At long last, and only after a great deal of public outcry, Gov. Murphy’s Department of Education finally released the full dataset from last spring’s state tests. This means that we now know the district-level results and community leaders, school administrators and parents know where and how much remediation is needed — and there is a lot of remediation needed. Why it took until December to do so remains unanswered, but Murphy’s desire to bury the horrible results offers a highly believable explanation. A new study shows that New Jersey and its children will suffer the devastating consequences far into the future.
Recall that Murphy allowed for extended school closures in many of New Jersey’s largest school districts, including Newark, Jersey City and Montclair, just as the teachers unions wanted. Now that the test results are out, we know that New Jersey students — particularly minority students — suffered immense learning losses because of these extended closures. And new research indicates that unless these losses are remediated swiftly and decisively, they will negatively affect these students for the rest of their lives.
A recent study by Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, “The Economic Costs of the Pandemic,” looked the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP – known as “the nation’s report card”) and determined that in 8th-grade math, New Jersey students “had greater learning losses than the nation as a whole.” The chart below shows just how much greater.