Stan Karp is a retired educator from Paterson public schools and currently director of the Secondary Education Reform Project at the Education Law Center. This was originally published in NJ Spotlight.

Dear Gov. Murphy:

I write as a retired public school teacher who spent 30 years teaching English and journalism to high school students in Paterson. I also write as someone who voted for you twice, in large part because of your promise to support New Jersey’s public schools and to reverse the teacher-bashing, test-crazed policies of your predecessor, Chris Christie, the most anti-public education governor the state has ever had.

There was one promise, in particular, that caught my attention during your first campaign. Speaking to the New Jersey School Boards Association on Sept. 19, 2017, you said, “I will eliminate PARCC, and remove exit testing requirements for our high school seniors … The era of high-stakes, high-stress, standardized tests in New Jersey must end, and I will see that it does.”

I was impressed. It’s a rare candidate who even knows what “exit testing” is, let alone how the misuse and overuse of standardized testing has damaged school culture, fed the school-to-prison pipeline and driven education policy into a ditch for several decades. My own teaching career paralleled the 40-plus years that New Jersey made passing an alphabet soup of exit tests a requirement for graduation. I helped students prepare for the MBS, the HSPT 9, the HSPT 11, the HSPA, the SRA, the AHSA and PARCC. Each test promised to ensure that all graduates would be well prepared for college, careers and citizenship, and each test failed because that’s something standardized tests cannot do.

High opt-out rates

You seemed to understand that. Your first gubernatorial campaign came at a time when New Jersey parents and students were rising up against the rollout of Common Core standards and tests. Common Core doubled down on the test-and-punish policies of the federal “No Child Left Behind” law, but New Jersey parents and students said “Enough!” Tens of thousands of students and families “opted out” of the tests and demanded change, and it seemed that you heard them clearly.

When you told the New Jersey Education Association, “I’ll give you the one sentence answer: scrap PARCC Day One, scrap PARCC as a high school graduation requirement,” I was ready to fill out my ballot.

But then the walk-backs began. Asked about your “day one” promise just before you were sworn in, you said, “The answer to the logistics of how it’s done, honestly, I don’t know.” Your new education commissioner said replacing PARCC would take “several years.”

Even more concerning was your decision to go to court to defend the Christie administration’s efforts to use PARCC as an exit test. In October 2016, the Education Law Center (where I went to work as a policy advocate after retiring from teaching) filed a legal challenge to the use of PARCC as a diploma requirement on behalf of several New Jersey civil rights and education groups. ELC hoped that your election would lead to settlement of the case and provide you with another chance to make good on your promise to end exit testing.

Legal defense

Instead, when the Appellate Division heard the case in October 2018, your attorney general’s office defended the Christie administration’s positions on exit testing. A few months later the court upheld ELC’s challenge and struck down the PARCC graduation rules. This provided another golden opportunity to end exit testing, but again your administration chose to keep it going indefinitely. Your Department of Education even authorized implementation of a new exit test, the New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment. (NJGPA)

Instead of ending the “era of high-stakes, high-stress standardized tests in New Jersey,” it’s still here. PARCC was shortened a bit and rebranded as the “NJ Student Learning Assessments (NJSLA).” Same test, different name.

As the COVID-19 pandemic played havoc with schools, the Department of Education suspended some tests and added others. For a while, under your administration, New Jersey had more testing than ever: the NJSLAs, the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a new layer of “Start Strong” state assessments supposedly designed to measure pandemic “learning loss,” and countless district- and school-level tests, some administered multiple times throughout the year. Like the COVID virus, standardized testing can be hard to contain.

More testing mania came from the State Board of Education, which remains controlled by Christie appointees, all serving in expired seats. Now in the middle of your second term, your administration — inexplicably — has not put a single new appointee on the board charged with overseeing the state’s public education system. While the Senate has failed to act on the three nominations you submitted earlier this year, the State Board has repeatedly made a mess of the graduation rules, adopting hopelessly complicated, and at times illegal, regulations and imposing arbitrary “cut scores” designed to set up students and schools for failure.

Right now, your legacy on testing issues is the NJGPA — the most useless of all state tests, one that has no instructional value for schools or educators and that comes far too late in a student’s career to have any impact on his/her educational program. Like the exit tests before it, the NJGPA does not reliably measure what it pretends to measure (“academic ability,” “college readiness,” “mastery of standards”), and doesn’t measure at all qualities we all want high school graduates to have (responsibility, resilience, critical thinking, empathy). It is simply an obstacle to graduation for the most vulnerable students who have stayed in school and completed all their credit, attendance and other requirements but who struggle with standardized exams. It is a test that hurts those who fail and doesn’t help those who pass. (See States Have Soured on the High School Exit Exam. Here’s Why, Education Week, Jan. 26, 2023)

Still time to act

But there is still time to change this legacy and to keep the promise you made when you first ran for governor. There is no federal requirement for exit testing for high school diplomas. It is totally a state decision. Only nine states still use exit testing, down from a high of 27 in the early 2000s. In recent years more than a dozen states have repealed their exit testing policies, and two of the largest remaining states, New York and Massachusetts, are currently considering steps to do the same.

Even if New Jersey eliminates exit testing, there will be no shortage of data about school and student performance at both the district and state levels. The NAEP tests, NJSLA tests (which exceed federal requirements) and multiple school and district assessments will all remain in place.

Not only can New Jersey eliminate exit testing without federal approval, but the Assembly has teed up a bill that would do just that. In June, a bill to eliminate exit testing for high school graduation (A-4639/S-3308) passed the Assembly by a vote of 64-9. But so far it has not moved in the Senate.

Gov. Murphy, if you put your administration’s support behind this bill and promise to sign it, the Senate could pass the measure in the coming lame-duck session and put an end to New Jersey’s exit testing nightmares.

That would be a promise kept and a legacy well worth leaving behind.

Sincerely, Stan Karp

[photo credit] Flickr: Phil Murphy