I received a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece from a man I know here in the county, Jim Rowland, focused on climate change and education in New Jersey. As I read it, it called to mind a conversation I had the night before with our daughter, AnnaFaith, on the state of education in America. Since she has spent her adult life educating young children, I asked her if she had any insights into why America’s children have fallen from top rankings to 25th place and below among the nations of the world. She offered that her observation is that the curriculum has become puffy, with far less time devoted to the basics. I received the author’s permission to print the piece below. If you have interest in the challenges New Jersey schools face, I believe you will find Tice’s piece informative.
Art Hall, publisher
By Paul H. Tice
The three Rs are taking a back seat to climate change in New Jersey schools.
As one of the lead state partners for the Next Generation Science Standards developed by the National Research Council, New Jersey has been integrating climate change into its K-12 science curriculum for the past decade. The Garden State has upped the ante in recent years by becoming the first state to incorporate climate change into all school subjects, not only science.
In 2020, the state Board of Education adopted a new set of climate-focused student learning standards. Gov. Phil Murphy’s wife, Tammy, was the primary cheerleader for these standards, which were implemented in the 2022-23 school year after a pandemic-related delay.
Under those standards, all public school districts across the state are required to teach and test students in every grade about climate change. The requirement covers core content areas including science, computer technology, social studies, world languages, visual and performing arts, health and physical education, and life and career planning. Districts are encouraged to incorporate climate change into English language arts and mathematics instruction.
Climate education resources distributed by Trenton’s first-in-the-nation Office of Climate Change Education provide sample lesson plans to illustrate how teachers can highlight climate change in class while constantly reminding students that New Jersey is suffering “the worst impacts of global warming.”
When learning about U.S. and world history, students are required to explain how natural resources such as fossil fuels remain a source of conflict, both at home and abroad. When mastering a foreign language, students are asked to discuss “the impact of climate change on the target language region of the world.” And in school performances, students are encouraged to use climate change to “inform original dances expressed through multiple genres, styles and varied cultural perspectives.”
It may seem like a joke, but there’s nothing funny about the academic performance of New Jersey’s public school students. Since Mr. Murphy took office in 2018, student proficiency rates in English, math and science trended sideways across all grade levels before declining sharply across the board since the pandemic.
Four years on, overall New Jersey student proficiency still hasn’t recovered to 2019 levels. Beginning with this year’s class, the state has lowered the passing score on its high-school exit exam to allow more seniors to graduate.
New Jersey’s climate curriculum is pure indoctrination. The goal is to “win the next generation” … Mr. Murphy has stated his desire to make New Jersey “a leader in the fight against climate change” and steer the state toward a green economy.
Since being reelected in 2021, Mr. Murphy has announced plans to achieve a 100% “clean” electricity grid by 2035, mainly by increasing the state’s reliance on offshore wind power. Also by 2035, all new cars and light-duty trucks sold within New Jersey’s borders must be zero-emission vehicles, with restrictions on sales of internal combustion engines starting to kick in by 2027.
In 2022 Trenton mandated that supermarkets stop offering customers single-use polyethylene film bags, even though, as John Tierney has argued in these pages, such bans are counterproductive. The allegedly reusable replacements tend to be thicker and do more harm to the environment than polyethylene bags when they end up in landfills, as they inevitably do.
Mr. Murphy’s climate rewrite of state educational standards is also likely to backfire. Rather than becoming “the next generation of climate literate leaders,” as Tammy Murphy has promised, many graduates of the state’s climate-crazed public-school system will likely leave New Jersey for good when they go off to college or enter the working world, feeding the recent exodus from the state.
In 2023 New Jersey led the country for the sixth year in a row in resident departures, based on the annual National Movers Survey released by United Van Lines. While many recent leavers have been retirees, going forward the mix of state emigrants seems likely to become more balanced by generation given the unintended climate lesson now being taught to New Jersey students: The Garden State is a climate hellhole, so seek greener pastures elsewhere.
Faced with rising electricity and other energy prices (on top of already high state income, sales and property taxes), less consumer choice and ever-increasing government intervention into their everyday economic lives … why would most young people choose to stay? Who wants to live in a perpetual state of emergency, in which you can’t even enjoy the Jersey Shore without hearing about the “rising seas that threaten our coastline”?
Reversing New Jersey’s demographic and economic decline will require a whole-of-government approach. It will likely also require partisan turnover in Trenton. But a good first step would be to depoliticize the state’s K-12 curriculum. New Jersey students need to learn how to think, not what to think.
Tice is a senior fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics.
