A terrible idea has been circulating lately in the halls of Trenton: that we should scrap the state test that New Jersey students must take to graduate, and let each of our roughly 600 school districts decide for themselves what it takes to earn a high school diploma.
It’s obvious what the failing districts will do: Instead of lifting their game, they’re going to lower the bar. Take Asbury Park, which spends $41,000 per kid annually, where 93% of fifth graders couldn’t read proficiently and 99% couldn’t do math on the latest state assessments. What do you think a district like that is going to do if it’s allowed to set its own graduation standards?
The Constitutional responsibility to ensure that children in New Jersey get a decent education rests with the state, not with the Asbury Park school board. We can have a discussion about changing the graduation test, but this can’t be a local decision.
And if we do decide to change our graduation test, don’t drop the current one, called the New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment, taken in the 11th grade, without putting a better substitute in place.
Eliminating standardized testing is not the “equitable” move that some advocates claim. We’ve seen districts in New Jersey inflate their outcomes to hide the fact that they’re not doing what they’re supposed to for vulnerable kids. An audit during the Corzine years found that the district of Newark was naming courses with more advanced titles than the skills they were actually teaching in the class, recalled Derrell Bradford, a former education advocate in New Jersey, and now president of the national advocacy group 50CAN.
And if each district has a different graduation standard, how do we compare one district’s effectiveness to another’s?
“The ability to compare across districts is an essential tool of an equitable system,” Bradford said. Dumping our graduation test, an effort supported by the state’s largest teacher’s union, is “a cynical move” that would allow districts “to spin a good narrative about high school graduation.”
No one is claiming that the state assessments we use right now are perfect. There’s room for improvement. But Senate Majority Leader Teresa Ruiz is right that we shouldn’t eliminate the state’s exit test without substituting a new benchmark, so we still have this data – particularly given how much the pandemic has hurt student learning.
Just knowing that academic gaps broadly increased isn’t enough; it’s “extremely important” for school leaders to find out precisely where their students’ weaknesses lie so they can target their interventions, said Joshua Glazer of George Washington University, an expert in improving high poverty schools. You won’t get that level of data from the SAT and ACT, he noted.
Those calling to eliminate the graduation test argue that grades are more accurate in predicting college success, and that’s usually true – but without standardized tests, we are powerless against grade inflation. We don’t want kids to take five years to graduate community college because they don’t have the skills they should have gotten in high school. Then they’re forced to spend their own money on remediation. Or they’re left in debt and without a credential, the worst of both worlds. “There’s never been a time when we are more positioned to have a deluge of that, like right now,” Bradford said, citing the pandemic’s academic toll.
At the same time, it’s not true that this exit test is standing between kids and a high school diploma, because it’s not the only option. Students can use an alternative test like the SAT or a portfolio of work to graduate. The state test is just “the primary and most rigorous one that we should be incentivizing,” says Kyle Rosenkrans of the nonprofit New Jersey Children’s Foundation. Scrapping it would be “a stake in the heart of educational equity.”
Let’s not forget the history here: Before we had standardized tests like this, we had “enormous inequities that just flew under the radar because we had no way to find them,” Glazer said. It was civil rights groups that pushed to collect this kind of data, in the interest of educational justice. So let’s not just dump the test, let schools spin a rosy narrative on learning loss, and pretend that’s equity instead.
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