New Jersey students’ English and math test scores saw modest improvement this spring, though performance remained below prepandemic levels and broad achievement gaps between demographic groups were mostly unchanged, state officials told the State Board of Education Wednesday.
The results show New Jersey’s students continuing to improve, albeit slowly, after staggering learning loss incurred during the pandemic when instruction was conducted virtually for months amid lockdown orders.
“We know these results don’t fully describe the complexities of the depth and breadth of a child’s complete learning experience, but these data are important and help us understand overall performance trends,” said acting Education Commissioner Kevin Dehmer.
The test results were based on the New Jersey Student Learning Assessment, given mostly to students in third through 12th grades in English language arts, math, and in some cases science.
Just over half of students, 52.2%, met or exceeded expectations on annual standardized English tests this year, up 0.9% over scores in 2023. In 2019, 57.6% of students at least met expectations on English exams.
Math scores saw a larger year-over-year improvement, with the share of students who met or exceeded expectations rising 2% to 39.6%. In the last full year before the pandemic, 44.7% of students met or exceeded expectations.
Students’ science scores were roughly level. Just under a quarter, 24.8%, were proficient or better, down 0.1% from 2023 and 0.6% from 2019.
“The data shows that there is improvement in performance in all subjects when all grades are aggregated. 2024 continued to show the recovery in [English language arts] and math proficiency rates, but science has remained fairly consistent since the introduction of the assessment,” said John Boczany, the department’s director of assessment.
Gains were not uniform across grade levels. For example, though ninth graders saw a marked improvement in English proficiency that put them ahead of 2019 levels, proficiency among students in grades seven and eight declined by 2% each year-over-year.
Officials pointed to relatively new learning standards and exam changes that enhanced focus on applications of knowledge — rather than rote memorization — to explain lagging science test scores.
“There was a shift from a rote memorization of facts and definitions … to an emphasis on measuring the students’ ability to use science and engineering practices to further their understanding of new and novel phenomenon,” Boczany said.
Performance gaps persisted along racial lines in 2024, test results show, though the gap between Black and Asian students was narrower than it was before the pandemic.
Among Black students, the lowest-performing group, 35.6% met proficiency standards on English exams, compared to 80.9% of Asian students, the highest-performing group.
The 45.3% gap between the two is slightly lower than the 45.4% gap found in 2019 and three points narrower than it was in 2022, the first year New Jersey administered standardized tests following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The state has yet to bring the math performance gap down to prepandemic levels. In 2024, it was 55.8%, compared to 54.8% in 2019.
Multilingual and economically disadvantaged students, as well as those with developmental disabilities, performed significantly worse than other cohorts.
State Board of Education member Arcelio Aponte expressed dismay at lingering performance gaps and suggested the board form a subcommittee to monitor efforts to close it.
“I just want to stress the point that it’s extremely frustrating to know that after all of the investments, the number of programs over the years, this achievement gap is persisting and still remains significant in terms of the gaps between the African American students and white and Asian students,” he said.
Ahmed Shehata, another board member, warned such a task force could be duplicative of work already done at the Department of Education and threatened to disrupt its daily operations.
Dehmer said the department is working to create a state repository to mirror a U.S. Department of Education program that collects and screens studies on the efficacy of educational programs and methods.
“We’re also pulling out information on the approaches that have shown more success compared to those that are less successful and focus in on those where we might get more bang for our buck, so to speak,” Dehmer said.
On the graduation proficiency exam given to high school juniors, 82.5% of students were rated as graduation-ready, a 2% increase from last year, officials also said Tuesday.
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