Everywhere you turn these days, there’s a teacher, professor, or employer talking about how alarmed they are by the lack of skills and ability among today’s young people, even many of those who’ve gotten a supposedly sterling education. Take Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco, an internationally renowned scholar of Herman Melville, who told The Atlantic he’s had to drop “Moby Dick” — “Moby Dick!” — from his syllabus because his Ivy League students are incapable of reading and understanding an entire novel.
Many other college professors have reported that their students struggle with literacy altogether, while elementary through high school educators lament serious problems with everything from math to motor skills. So it would seem that if anything, our schools need higher standards, not lower ones, right? But New Jersey, one of the few states in America that actually had rigid standards for students graduating from its high schools, has decided to do the opposite.
New Jersey is moving to drop its high school exit exam to make it easier to graduate.
For years, New Jersey high school students have been required to pass the New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment, a standardized test known as the NJGPA, administered to 11th graders in public schools.
Passing the test is a requirement to graduate with a high school diploma, but many parents, educators, administrators, lawmakers, and rank-and-file parents have long complained that the test does little but serve as a roadblock to graduation, especially for students from marginalized and lower-income communities.
The exam’s critics are one huge step closer to getting their way after the state Assembly passed bill A4121 to end the exam with a 55-17 vote. It’s the latest of a handful of attempts to get rid of the exam that has proven divisive among New Jersey’s politicians.
Those who oppose the bill say it will lower both educational standards and the value of a diploma.
“Do not hand out a diploma disconnected from proficiency. I think it’s a huge error,” state Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia, a Republican, told the New Jersey Monitor. “Students in New Jersey can do it — our policy cannot reflect that they can’t.”
She went on to tell the paper that she feels students should be held to high standards as they enter the workforce, especially given the consternation many employers have expressed about how ill-prepared many young people are for the workplace in recent years.
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“If anything, we’re going to widen the gap between the diploma we hand them and their actual preparedness,” she told the Monitor. Others, like New Jersey’s former Deputy Commissioner of Education Peter Shulman, now part of the parent advocacy group Wake Up Call New Jersey, agree.
Shulman urged legislators to replace the test with something that works better rather than getting rid of it entirely, which hits directly at the issue animating the side of the debate that is against the test: They say it doesn’t work and hasn’t for quite some time.
Critics of the exam say it is outdated and does not produce the results it was designed for.
As the Assembly vote reflects, the NJGPA has far more critics than fans in both political parties. The bill’s sponsor, Republican Assemblywoman Michele Matsikoudis, says the data the test evaluates doesn’t give a meaningful measure of a student’s aptitude and provides no real difference in insight from the state’s other standardized testing.
In the Assembly meeting, Democratic Assemblywoman Rosy Bagolie shared her own son’s situation, which illustrates part of why so many think the test should be scrapped: After failing the exam, he was still able to graduate on the basis of his PSAT, because the state allows students to submit their PSAT, ACT, or SAT scores in lieu of the test. He went on to college and garnered a 4.0 GPA.
As Bagolie put it in the meeting, “exit exams do not measure readiness for college, careers, or life. They measure testing under pressure.” Bagolie, who is also superintendent of East Newark’s school district, went on to explain that the test also disproportionately challenges students from disadvantaged backgrounds, “many of whom have met every graduation requirement only to be blocked by one single exam.”
But perhaps the best reason to scrap the test is that, with the ability to use college entrance exams in place of it, the test doesn’t amount to much but an inconvenience in the eyes of students. Kailynn DuRose, East Brunswick High School’s student representative to the state Board of Education, told the Assembly that most students “just want to get it over with, to prioritize something else.” Tests like the NJGPA may sound like a solution to our broken education systems, but in practice they don’t seem to solve much.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
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