee member to vote against approving the proposal for Assembly approval was Sussex Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia, who cautioned, “Do not hand out a diploma disconnected from proficiency. I think it’s a huge error. Students in New Jersey can do it — our policy cannot reflect that they can’t.”

From the NJ Monitor:

Fantasia said students who are about to enter the workforce or pursue higher education should be held to a high standard, and she claimed employers are already seeing a decline in the readiness of entry-level employees. “If anything, we’re going to widen the gap between the diploma we hand them and their actual preparedness,” she said.

Many members of the public, both for and against the bill, testified during the hearing including NJEA President Steve Beatty. He told a story of one of his children (at 21:55 on the recording) who got all As and Bs in high school but didn’t pass the math portion of the NJGPA, which evaluates student proficiency in 10th grade math and reading. “Why didn’t we know this all along?” he asks. “Thankfully I was friends with the principal so we had to go to a community college so [the student] could take the Accuplacer” (one of the many alternative ways to get a NJ diploma). “There is an injustice being done,” claims Beatty, because these tests provide unnecessary barriers.” He concludes that parents “should listen to educators instead.”

Beatty nails it: Parents should know this all along.

We do know there is rampant grade inflation, not only in NJ and not only in K-12 schools but in colleges as well. Note the national headlines documenting that this year 1,000 freshman at the top-ranked University of California at San Diego need to take remedial math, a cohort that has “skyrocketed” according to Kelsey Piper, and they don’t just need remedial high school math but middle school and elementary level math too.  Only 39% of the students in the remedial class knew how to round the number 374518 to the nearest hundred. Only 25% could figure out the answer to 7 + 2 = [_] + 6.

But here’s the wrinkle that ties back to the NJ Legislature’s determination to eliminate objective assessments of student learning and, instead, rely on report card grades: In a report generated by UC-San Diego, investigators found, “of those who demonstrated math skills not meeting middle school levels 42% reported completing calculus or precalculus. The pattern of high school math classes taken in many cases suggests much higher levels of math skill than the actual math skill the student often has.” 

These are not borderline students: more than 25% of those requiring remedial math had a high school GPA of 4.0. The average was 3.7.

Here’s where we are: Straight As and a high school diploma will get you remedial classes in college. (Two out of five of those remedial math class students also need remedial writing courses.)

No shade on NJ teachers or, for that matter, NJEA’s president! No doubt Steve Beatty’s kid is smart and their parents did everything right. But we lie to parents and students all the time about learning levels. And if we codify that inflation, if we legislate our aversion to measuring real learning, we fail NJ families. 

The bill now goes to the Senate next month. It has to be passed by January 13th to make it into the lame duck session.