Updated NJ High School Rankings

[NJGOAT]

Originally Posted by Attagirl22

I don't understand these rankings in this forum. According to NJ monthly James Caldwell (West Caldwell) was ranked #45 for 2010 but in the list posted above James Caldwell HS is ranked #127. Can someone please help explain the discrepancy? I am very interested in moving to West Caldwell and want to make sure they have a good school system.

First off, I agree with Marc, these rankings should be taken with a grain of salt. As for the differences in the rankings, this "ranking" was only based on one piece of information tabulated by the OP, student performance on the HSPA test, which is a mandatory statewide test designed to gauge student proficiency in math and lanuage arts. The regular NJ Monthly ranking uses multiple weighted measurements including; class size, AP course availability, AP testing scores, graduation rate, college admittance, etc. It tends to give a more rounded look, but the categories they weight can provide some very skewed results. There can also be fraction of a point differences between school number 40 and school number 100.

For instance, I live in Kingsway Regionals system and NJ Monthly had it ranked around 210 or so on the last ranking, or in the bottom 1/3rd in the state. However, rankings with SAT and the one posted in this thread had it in the top 100 or so. Looking at it closer, Kingsway lost a ton of points on the NJ Monthly score do to an overcrowding issue that is just being rectified. However, on all objective measures of academic performance, it was in the top 1/3rd of schools in the state and scores a "9" on greatschools.

I tend to prefer looking at ranking sites like greatschools.org as their comparison is a little less skewed and uses the latest information. They rank everything on a scale of 1-10 with the state average pegged at 5 and the comparisons are only intra-state. They also rank individual schools within a district as well as the district overall. So, a school/district that ranks 5 is considered average for the state. They also bracket the results, so that you can have multiple "10" schools and not have a situation where schools 1 through 50 are only separated by a very small statistical margin.

I looked up James Caldwell on the greatschool site and they scored it a "7", so above average, but not the "best". I would consider it a good school system with that score.

[Goldendoodle1969]

The HSPA is a test that all students have to take and pass. That said colleges DO NOT care about your score on it so many schools focus there efforts on more important tests like the SATs. Basically most schools systems only care if you pass or fail, they could care less whether you pass by alot or a little.

All rankings systems are flawed, whether it's this list, NJ Monthly, US News, or ranking by SAT scores. As Marc stated, where your school falls on any list is pretty irrelevant.

Personally I only look at average SAT scores. Why? I don't care about the entire population of a school. I don't care if only 20% of students in a school take the SATs. I don't care if only 10% of the kids graduate and go onto a 4 year school . All I care about is what are the kids that are taking the test getting. Why? Because as a parent I believe it is MY responsibility to make sure that my kid takes the SATs and goes on to college so that is the only sample group I am concerned about. Make sense?