BY CATHERINE CARRERA
NJ Spotlight
In the small pre-K-8 school district of Beverly City in South Jersey, resources are limited while needs are high for a student population largely from households of little means.
The Burlington County district has often been placed on corrective action plans under the state’s accountability measurement tool due to lower-than-state-average rates in standardized tests in English language arts and mathematics.
This year, Superintendent Elizabeth Giacobbe says classes will start with a major challenge beyond the district’s control: It will be weeks until educators learn the results of the New Jersey Student Learning Assessment-Adaptive, a newly redesigned state exam that grades 3-8 took in May.
The delay in reading and math test results may cost schools valuable time to target instruction for students who need the most help. It also may cause parents, busy with a new school year, to put less stock into results, potentially hampering advocacy for more interventions.
Though the delay is temporary for this year, it comes at a fraught time, as when district budgets are strained with rising costs and educational resources are stretched thin.
“Getting scores beyond August puts us even further behind the eight ball than we already were trying to manage in years past,” Giacobbe told NJ Spotlight News. “It’s ridiculous to not know exactly when those results are coming.”
Corrective action plan
Beverly City Public Schools is on a corrective action plan due to low state test scores, so Giacobbe uses key data from those assessments, among other metrics, to make decisions on student placement and resource use. The timing of those data, she says, is crucial. In all, 70% of her 337 pre-K-8 students are economically disadvantaged, with many in need of extra help.
In recent years, state test results arrived in late August, three months after tests were taken, and educators say even that delay hampers their work. This year’s exam was a new type, one that adapts to students’ responses to make questions more or less challenging, a necessary and lengthy process is underway to align proficiency levels with state standards.
New Jersey Department of Education leaders announced last month that results may not get to districts until the fall — four to six months after the exam was administered.
Next year should go more smoothly, with results expected to be distributed by June 30, Education Department officials say. “The department is committed to providing school districts with accurate, actionable data as quickly as possible,” said Michael Yaple, a spokesman for the state Education Department. “Following the first year of implementation, the department expects to provide results to school districts on a significantly faster timeline.”
The earlier turnaround still might not be ideal, some district leaders say. School typically starts its summer break in mid-June.
“The sooner we get the results, the better, because it would allow us more time with the data,” said Springfield Superintendent Rachel Goldberg. “We target students for summer intervention by the end of the third marking period, around the time that kids are taking the state tests.”
Most K-12 schools run on four marking periods, with the third ending around mid-April.
In Springfield, a pre-K-12 district of 2,200 students in Union County, Goldberg uses diagnostic test data to help determine which students need summer intervention so they don’t fall too behind before the next school year.
“If something amazing happened and we got this state test data by the first week in June, it would make a difference,” Goldberg said. “If we don’t get results back until the end of June, then it’ll be used as a data point to say how did these students do and did we provide the right interventions?”
Earlier results would “inform shifts to program structure or curriculum” before scheduling gets finalized in July, she added.
Diagnostic tests
Many districts rely on diagnostic tests about four times a school year to gain insight on how effectiveness of instruction and depth of learning. Those tests, while informative, don’t give a complete picture, educators say.
“The delay in putting out assessment results can be mitigated at the school and classroom level through diagnostic tests, but there’s no systematic way to do that so it will vary from district to district and even school to school,” said Chris Cerf, a former state education commissioner and a onetime Newark Public Schools superintendent. “These tests are not mandatory, so there are some schools who don’t do them at all.”
Giacobbe says diagnostic tests for her students provide the most effective data point, and the state assessment gives more precise insight on a student’s strengths and weaknesses.
“We’re not uninformed but we’re less informed than we should be,” Giacobbe said. “It’s like we have an eye patch over one eye flying a plane — we don’t have full 20/20 vision or the full picture.”
In 2025, 44% of her students met grade-level proficiency in reading, while 35% met proficiency in math. Those rates were lower than the state average of 53% grade-level proficiency in reading and 42% in math.
“What is the purpose of this test if we’re not given the data quickly to ensure we’re using it to drive instruction to make the changes that we need to get the New Jersey public school system up to the reputation that it has?” Giacobbe said.
Besides diagnostic tests, school leaders also consider report card grades, though they have the least amount of value for assessing math and reading progress, educators said.
Meanwhile, families tend to put a lot of stock into those and may mistakenly use them as proficiency indicators, educators say.
Grading can vary from classroom to classroom and comprises different variables, which can be quizzes and tests for one teacher or behavior and extra credit for another, says Peter Shulman, a former state deputy education commissioner.
“That final grade is not always related to proficiency,” said Shulman, co-founder of Wake Up Call New Jersey, an education advocacy group. “Test scores are meant to be objective measures, imperfect as they may be, of how a kid is doing in a snapshot in time against the state standards.”
By not getting those scores until the fall, “it really becomes rearview mirror stuff for parents,” Shulman said.
In Springfield, third graders who took the state exam for English language arts for the first time in the spring are the first in that school system to have gone through the district’s “in-depth early literacy program,” Goldberg said.
“I’m really looking forward to seeing if we moved the needle even a little bit,” she said. “Unfortunately, we’ll just have to wait a little longer.”
