NJ Spotlight published the following article on January 29, 2014. To read the full article, click here.
INTERACTIVE MAP: STATEWIDE REPORT CARDS TRACK STUDENT PERFORMANCE
COLLEEN O’DEA | JANUARY 29, 2014
New Jersey education officials yesterday released the annual report cards for the state’s schools, issued for the second year in a revised format that compares performance not only against the state averages but against “peer” schools.
The 2012-13 School Performance Reports include some of the measures – SAT and other test scores, enrollments, graduation statistics — that have been reported since the state began issuing school report cards in the 1990s.
But they also rate each school, for only the second time, for academic achievement, college and career readiness, and graduation and post-secondary metrics. These latter categories, in which schools are rated from “significantly lagging” to “very high” performance, are provided on individual school narrative reports and not distributed en masse, making it virtually impossible to rank districts in these categories.
That is by design, said Education Commissioner Chris Cerf on Monday in discussing the impending release with reporters. The idea is to provide a “broader context, so the stories are broader than who beat whom.”
Still, those comparisons are often what parents and school officials look for.