“Standardized assessment scores have little to no value as an indicator of school or teacher quality.”

That’s a written comment from NJEA leaders* at last week’s State Board of Education meeting regarding proposed changes to how the Department of Education evaluates school districts. The tool they use (QSAC, or Quality Single Accountability Continuum) is essentially a compliance monitor and requires districts to show they meet metrics in five different areas. (Explainer here.) One of the five areas is Instruction & Program, which includes scores on state standardized tests. The DOE is proposing to change how it calculates district scores: While previously one of the ways they used was equally weighing test scores and student progress, now the DOE wants to place more value on progress and less on absolute test scores.

What is behind NJEA’s response (which appears within the text of public comments released the day of the Board meeting) to this proposed de-emphasis on student scores on standardized tests?

To argue we should toss out test scores altogether.

To its credit, the DOE dismissed NJEA’s assault on the one objective means of evaluating student learning.

This little anecdote is relevant to the narrative circulating among education analysts: As Tim Daly recounts in a new column, “I’ve heard the A-word [“accountability”] more times in the past month than in the past five years. It’s suddenly back.”

Daly explains that standardized testing is the last relic of accountability from the much-despised federal law passed in 2001 called No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which has since been watered down to the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Now states still have to evaluate school districts through objective student evaluations (see: QSAC) but there are no consequences for districts from D.C.. Daly says ESSA is to “‘accountability’ like Scooby Doo was a guard dog.’” It’s accountability-lite, relying on states to set their own definitions of successful outcomes.

As many have noted in the wake of dreadful national testing scores, during the NCLB era U.S. students, especially historically-underperforming subgroups, raised their proficiency levels while achievement gaps tightened, probably because the law required states to identify their lowest-performing schools and help them improve. But NCLB made schools look bad because it was unforgiving, with its pipedream of 100% proficiency levels. ESSA erased those aspirational benchmarks but students’ reading and math skills tanked and achievement gaps widened, exacerbated by the Covid school closures.

Yet at last week’s meeting NJEA leaders not only applauded the dissolution of state oversight but wanted to take it further, leaving the public in the dark about academic progress by defaulting to subjective evaluations like wildly inflated report card grades.

Datapoint: 56% of NJ fourth graders can’t do math at grade level and 62% can’t read at grade level.

What would NJEA have the New Jersey Department of Education do in response to these troubling results when evaluating school districts through QSAC?

Ignore the bad news.

NJEA leaders are correct that student outcomes are influenced by a host of factors unrelated to school quality:  household income, trauma, disabilities, parents’ level of education, genes, etc.. This is why high-performing wealthy students’ proficiency levels barely budged during Covid. Needier students, whose parents don’t have resources to move to a better district or hire private tutors, depend on the state to embrace the A-word.

The New Jersey Department of Education responded powerfully to NJEA: “The Department contends it is important to measure and report individual student progress or ‘academic growth’ toward proficiency for all students.” It opted to not consider  NJEA’s stated mission to “minimize the impact of State assessments on a school district’s NJQSAC performance.” That’s a win for New Jersey children.

Or, as Daly puts it, “learning comes first. That’s what the public wants.”

*The NJEA representatives listed on the DOE public comment page are Kaitlyn E. Dunphy, Esq., Associate Director, Legal Services and Member Rights; Michael Flynn, Associate Director, Government Relations; Sean Hadley, Associate Director, Government Relations; Lou Randazzo, Field Representative, Region 2; and Elisabeth Yucis, Associate Director, Professional Development and Instructional Issues, New Jersey Education Association (NJEA).