New Jersey recently passed a law removing the requirement that prospective teachers pass an exam covering reading, writing, and mathematics to be certified.  Act 1669 decisively cleared the state senate in a 34-2 vote as part of the Garden State’s 2025 budget and was signed into law by New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy in June of last year.

The law states, “The State Board of Education shall not require a candidate seeking any instructional certificate, except in the case of a limited certificate of eligibility or a limited certificate of eligibility with advanced standing … 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 an instructional certificate.”

State leaders have indicated that lowering standards for those who educate the up and coming generations of Americans is the best way to combat understaffing at schools.  According to state Senator Jim Beach (D-NJ), who sponsored the bill, “We need more teachers. This is the best way to get them.” Furthermore, the teachers union, the New Jersey Education Association, was a major proponent of the bill, suggesting the testing requirement was “an unnecessary barrier to entering the profession.”

In other news regarding the state of the American classroom, The American Tribune reported on parents in Virginia fighting back against woke and “racially divisive” material being shown to their children.  Earlier this year, five families moved to sue the Albermarle County Public Schools near Charlottesville, Virginia, over alleged “discriminatory” policies.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal organization dedicated to fighting for causes such as freedom of speech, asserted, “The five families are challenging the school board’s in-class implementation of a discriminatory policy that indoctrinates students in, and compels them to say they agree with, a racially divisive ideology. The families appealed in June 2022 after a lower court dismissed their case.”

“Every student deserves to be treated equally under the law, regardless of race or religion. Public schools can’t impose demeaning stereotypes on students based on these characteristics,” according to ADF Senior Counsel Vincent Wagner. “Parents have the fundamental right to know what their kids are being taught in public schools and to protect them from policies and curriculum that compel them to affirm harmful ideologies. We urge the court to take a hard look at the school board’s discriminatory policy.”

The group asserted that the school district practices infringe upon the civil rights of students.  “The policy violates students’ civil rights by treating them differently and stereotyping them based on race, and by compelling them to affirm and support the board’s ideology, even if it is contrary to their deeply held moral and religious beliefs. Parents in the school district are not allowed to opt their children out of classes that teach this ideology, and the school labels any opinion not aligned with the curriculum as “racist” and threatens to punish dissent based on its redefinition of “racism,”” the ADF stated.

Watch MTG explain how DOGE could slash “Democrat propaganda” here: