How We Start Fixing New Jersey Schools

By Laura Water (NJ Education Report)

The Education Scorecard, from the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard and the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford, has a new analysis that looks at our national educational recession and highlights districts that are models for improvement. It includes state profiles: New Jersey is ranked 20th out of 38 states in academic growth in math and 19th out of 35 states in reading between 2022 and 2025.

This may come as a surprise to some readers, given former Gov. Murphy’s insistence that NJ has the #1 school system in the country. And, in fairness, many states have similar problems, which began around 2013 when the federal government started issuing waivers to states that let them avoid harsh penalties from the law called No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Those waivers let state education agencies and school leaders dismiss student regression; the downslide accelerated in 2015 with the passage of NCLB’s toothless replacement, the Every Student Succeeds Act, which downplays student learning and school accountability.* Sure, covid and screens, but you can’t blame NJ’s and other state’s declines for all that.**

What distinguishes states where students are making up ground (despite far less generous state funding than NJ’s $27K per pupil annual costs) and those that aren’t?

This: When the federal government abdicated responsibility for student achievement, successful states stepped up, took on that role, and students continue to improve, which is why you’re hearing a lot about Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana (#1 in student growth), Georgia, Alabama, and D.C.. 

But in New Jersey and other states, the education agencies (here, our Department of Education) eschewed that responsibility, leaving us with little accountability, stagnant student outcomes, and a vacuum of leadership. You can be sympathetic to the headwinds of local control and NJEA’s vise-like grip on education policy. But the victims are NJ’s children, particularly those from low-income families stuck in mediocre schools. Here is Tom Kane of Harvard and co-author of the report: “The learning recession started a decade ago, after policymakers switched off the early warning system of test-based accountability and social media took over children’s lives…there are a lot of people in affluent districts who think things are just fine, who have seen big losses over time.”

Compounding the tragedy is the number of places where you have education people at all levels of the system still arguing this is not really a big deal or even real at all. https://t.co/6ModeXATez

— Andrew Rotherham (@arotherham) May 13, 2026

Bottom line: Things are not just fine. Until those in charge touch grass, our children will continue floating on clouds of pretense that leave them unprepared for life after high school.

Two points from the report: First, you can read the Education Scorecard’s NJ profile here and  you can look up your district here (or use this really cool tool from the NY Times).  A few samples: Trenton Public School students have dropped almost three grade levels in reading and two in math over the last decade and Toms River is only slightly better. Even in Cherry Hill and Montclair, students have dropped at least a grade level in both math and reading. On average, students are performing about .6 grade levels below 2019 levels in math and .4 grade levels below their grade levels in reading. There are a few exceptions the report highlights – check out Union City!— but one can conclude NJ student achievement is suffering, at least in large part, from our DOE declining to take on what had been the federal government’s role. 

Second, let’s look at how states that took on the role the feds gave up can serve as models in rebuilding our diminished DOE, which spent much of the Murphy Administration diluting standards and playing limbo (“how low can you go”) with objective assessments.

Mississippi, for instance, has put student growth front and center and is now considered an exemplar of ensuring school leaders and teachers receive the training they need to best serve children.  Look at its education department’s strategic plan: “Increasing student growth and proficiency in all tested areas through strong academic standards, professional development, accountability and state support.” In contrast, New Jersey doesn’t have a strategic plan but something called “Managing for Equity in Education.” 

In a recent interview, MO’s former commissioner Carey Wright explained how she implemented “the most rigorous standards that Mississippi has ever put in play,” a contrast to NJ’s lowering of standards, and how she would walk up to principals, ask for a list of the bottom 25% of students, “point at some random kid’s name and say, ‘What are you doing for that kid, right there?’”

Top-down mandates? Infringement of local control? You bet. But kids in Mississippi, where the state allots less than half the cost per pupil as we do ($12,324) and has far higher concentrations of poverty, are now outperforming low-income students in New Jersey. ***

In Louisiana, another state with remarkable student growth,  the State Board of Education adopted a new accountability framework called “Grow.Achieve.Thrive.” now considered tops in the country. The state keeps standards high and requires high school graduates to show “readiness on a nationally recognized exam [a lot of states are using ACT] and prepared to accelerate career, college or military indicators.” A new math law in Alabama requires “certified K-5 math coaches in each elementary school and a summer intervention program for identified fourth- and fifth-grade students.”

(If you’re as wonky as me, you can compare New Jersey’s  tepid School Accountability System with other states.)

Some of those in positions of power know what is lacking.

“From every single hearing where we had the Department of Education before us, I don’t feel that this past administration was aggressive enough,” Senate President Teresa Ruiz recently told NorthJersey.com. 

The Center for Reforming Public Education notes, “Too many [state education agencies] assume their primary function is to monitor compliance with state and federal laws rather than be agents of change that materially impact the lives of students.”

If we want our DOE to be an agent of change instead of a bureaucratic box checker (that’s an open question, by the way), we need to do more than monitor district compliance with obscure regulations. So let’s say the Sherrill Administration could corral teacher union leaders and local control addicts (the fiercest obstacles to change) into accepting the sort of fiscal and academic reforms needed to best serve NJ children (or decided it didn’t need their approval). What would those changes look like?

Let’s take our much-celebrated literacy bills, which start off fine with multiple references to the science of reading yet decline to do anything but “recommend” improvements in instructional efficacy. Said the estimable Paula White, head of JerseyCAN, “it’s a good start, but this is a law that has more recommendations than requirements.”****

How about “three-cuing,” the disproven method where students are encouraged to “guess” the word by context instead of sounding it out phonetically? Fourteen states ban it (Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Alabama, Kansas, Minnesota, and Virginia). New Jersey is silent on the issue. 

NJ’s DOE doesn’t require aspiring teachers to pass a test that proves they are proficient in the science of reading. Instead they take a licensure test rated as “weak” by the National Council on Teacher Quality and has no system for requiring teacher preparation programs to adhere to data-driven instructional techniques. The state offers a list of “approved” literacy screeners but 25% of districts don’t bother handing in (required) results or use non-approved ones. (NJEA president Steve Beatty says he wants teachers to have maximum “flexibility.”) We don’t require districts to choose from state-approved lists of successful curricula. It’s all “choose your own adventure,” district by district.

NJ’s leaders have a choice to make: Do we continue floating on pretense or do we concentrate more power with the state to upgrade accountability and transparency?

All I know is that a student in Trenton, going to school within shouting distance of the Statehouse, would be academically better off going to school in Mississippi.

*Read Matt Yglesias about how, post ESSA, the political energy to improve schools started to evaporate and the left “retreated into coalition solidarity with teachers unions.” 

**Nat Malkus notes, “This learning slump is most glaring in reading comprehension. Between 2017 and 2019, reading scores declined at the same rate as they did during the pandemic years. That is worth restating: Reading declines in the two years before the pandemic were comparable to those during the pandemic itself.”

***Just a few weeks ago in Newark, Gov. Mikie Sherrill conceded NJ schools aren’t keeping up with their “great reputation in all cases,” noting that Mississippi schools are outperforming NJ’s with high-poverty populations despite far lower costs. “It shocked me and I think it should shock everyone here.” (Journalist Tom Martello wonders, “is she readying for war with NJEA?”)

**** According to ExcelinEd, NJ has adopted only 7 of the 18 fundamental principles for effective instruction in early literacy.

https://t.co/dXYqwgRvom

— Dale Chu (@Dale_Chu) May 14, 2026