Quote:
Originally Posted by newdude05
Researching schools, and saw a lot of good recommendations for brookdale elementary in bloomfield from a few years ago, then saw the rank drop significantly for the past 3 years in a row.
It's almost impossible for a school to drop this much, or so i thought. Does anyone know what happened exactly to this elementary school in the last few years?
2011 9th
2012 177th
2013 250th
2014 408th
Brookdale Elementary School in Bloomfield NJ - SchoolDigger.com |
If you are truly interested in researching data to compare schools, you'd be much better off looking at data from the NJ Dept of Ed's School Reports. The are a great resource for finding unbiased facts regarding a schools performance is the NJ DOE school report cards. On the site you can see any public school's performance report card.
New Jersey Department of Education | 2012-2013 Performance Reports If you want to see the schools report cards from over the past several years, you can do so here
Department of Education - DOE Archives I find it quite useful to be able to not only see the most recent report, but to also see the reports from over the past several years so that you can clearly get an idea of not only how the schools is currently performing, but what trends you see in the school's performance - is the current scores an anomaly, or part of a general trend (either improving or declining)
Sites like Schooldigger and Greatschools "ratings" are heavily influenced and depend on feedback from parents and teachers. Thus they are inherently biased and IMHO not reliable as a true measure of how good or bad the schools are performing. It's more of a popularity contest. Of course if you live in that school district, pay taxes to support the schools, (and someday will want to sell your home, hopefully for more than you paid for it) your opinion of the school will be biased. Most PTA's and HSA have organized efforts to have parents post to goodschools and other similar sites to post positive reviews. Not to mention the concerted efforts by the teacher's union to have all members post and review their own schools, of course encouraging them to give their own school glowing recommendations and reviews. Schooldigger's method for coming up with these so called "ratings" would certainly not pass muster in a scientific study.
HTH
KoalaNJ
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