New Jersey is fast becoming an international laughingstock as news of its recent decision to end the basic-skills testing requirement for teachers makes international headlines. But of course, this should not be surprising: reading, writing, and math are hardly important when the goal is to dumb-down and indoctrinate rather than educate children.
Just this month, a new first—that I previously highlighted in 2023—went into effect, ending the requirement for teachers to prove they can read, write, and do basic math. The official reasoning is that the state is facing a massive shortage of teachers. Apparently, requiring basic educational skills was weeding out too many potential candidates.
The law, known as Act 1669, is clear: “The State Board of Education shall not require a candidate seeking a certificate of eligibility, a certificate of eligibility with advanced standing, a provisional certificate, or a standard instructional certificate to complete a Commissioner of Education-approved test of basic reading, writing, and mathematics skills including, but not limited to, the Praxis Core Academic Skills for Educators test, in order to obtain a certificate of eligibility, a certificate of eligibility with advanced standing, a provisional certificate, or a standard instructional certificate.”
Union bosses and Democrats led the charge. Blasting the “basic skills test” for teachers as a “barrier,” the New Jersey “Education” Association got the bill passed last year with overwhelming support from bought-and-paid for politicians. In 2023, the union boasted, they got rid of the Education Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA). “Now it’s time to eliminate another barrier: the basic skills test for teachers,” the union, an affiliate of the vicious National Education Association, told its members in an email urging them to get involved.
Ironically, the NEA and its state and local branches for years have been agitating against homeschooling. Among other supposed concerns, the totalitarian union bosses argue in multiple resolutions that parents are not “qualified” to teach their own children. The basic skills test that was just eliminated aimed at ensuring that teachers had 6th grade-level proficiency in the basics.
Many critics ridiculing the move by New Jersey lawmakers expressed confusion about how it could be so hard for potential teachers to pass such a simple academic test. The reality is that these would-be “educators” were “educated” by the same indoctrination system they hope to work for — a system in which just a tiny fraction of students are even considered “proficient” in any core subject on standardized tests.
Billionaire Elon Musk made the story an international scandal by posting on his social media platform about it to over 200 million followers. “So teachers don’t need to know how to read in New Jersey?” he asked on a post with a news headline, New Jersey Teachers No Longer Required to Pass State’s Basic Literacy Test. “Seems like that would make it challenging to teach kids how to read.”
Turning Point founder, Charlie Kirk, a key ally of President-elect Donald Trump, also poked fun. “Imagine being illiterate and thinking to yourself, ‘You know what, I think I’ll go into teaching’,” he wrote on X. “The state’s role when it comes to deranged people like this is to protect children from them, not enable their idiocy by helping spread it to the next generation.”
Advocates for education and parental involvement spoke out, too. “It is a major red flag that so many aspiring teachers fail that test — and it is indefensible that the teachers’ union and state legislature decided that the solution to that problem was to eliminate the test altogether,” explained Erika Sanzi, director of outreach for the national group Parents Defending Education. “This decision to lower the most basic standards does not bode well for students but is a win for the unions. Just bad all around.”
However, there were plenty of defenders, including the Democrat lawmakers behind the move. “The test is duplicative,” complained charter-school administrator and New Jersey Assemblywoman, Dawn Fantasia, in a response to Musk’s comments on X. To defend the elimination of the basic-skills test, she noted that teachers were still required to take a test showing proficiency in the subject they intend to teach.
The NJEA, which led the charge for the law, also put out statements defending the move. Among other claims, the union claimed the test “did nothing to elevate standards and amounted to a corporate money grab from the pockets of successful college graduates trying to enter the teaching profession.” The statement also pointed out that relative to other states, New Jersey has “among the best public schools” because of its “talented, dedicated and successful teachers.”
Other states, including California, have also been rolling back requirements for aspiring teachers. And Oregon recently made history by eliminating academic testing requirements for high-school graduation. In short, in the not-too-distant future, America faces the realistic prospect of illiterate and innumerate teachers graduating illiterate and innumerate students at a cost to taxpayers of $250,000 or more per victim.
Government schools are rapidly dispensing with even the pretense that children are somehow being “educated.” Most of what is happening today under the guise of “education” and “social-emotional learning” is psychological manipulation, sexualization, and dangerous indoctrination that is weaponizing children for revolution. Parents must take action immediately to protect their offspring—and their nation.
Alex Newman is an award-winning international journalist and the Founder of Liberty Sentinel.
Editor’s Note: Why Is This News Biblically Relevant?
In recent years, there has been a surge in parents seeking to pull their children out of public education. This shift toward homeschooling became necessary for countless parents who were shocked to discover the low quality of education their children were receiving and, more importantly, what they were being taught.
School board meetings were filled with mothers and fathers standing up and reciting sexually explicit content found in school libraries. Lawsuits were filed as a result of school administrators promoting LGBT ideology and then hiding the newfound “gender identities” of students from their parents—with some cases involving clothing of the opposite sex being given to children once they arrived at school.
Parents saw their children becoming radicalized to hate America, favor socialism, reject the Bible, believe sex is fluid, see morality as subjective, consider Jewish people as oppressors, view white people as inherently racist, and regard evolution and climate change as indisputable facts. To top it off, when asked about math, history, and other subjects, children were found to be unable to answer the most basic of questions.
The emphasis in schools has been primarily on indoctrinating children with unbiblical ideologies rather than education. While many parents have woken up to this reality, the majority of youths remain in the crosshairs of this deceitful system.
For today’s public schools, it would be in their best interest to learn from Jesus’ words. In the book of Matthew, Jesus warned about God’s judgment on those who place a stumbling block in front of children to cause them to sin, saying that it would be “better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea” than to face the judgment of God for their actions (Matthew 18:6).
Throughout the Bible, we read that God takes the protection of the innocent with utmost seriousness. God has placed the responsibility on loving parents to educate their children (Proverbs 22:6)—and that starts with teaching them from Scripture and safeguarding their impressionable minds from preventing and anti-God ideologies.
