The New Jersey Department of Education is proposing changes to the way it labels whether or not school districts are “high-performing,” which it does through a  complicated five-part rubric called called the New Jersey Quality Single Accountability Continuum, or QSAC. (See here for an Explainer.) Many of those changes involve the section that is most troublesome for districts: Instruction and Program (I&P), which has multiple indicators including student achievement based on state standardized tests and student progress year-to-year. Low student achievement scores are the most frequent cause of districts “failing” QSAC, or not being labeled “high-performing.”

The change is this: Currently QSAC puts equal weight on absolute student achievement based on test scores and student progress; each is worth a maximum of 10 points. The DOE is proposing to lower the value of achievement scores to 7.5 points and raise the value of student progress to 15 points.

The benefits, according to an internal document, are two-fold: The changes will both align QSAC more closely with federal accountability law and also allow more districts to be labeled “high-performing.” 

“While current QSAC regulations give equal weights to student progress and student achievement, learning loss from Covid-19 school disruptions have set many districts back. Here is a list of the 45 districts under review at the State Board of Education meeting in July 2024, which shows they all failed because of I&P; their scores on the other four areas were passing scores.”