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June 22, 2023New Student Learning Data Is Out. Will This Be a ‘Serious Wakeup Call’ for the Murphy Administration?
A new report is out today from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and everyone is talking about the dismal results. In short, 13-year-old students’ proficiency in math and reading has fallen, especially in math where the plummet is the highest in NAEP’s 53-year history of assessing 4th, 8th, and 12th graders. “It is a serious wakeup call for us all,” Peggy Carr, commissioner of NAEP, said in an interview. “In NAEP, when we experience a 1- or 2-point decline, we’re talking about it as a significant impact on a student’s achievement. In math, we experienced an 8-point decline — historic for this assessment.”
This news should be a serious wake-up call for the Murphy Administration’s Department of Education too. In a state that pays so much attention to racial inequities and social justice, shouldn’t we be alarmed at the 42-point achievement gap between Black and white eighth-graders? (Only D.C. and Wisconsin have larger gaps.)
Nope. We’re sticking with our story that the state school system, laden as it is with self-righteous memes, is just hunky-dory.
That’s not what national education leaders are telling us is best for our children.
Over the half-century since NAEP began measuring learning, American students have slowly risen in proficiency. Now, for our lowest-performing students, math scores are back to where they were in 1978 and reading scores are lower than they were when NAEP first tested students in 1971.
The worst declines were among Black 13-year-olds, who over the last decade dropped 10 points in reading and 24 points in math. Since 2020 and the COVID school closures, they’ve dropped 13 points in math, an equivalent of a year and a half of learning.
In a press call yesterday, NAEP’s Carr told reporters, “There are signs of risk for a generation of learners in the data. “We are observing steep drops in achievement, troubling shifts in reading habits and other factors that affect achievement, and rising mental health challenges alongside alarming changes in school climate.” (This is worsened by the perception of a majority of parents that their children are performing at or above grade level in reading and math.)
How is New Jersey responding to this news?
Let’s just say we’re not following the lead of Mississippi, which has astounded other states by rebounding relatively quickly from COVID learning loss because the state education department told districts to keep standards high and be honest with parents. (Also, Mississippi is way ahead of us in mandating teachers be trained in the science of reading; this new analysis says on that score NJ is “the worst in the nation.”)
Yet how many families know that NJ eighth-graders lost a full year in math due to school closures, remote instruction, failure to provide research-based interventions, and lackadaisical oversight?
Not many. Why? Acting Commissioner Angelica Allen-McMillan, following the 64 Floor philosophy of former Commissioner Lamont Repollet, is intent on perpetuating the charade that we have, as she insists, the “number 1 school system in the nation.”
And what is the Murphy Administration’s strategy to keep families in the dark? Lowering standards. After all, if you call a “D” a “B,” who is the wiser?
- That’s why the State Board of Education, under Allen-McMillan’s direction, just lowered the passing score on this test to the equivalent of “partially meets expectations” instead of the former “meets expectations.”
- That’s why in 2021 the DOE changed its definition of a NJ high school diploma from “college and career-ready” to “high school graduation-ready.”
- That’s why that same year, during a State Board meeting where members called the extent of learning loss an “emergency,” Allen-McMillan replied, “I do need to state publicly that it has not been a drain for everyone. It has not been a failure for everyone.”
She might as well have trumpeted, “it’s fake news!”
Except it’s not. The Murphy Administration appears so frightened of an honest discussion of recent student learning data we were one of the very last states to release results to the public.
Sure, it’s far easier to hide bad news than talk about it.
But that’s not leadership–it’s cowardice.
In other NAEP news, the percentage of 13-year-olds enrolled in algebra (of any level) has dropped to 24 percent from 34 percent in 2012. (This is, at least in part, driven by a movement some call the “California Framework,” which delays algebra until high school.) Also, in 2022, 31 percent of these students said they “never or hardly ever” read for fun, compared to 22 percent in 2012, and absenteeism rates are way up: 15% of students said they missed 3-4 days in the previous month, an increase of four points.
