The New Jersey Department of Education is proposing changes to the way it labels whether or not school districts are “high-performing,” which it does through a  complicated five-part rubric called called the New Jersey Quality Single Accountability Continuum, or QSAC. (See here for an Explainer.) Many of those changes involve the section that is most troublesome for districts: Instruction and Program (I&P), which has multiple indicators including student achievement based on state standardized tests and student progress year-to-year. Low student achievement scores are the most frequent cause of districts “failing” QSAC, or not being labeled “high-performing.”

The change is this: Currently QSAC puts equal weight on absolute student achievement based on test scores and student progress; each is worth a maximum of 10 points. The DOE is proposing to lower the value of achievement scores to 7.5 points and raise the value of student progress to 15 points.

The benefits, according to an internal document, are two-fold: The changes will both align QSAC more closely with federal accountability law and also allow more districts to be labeled “high-performing.” 

As described in NJ Education Report’s Explainer,

“While current QSAC regulations give equal weights to student progress and student achievement, learning loss from Covid-19 school disruptions have set many districts back. Here is a list of the 45 districts under review at the State Board of Education meeting in July 2024, which shows they all failed because of I&P; their scores on the other four areas were passing scores.”

The DOE says that weighting student progress more than absolute achievement scores will “foster a more equitable distribution of points for each school district type.”

Student achievement became a big part of QSAC due to the educational priorities of the Bush and Obama Administrations, which spearheaded a higher degree of accountability for student learning across all 50 states and D.C.. In 2014 the NJ DOE established a  baseline for high-performance that required 80 percent of students to be proficient in math and reading based on state tests while also including year-to-year student growth, per the federal school accountability law called Every Student Succeeds Act.

However, with political setbacks in the accountability movement, along with student learning loss from Covid-19 school disruptions, placing so much emphasis on proficiency scores has led to an uncomfortable percentage of NJ school districts failing QSAC. Currently (based on 2023 state standardized test results), 51.3 percent of NJ students are proficient in reading and 37.6 percent are proficient in math. (Also, from a paper released Tuesday by NWEA, a national testing company: “At the end of 2021-22, we optimistically concluded that the worst was behind us and that [learning] recovery had begun. Unfortunately, data from the past two school years no longer supports this conclusion.”)

Measuring year-to-year student growth is regarded by some as a little squishy, especially because there are multiple ways of doing so. The trick, according to ExcelinEd, is finding the right balance between growth and proficiency.

In response to an inquiry, DOE spokesman Howard Seidman confirmed by email that “potential changes to the method of weighing achievement scores has been introduced” and may be on the August 7th State Board of Education public meeting agenda.

Other amendments up for discussion by the State Board include the some technical and procedural changes, the inclusion of science test scores, and increasing the weight for districts’ compliance with student learning standards in curriculum and instruction. This is from a summary of the proposed amendments:

“The Department also proposes the new I&P Indicator 18 to incorporate all statutory curricular requirements that are not already incorporated into the NJSLS but must be included in a school district’s curriculum. The proposed indicator will monitor whether a school district’s curriculum includes, but is not limited to: (a) diversity, equity, and inclusion in accordance with N.J.S.A. 18A:35-4.36a and (b) the history of persons with disabilities and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in middle and high school curriculum in accordance with N.J.S.A. 18A:35-4.35.”