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“Have you ever brought your child to a pediatric appointment and asked the doctor to withhold the diagnosis?” asks Laura Overdeck. As one of two leaders of a newly-launched non-profit called Wake Up Call New Jersey, she believes parents, just like they want the truth at the doctor’s office, want the truth about how their children are really faring in school. In a recent interview Overdeck and her partner Peter Shulman explained how we’re losing sight of alarmingly low math proficiency levels: Consider that 55% of NJ fourth graders can’t do math at grade-level and by sixth grade the percentage of students below grade-level rises to 64%.
People may know this happens in districts like Newark and Camden. But how does one break through the pretense that children in suburban districts are just fine? These advocates propose a theory of change that relies on raising public awareness of New Jersey students’ challenges in mastering essential math skills, often masked through reductive and inflated report card grades as well as high school diplomas. If parents learn of the mismatch between assumptions of proficiency and reality, they reason, if they are armed with facts, they will be motivated to ask for fixes to a problem they currently don’t know they have.
According to a recent poll, 89% of parents think their children are at or above grade level in math. But a new analysis of national test scores by the Education Recovery Scorecard shows the average New Jersey student is two-thirds of a grade level below 2019 levels; NJ ranks 43rd among states in Covid math recovery. (We’re 24th in reading.) Right now 91% of NJ students attend schools where average math achievement in 2024 is below 2019 levels and the achievement gap between lower-performing and higher-performing students has grown by 25% over the last decade, one of the “most dramatic” gaps in the country.
This includes students in higher-performing suburban districts, as noted on Wake Up Call NJ’s data page:
- In Montclair, 1 in 3 (36%) of fifth graders can’t do math at grade level. Only 38% of Algebra students demonstrate grade level achievement.
- In Princeton, more than 25% of fourth graders can’t do math at grade level.
- In Cherry Hill, 50% of fifth graders can’t do math at grade level.
Overdeck, founder of Bedtime Math and the Overdeck Family Foundation, and Shulman, former Deputy Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Education and CEO of City Teacher Alliance, hope to change this false narrative of academic excellence. They also emphasize the essential role numeracy plays in charting successful lives: Too many people, says Overdeck, “think it’s okay to be ‘not so good in math’” and they pass that on to kids, something she calls a “massive generational contagion.” Without numeracy, students’ access to a whole raft of potential choices — high-level math courses, career choices in STEM, financial stability, even quotidian tasks like buying a car— is stymied.
Wake Up Call New Jersey is running a campaign on cable channels, YouTube, social media, and billboards explaining this disconnect between perception and reality But changing the way we deliver accurate information to parents is a longer-term endeavor, with a focus on what Overdeck calls “the two pillars of information,” report card grades and high school diplomas, which must be “more informative” to be useful. Only then can we fix the disconnect.
Through no fault of their own— Overdeck and Shulman stress there are no villains here— parents often are unaware of their children’s lack of mastery of foundational math skills. New Jersey parents, like most, rely on report card grades for accurate information about their children’s academic progress. But according to research like that from Learning Heroes, 80% of students get B’s or higher on their report cards, unaligned with actual proficiency rates. Cindi Williams, founder of that non-profit says, “Grades are the holy grail for a parent. It’s a single source of information,” which is “the reason nobody’s asking for a better system, or for change.” (Educator Tim Donahue compares grade inflation to “a looming sense of climate denial, propped up by wishful thinking.”)
This “single source of information” is incomplete. “We’ve got so many great people,” says Shulman, referring to NJ teachers, “but the wrong incentives,” specifically the practice of reducing student performance to a single letter grade or numeral and tolerating long delays in disseminating objective data about progress. This leaves parents with “a very narrow view of learning.” What if, instead of that single letter or number, parents saw the results of a variety of assessments— diagnostic, formative, summative — that can help them figure out whether their children have mastered grade-level standards necessary to be successful the following year? What if teachers told parents directly when their children were not at grade-level? Think of it, says Overdeck, like replacing a photo with a photo album, an analogy she borrows from former NJ Education Commissioner Kimberly Harrington. “We’re talking about our children’s future and this is serious. Parents deserve more granularity, to have the entire suite, a whole mosaic of artifacts before them.”
Part of the problem is timing. The 2025 state standardized tests, according to the NJ Department of Education, will be given in March but parents won’t know outcomes until October, seven months later when students have missed out on potential interventions. But if results were available three weeks after tests were given, suggests Shulman, just like other types of standardized tests, parents or students could simply log on, see results, and get help for their children. “This is fixable,” he exclaims.
In addition, the diplomas that students receive at the conclusion of high school, which for many parents denote readiness for college and careers, no longer signify that preparation. In 2012 the Department of Education said high school completion meant that students were provided “with the rigorous foundation they need to be successful in college, careers and life.” But in 2022 the state DOE changed the definition of a diploma to “High School Graduation Ready.”
This lowering of standards (elsewhere Shulman compares it to “telling everyone that they’re a great swimmer when you know half of us really are drowning”) conceals actual student readiness. For instance, based on last year’s math scores on the high school test called NJGPA, which align with SAT results, less than 56% of eleventh grade students were “graduation ready”— although 90% got diplomas.
Parents want honesty about their children’s growth, just like they get at the pediatrician’s office. The Wake Up Call NJ team hopes they can harness that drive for accurate information by unveiling the truth and presenting parents with a narrative they can believe in order to maximize student prospects. Together, they say, we can fix this.
