A New Jersey district building its autumn results conversation has a reasonable worry. The NJSLA-Adaptive replaced the fixed-form NJSLA in spring 2026, and NJDOE has been direct in its standard-setting presentation that this “introduces a new scoring scale” on which “prior fixed-form cut scores from the NJGPA and NJSLA no longer apply.” If last year's scale and this year's scale are not the same ruler, it is natural to assume that growth — which compares a student now to a student then — stops working.

It does not, and the department has said so on the record. The question is in NJDOE's own NJSLA-Adaptive FAQ, and so is the answer.

NJDOE has answered the question directly

The NJSLA-Adaptive and NJGPA-Adaptive FAQ asks: “With the changing of the statewide assessments, will median Student Growth Percentiles (mSGP) still be calculated for the 2025-2026 school year?”

Yes, mSGP can still be calculated regardless of the assessment administered because Student Growth Percentiles (SGPs) measure a student's relative growth compared to their “academic peers” over prior years.

That is a class of answer worth reading closely. It does not say the new scores are comparable to the old ones. It says the growth measure does not depend on that comparison in the first place.

Why a relative measure survives a new scale

An SGP is not a distance. NJDOE defines it as “a percentile ranking from 1 to 99 which explains a student's academic progress compared to their academic peers,” and it defines those peers as “all students in New Jersey in the same grade level who took the same previous assessments in the last year or two and had similar scale scores on those assessments.”

Read that definition against the scale change and the logic comes apart cleanly. The comparison group is built from prior scores, which all sit on the old scale together. The ranking is then done on current scores, which all sit on the new scale together. At no point does the calculation subtract a 2026 score from a 2025 score. It asks a narrower question: among the students who looked like this one last year, where did this one finish this year?

A new scale changes what a scale score means. It does not stop students being ranked against each other on it.

New Jersey has lost growth data before, for a different reason

This is not a hypothetical worry, and the state has a real precedent — which makes the contrast instructive. Growth was missing from the School Performance Reports for three years. When it returned, NJDOE explained why it had gone:

The 2022-2023 School Performance Reports will include student growth data for the first time since 2018-2019. The NJDOE measure of student growth requires both current-year assessment results and at least one prior year results, but growth data could not be reported in recent years because the New Jersey Student Learning Assessments (NJSLA) were cancelled in 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The thing that broke growth was a missing administration, not a changed test. Growth needs two points to compare, and cancelling a year removes one of them; changing the instrument the second point is measured on does not.

That distinction is the whole answer, and it is worth carrying into a board meeting, because the instinct in the room will be to treat any disruption as the same kind of disruption.

What still has to be true

The answer is yes, but it is not unconditional. The existing rules did not relax, and they are where a district will actually lose students and teachers from the count.

  • Two consecutive grade-level assessments. NJDOE states that “only students who take two consecutive grade-level assessments will receive an SGP.” A student who did not test last spring has no peer group this spring.
  • Grades 4 through 8, not 3 through 9. Students in grades 4 through 7 receive an SGP in both ELA and mathematics. Grade 8 students receive one for ELA only, because many take Algebra I instead of Math 8. Grade 3 is the first testing year, so there is no prior point to grow from.
  • Twenty students, seventy per cent of the year. For a teacher to receive an mSGP, NJDOE requires valid SGP scores for at least 20 separate students enrolled in the class for at least 70% of the year before the assessment, in an eligible ELA or mathematics assignment.

None of that is new. All of it is easier to get wrong in a year when rosters, identifiers and a new platform all moved at once.

Three things NJDOE has not answered

The FAQ answers whether the calculation can be performed. It does not answer what the resulting numbers should be used for, and the difference matters more this year than most.

Whether this year's growth is comparable to last year's growth. A 55th-percentile SGP in 2026 was produced by ranking students on a scale that did not exist in 2025. Nothing published says a district may put the two side by side on a slide and read the difference as improvement. This is the same trap as the proficiency line, and we have written about what would actually show that a label still means the same thing.

What the timing will be. The 2024-2025 mSGPs were released on 19 November 2025, with the certification window closing on 2 January 2026 and Corrective Action Plans due within 25 working days of that date. Spring 2026 results are already running later than usual, because the state has to set performance standards first. Whether the evaluation calendar moves with them is not something the published record answers, and it is a question a district would rather ask in September than in December.

How the three-year rule behaves across the break. The same November memo states that teachers with at least three consecutive years of mSGP data earn a score based on their current year or the median of the three combined, whichever is more advantageous. For 2025-2026 that median would combine one year of growth measured across a scale change with two measured within a single scale. That follows from the two rules read together rather than from anything NJDOE has published about it, so treat it as a question to raise, not a finding — but it is the kind of question a testing coordinator should be the one to raise.

What to do with this now

The useful move is not to prepare a defence of growth data. It is to separate the two claims before anyone conflates them, because they will be conflated.

Proficiency rates across 2025 and 2026 are not comparable. The scale changed and the cut scores were reset. Growth percentiles are still calculated. Those are different statements about different measures, and a slide that treats them as one story will be wrong about at least one of them.

Before results arrive, the answerable questions are local: which students in grades 4 through 8 are missing a prior-year assessment and will therefore have no SGP, whether your rosters will support the 20-student and 70% thresholds, and who in the district is going to notice if the evaluation calendar shifts. None of that requires the results file. All of it is harder to do once the file lands.