NJ Governor's Race and Education, Part I: Should NJ Become Mississippi?

Is this thing still on?

I've got some thoughts I want to share about the NJ governor's race and education over the next few weeks, so I'm firing up this blog again. Hopefully, advocates for NJ's public schools will find these posts helpful.

Let's start this by examining a claim by the Republican candidate, Jack Ciattarelli:

Jack Ciattarelli: We do have the most segregated schools, but I wonder if we would be having this discussion if the performance of schools with predominantly black student populations were outperforming schools with predominantly white populations. We need to get back on day one to improving all of our schools, and I intend to do that with a high-impact curriculum. New Jersey recently slipped from two to 12 on the national report card. Most of that’s because we haven’t made up for all the learning lost when Phil Murphy and the Democrats shut down our schools for two years. We opened up our nursing homes, and we closed down our schools. Louisiana and Mississippi have moved significantly—Louisiana from 48 to 32 with a high-impact curriculum. What is that exactly? If your child is behind a grade level in any of the critical life skills, like reading, writing, or math, that child will spend the next marking period and the one thereafter doing nothing other than reading, writing, and math to get them on grade level. The data is clear. I’m a data-driven guy as an MBA and CPA. If the child is not on grade level for reading and writing by the end of eighth grade, more than likely, they will be underemployed their entire life. So while that lawsuit proceeds, let’s pick the schools on day one with a high-impact curriculum. [emphasis mine]

We'll leave aside several other... questionable claims here and focus instead on Ciattarelli's comparison between New Jersey and two southern states: Louisiana and Mississippi. The clear implication is that they are doing something right, and NJ is doing something wrong. 

I'll get to trends in a future post; for right now, let's instead look at where these states are today. I'll throw in Florida as well, because I've heard Ciattarelli make similar claims about it. I'll also add national averages for context.

The source for comparisons here is the National Assessment for Education Progress, generally considered the gold standard national assessment. The NAEP is given to a representative sample of Grade 4 and Grade 8 students in all states; the tests are in math and reading.

We'll start by looking at the state-level average outcomes in these four exams for all students. The data is from 2024, the last administration of the NAEP.

	NAEP: All Students, 2024
	Gr 4		Gr 8
	Math	Reading	Math	Reading
Florida	243.4	218.2	267.2	252.9
Louisiana	234.5	216.0	266.8	256.5
Mississippi	239.2	218.5	269.1	253.5
National	237.5	215.0	273.8	258.0
New Jersey	240.1	221.6	281.7	266.0

 

To help interpret these tables, I've put the states that beat NJ in green, and the ones that lose to NJ in light red. What do we see? In nearly every exam and grade level, New Jersey outperforms Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and the national average.

It's difficult to convey the scope of the performance differences, but let's try this: Typically, a standard deviation on the NAEP is between 30 and 40 points. A standard deviation is also around the difference in test scores found between the highest- and lowest-income students. So the gap between the FL and NJ average in Grade 8 reading is roughly one-third to one-half of the difference between the least-affluent and most-affluent students. That's significant.

Note that the gap in scores is wider in Grade 8 than in Grade 4. We have to be cautious about reading too much into that, but we should at least consider the possibility that as students get more schooling, the differences between NJ and the southern states gets larger. That's a good thing for the Garden State.

Let's consider two other student populations. Here are the scores for students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch (FRPL), a proxy measure of poverty.

	NAEP: Economically Disadvantaged Students, 2024
	Gr 4		Gr 8
	Math	Reading	Math	Reading
Florida	234.7	209.6	258.4	244.8
Louisiana	227.6	208.8	257.6	249.6
Mississippi	233.8	211.9	262.4	249.0
National	225.9	202.0	257.5	244.6
New Jersey	221.9	201.8	259.2	247.4

New Jersey doesn't do nearly as well in the Grade 4 tests... but the gap closes, and even reverses a little, in Grade 8.

How the NAEP measures "economic disadvantage" is a complicated topic I'll get to some time. For now, it's enough to say that the level of relative economic disadvantage for FRPL students in different states is not the same; for that reason, it's difficult to compare states on this measure without some transformation of scores (and even then...).

There also an issue about grade retention and its effect on test scores. But let's set that aside and concede that NJ has work to do to close its opportunity gap. That begs a question: how do the students who don't qualify for FRPL fare on the NAEP?

	NAEP: Not Economically Disadvantaged Students, 2024
	Gr 4		Gr 8
	Math	Reading	Math	Reading
Florida	252.9	229.7	277.0	262.5
Louisiana	253.7	236.0	288.9	274.2
Mississippi	256.0	238.2	287.7	265.3
National	251.1	229.2	288.0	269.5
New Jersey	254.1	236.5	295.2	277.0

Only Mississippi beats New Jersey in this category in Grade 4; however, by Grade 8, NJ is blowing the doors off the others, especially in math.

Does New Jersey have problems with its education system that manifest in NAEP scores? Unquestionably, yes: the opportunity gap in this state is too big and needs to be addressed (Ciattarelli's state aid plan will make that gap worse, but let's talk about that in another post). 

But should New Jersey, on the basis of its NAEP scores, be looking to these southern states as models for reform?

You tell me.

More soon, including a discussion of "growth."