Over the last several years, tens of millions of dollars in funding from federal and state coffers have been poured into educational initiatives annually to improve literacy and math proficiency rates among New Jersey’s K-12 students.
Just this year, high-impact tutoring along with literacy initiatives like early screening and literacy coaches have been funded by nearly $20 million in Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s 2027 state budget alone. That budget also includes $11.5 million in federal funding for more literacy improvement efforts.
But the 2026 results on the latest statewide exams, the New Jersey Student Learning Assessments – Adaptive, provide a sobering reality: all that funding has done little over the last decade to move the needle in overall proficiency rates and the persistently wide gaps between the state’s highest- and lowest-scoring student groups.
Overall, roughly 51.1% of all students who took the state English language arts exam, which is a measure of literacy proficiency, met grade-level expectations, a small decrease of two percentage points from last year and barely changed from a decade ago.
The overall proficiency did not move at all from last year for the math exam, where 41.7% of all New Jersey students met grade-level expectations and again virtually unchanged from 2016.
State education officials presented a breakdown of the results at the State Board of Education meeting last week, underscoring that key efforts to improve the proficiency rates are ongoing this school year.
Those efforts include the high-impact tutoring model, which was earmarked for $15 million in funding in this year’s state budget toward small-group instruction. The budget also included about $4 million in various programs to help improve literacy rates.
But there was also impatience among some board members with the lack of tangible progress.
“These investments – whether it’s high impact tutoring or the other categories – are not having the type of impact that we would like,” said board member Arcelio Aponte, who pushed for an analysis of the effectiveness of each of those initiatives. “Should we be investing in different strategies moving forward?”
Modernization of state tests
The latest state test results mark the fifth year since the state returned to administering the standardized exam after a two-year break in 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Soon after the return to state tests, the education department updated the New Jersey Student Learning Standards in 2023 for English language arts and mathematics.
Last year, the state school board then approved a modernization of the state assessment system that is based on the 2023 learning standards, an update from the older model that was based on previous standards.
The state exam changed from a “fixed” model, which gives all students in a given grade the same set of questions, to a computer-adaptive form, which was first administered in the spring. The new exam adjusts its difficulty based on a student’s answers. The adjustment keeps students engaged and provides a more precise look at strengths and weaknesses, according to the Education Department.
Due to the switch in the type of exam and the newer standards, state officials cautioned against directly comparing the latest results with prior years’ results.
Gaps remain unchanged
Despite the new exam form and standards, wide gaps between student groups’ overall proficiency rates in reading and math continue to persist.
For example, there is a 43-percentage-point gap between Hispanic and Black students’ proficiency rates in reading at roughly 36% and Asian students, where nearly 80% were tested at grade level.
That gap is wider in mathematics. Between Black students, who have an overall 23% proficiency rate in math, and Asian students, with a 75% proficiency rate, there is a 52-percentage-point gap.
“Even though this is a new baseline, we still see some of those discrepancies across demographic groups presenting themselves in this data,” said state school board member Nedd James Johnson. Johnson, a former Bridgeton school administrator, added that he believes the education department should provide data on how the investments in programs, such as high-impact tutoring, are helping students.
“For tutoring, in particular, we need to look at the fidelity of it, making sure that students are getting the right dosage, that they’re getting those indicators of quality, and then look at the actual student data,” said state Education Commissioner Lily Laux.
Laux added that the department is working on refining its strategic plan with a “scorecard” that would evaluate its initiative to look at “how they do or don’t help move the needle with overall achievement and closing the achievement gaps.”