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ok, i'm replying to myself, but i bet i know what happened with montgomery.....for the past "x" no. of year the district paid for this "SAT guru" to come and prepare the kids for the test ("teach to the test"), which is why for so long Montgomery had the highest scores in the state. My SIL told me they were ending the contract after that school yr was up (this was maybe 2 yrs ago?). Perhaps Millburn picked him up.........
Don't think that's it.It use to be judged by amount of students in AP class an % clompleting them ,plus how many AP class's each student was in.LIke I said I thought it was something like that.
Our school in Old Bridge is over #200! Sad... Yet in the community papers they always write that Old Bridge provides a solid education for its kids...
I wouldn't take much stock in the ratings... it's all about the teachers and your specific kid's ability to do well or not! How many of us in here, who are successful, graduated from one of the top 100 schools listed????
I wouldn't take much stock in the ratings... it's all about the teachers and your specific kid's ability to do well or not! How many of us in here, who are successful, graduated from one of the top 100 schools listed????
Agreed. I looked up my old town Belleville. I laughed, literally, out loud, at the fact that they have "moved up" on the list. You have no idea how horribly that town has deteriorated. I even checked their methodolgy and still can't figure out their logic behind moving this town up on the list. And Wiley's right, it's about the teachers, the child...and also what the parents put into helping their children.
I wouldn't take much stock in the ratings... it's all about the teachers and your specific kid's ability to do well or not! How many of us in here, who are successful, graduated from one of the top 100 schools listed????
i succeeded DESPITE my education, not because of it (as did my DH). we wanted to live in a place where that wouldn't be the case for my kids, KWIM? luckily we have the means to do so.
I think it’s great to have these rankings. More information for parents is a good thing. However, I want to point out what I see as some problems with the ranking methodology. The short summary is I think the data points of “Average Class Size” and “Student Faculty Ratio” are given too much weight. It also seems to me that “% Graduates to 4-year College” could be too influential as well.
“Average Class Size” and “Student Faculty Ratio”
I’ll just point out a couple of examples where I think this data has a large influence. While I think a smaller class size and lower student-faculty ratio are generally good things, I think we need to remember that we are comparing high schools here not elementary schools. It is not clear that smaller class sizes lead to better education at the high school level.
For an example, let’s look at the #137 ranked school, Rosa Parks, and a similarly ranked school, #141 Nutley. Rosa Parks has a smaller average class size (17.2 versus Nutley’s 21.0) and a “better” student-faculty ratio (5.6 versus Nutley’s 12.5). But look at the academic results – Nutley’s average SAT score is 1,514 compared to Rosa Parks’ 1,212. Nutley offers 15 AP tests, to Rosa Parks’ 3. 72% of Nutley students scored 3 or higher on the AP tests. 29% of Rosa Parks students did. So the smaller classes make up for those large differences in test results? The two schools are about the same? Really?
Two more similarly ranked schools: #117 Marlboro and #119 Weehawken. Again, Marlboro students perform significantly better on SAT (1,635 to 1,379) and AP tests (90% getting a 3 score versus 56%) but Marlboro’s large average class size of 29.5 dwarfs Weehawken’s 15.4 .
The results effectively seem to punish schools that do more (better test results) with less (# of faculty). I am not comfortable with that.
“% Graduates to 4-year College”
I wonder about this data point. Is it self-reported? What does it really measure? Does it punish the schools that have lower income students that need to go to a 2-year community college first to save money? Would a better data point be the percentage of high school students that graduate from a four-year college?
Anyway, here’s one example of why I think this data point has too large an impact. Look at #56 Westwood. It has a fairly high 82% of its graduates going to 4-year colleges. Westwood’s academic performance, however, is comprable to that of #153 Northern Burlington Regional (Columbus).
% of students scoring 3 or higher on the AP tests
Westwood 51% Northern Burlington 63%
Class size is about the same, but where Westwood really beats Northern Burlington is that 82% of Westwood students enroll (or say they will enroll – who knows) in 4-year colleges, while only 40% of Northern Burlington students do. So for that difference, Westwood is ranked almost 100 schools higher? Really? I don’t buy it.
Good luck fellow parents. Do your best.
(For the record, I did not attend any of the high schools listed nor do I currently live in any of the towns.)
Agreed. I looked up my old town Belleville. I laughed, literally, out loud, at the fact that they have "moved up" on the list. You have no idea how horribly that town has deteriorated. I even checked their methodolgy and still can't figure out their logic behind moving this town up on the list. And Wiley's right, it's about the teachers, the child...and also what the parents put into helping their children.
I have cousin's who grew up in belleville..eventually went over to bloomfield by the time they hit HS. Belleville was a great little Italian/Irish community back in the day. Have a pal who's dad was a cop in Belleville..probably retired now which is good..it's not so safe anymore : ( I graduated from Mt. Olive HS - they are listed as 107 on that ranking table. I'm sure it was 701 when i attended
I have cousin's who grew up in belleville..eventually went over to bloomfield by the time they hit HS. Belleville was a great little Italian/Irish community back in the day. Have a pal who's dad was a cop in Belleville..probably retired now which is good..it's not so safe anymore : ( I graduated from Mt. Olive HS - they are listed as 107 on that ranking table. I'm sure it was 701 when i attended
Yup, I'm Italian and my husband's Irish, if that's proof of what you said about Belleville lol! It really was a great little town when I was growing up. But even after I graduated, within about 2 years, you could start to see changes. Now, forget it. A good friend of mine went back to teaching there a couple of years ago. There are suspensions and expulsions out the wazoo, people get jumped because of race, sexual preference, etc. And she herself was threatened by a student because she sent him to the office. WTF?!
I probably know your friend's dad too lol. My dad was a Newark cop, but I have many cousins, friends and acquaintances on the Belleville force, plus the older ones that my dad knew. About 5 years ago, one of them was telling me that they had to go for special training on how to handle gang activity because it was moving into our area big time. Scary to think that that was where I used to walk all over town with my little boombox, by myself to meet my other friends so we could just sit in the park and blast the radio.
As for Mt. Olive, my cousin had told me awhile ago that they really had a decent school system, but my older cousins laughed at that. See just how time changes things?
Well, it was relatively easy for me to find the ranking of my old high school. Being the cynic that I am, I started at the bottom of the list and didn't have to look far. John F. Kennedy (Paterson) was third from the bottom! How times have changed! I started high school in 1965 at the age of 12 and graduated in 1969. J.F.K. HS was brand new back then. My greatest fear was not doing well in the SAT test. I needn't have been concerned, I did pretty well. Back then, there was still a significant white population attending the school before the riots of 1968. Now I think that it's nearly a 100% minority population. The SAT scores are just slightly higher than you get for just signing your name on the test paper. Sad, - very sad! NJ's cities' schools represent the nadir of education.
I think it’s great to have these rankings. More information for parents is a good thing. However, I want to point out what I see as some problems with the ranking methodology. The short summary is I think the data points of “Average Class Size” and “Student Faculty Ratio” are given too much weight. It also seems to me that “% Graduates to 4-year College” could be too influential as well.
“Average Class Size” and “Student Faculty Ratio”
I’ll just point out a couple of examples where I think this data has a large influence. While I think a smaller class size and lower student-faculty ratio are generally good things, I think we need to remember that we are comparing high schools here not elementary schools. It is not clear that smaller class sizes lead to better education at the high school level.
For an example, let’s look at the #137 ranked school, Rosa Parks, and a similarly ranked school, #141 Nutley. Rosa Parks has a smaller average class size (17.2 versus Nutley’s 21.0) and a “better” student-faculty ratio (5.6 versus Nutley’s 12.5). But look at the academic results – Nutley’s average SAT score is 1,514 compared to Rosa Parks’ 1,212. Nutley offers 15 AP tests, to Rosa Parks’ 3. 72% of Nutley students scored 3 or higher on the AP tests. 29% of Rosa Parks students did. So the smaller classes make up for those large differences in test results? The two schools are about the same? Really?
Two more similarly ranked schools: #117 Marlboro and #119 Weehawken. Again, Marlboro students perform significantly better on SAT (1,635 to 1,379) and AP tests (90% getting a 3 score versus 56%) but Marlboro’s large average class size of 29.5 dwarfs Weehawken’s 15.4 .
The results effectively seem to punish schools that do more (better test results) with less (# of faculty). I am not comfortable with that.
“% Graduates to 4-year College”
I wonder about this data point. Is it self-reported? What does it really measure? Does it punish the schools that have lower income students that need to go to a 2-year community college first to save money? Would a better data point be the percentage of high school students that graduate from a four-year college?
Anyway, here’s one example of why I think this data point has too large an impact. Look at #56 Westwood. It has a fairly high 82% of its graduates going to 4-year colleges. Westwood’s academic performance, however, is comprable to that of #153 Northern Burlington Regional (Columbus).
% of students scoring 3 or higher on the AP tests
Westwood 51% Northern Burlington 63%
Class size is about the same, but where Westwood really beats Northern Burlington is that 82% of Westwood students enroll (or say they will enroll – who knows) in 4-year colleges, while only 40% of Northern Burlington students do. So for that difference, Westwood is ranked almost 100 schools higher? Really? I don’t buy it.
Good luck fellow parents. Do your best.
(For the record, I did not attend any of the high schools listed nor do I currently live in any of the towns.)
excellent post! thanks for doing the research!
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