New Jersey teachers are no longer required to pass basic literacy tests

We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.

Call me old-fashioned, but I have always been under the impression that a minimum requirement for teachers would be basic literacy skills.

But that’s just some outdated mumbo jumbo, I guess. Because in New Jersey, they need teachers and they don’t care if they can even read or not.

A 6th-grade reading comprehension is NOT hard! Heck, there was a time when this was required to, you know, graduate to the 7th grade.

But after years of schools just passing kids along, grade by grade, learning apparently nothing, now we have teachers who have teaching degrees and licenses but who can’t read as well as a 12-year-old!!

From Campus Safety Magazine:

New Jersey Democratic Governor Phil Murphy passed Act 1669 as part of the state’s 2025 budget in June to address a teacher shortage, Read Lion reports. The law went into effect on Jan. 1, 2025. Individuals seeking an instructional certificate will no longer need to pass the Praxis Core Test, a basic skills test for reading, writing, and math that is administered by the state’s Commissioner of Education.

‘We need more teachers,’ Democratic Sen. Jim Beach, who sponsored the bill, said in May 2024 when the chamber cleared the bill in a 34-2 vote. ‘This is the best way to get them.’

Translation: “We just need bodies in the building.”

The people who voted in favor of this law will, in the same breath, tell you that homeschooling is not a quality education.

Just a few months prior, Murphy also signed a similar bill into law that established an alternative pathway for teachers to sidestep the testing requirement. According to Read Lion, the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), a teachers union, was a driving force behind the bill and called the testing requirement ‘an unnecessary barrier to entering the profession.’ NJEA is associated with the National Education Association (NEA).