The state’s school report cards are too general.
It’s that time of year again, time for the state to grade local schools.
But don’t get too worked up. The report cards issued by the state, while somewhat useful, tend to try to hard to simplify what happens within each school building, to boil the process of education down to numbers.
The problem is schools are not numbers.
The report cards, issued last week, do contain a wealth of information including average class size, the number of computers per student, how much the district is spending per student and how students compare academically with students from similar districts. They are part of an initiative by the state Department of Education to provide more information to the public about schools.
These report cards are not the same as the ones delivered to parents by students at the end of each marking period. They are far too general and the information they contain is far too esoteric for that.
But, if used judiciously, the state report cards can offer parents and the public a chance to judge how their schools compare in general ways to schools across the state.
Having a sense of enrollment trends, for instance, can make it easier for the public to understand why spending is on the rise and whether proposed budgets are adequate. Information on test scores allows the public to judge whether students are learning what the state thinks they should know, offering a chance for parents to ask for curricular and other changes that might be necessary.
According to the report cards, which are available at the state Department of Education Web site, http://education.state.nj.us/rc/rc03/letter.html, 86.8 percent of Lawrence High School students were either proficient or advanced on the literacy arts section of the High School Proficiency Assessment, down 5.1 percent from 2001-2002, but still above the state figures of 80.1 percent. On the mathematics portion of the test, 77.9 percent scored proficient or advanced, down just 1.8 percent from 2001-2002, and well above the state figure of 65.8 percent.
Also, the number of high school seniors taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test in 2002-2003 increased by 20 students from the previous school year, with 256 students or 100 percent of LHS seniors taking the test, compared to 80 percent in 2001-2002.
The average score in math for Lawrence High School seniors taking the Scholastic Aptitude Test was 533, compared with 541 in 2001-2002. In the verbal section, the average score was 525 among LHS seniors, compared with 532 the previous year. But the most recent scores were still above the state average of 518 in math and 500 in verbal.
The district’s per-pupil spending increased from $11,467 in 2001-2002 to $11,732 in 2002-2003, and remained several hundred dollars above the state average of $11,313 spent per pupil.
All of this is useful information, to be sure, but only if parents and taxpayers remember that the numbers offered do not tell the whole story. The report card is a "snapshot" of the district, and we should be careful not to read too much into it, especially when discussing what kind of education a child is getting.
The only sure-fire way to determine what kind of job your district is doing is to pay attention to your children and to get involved. Talk to your kids about school, find out what they are learning and doing. Spend time with them on homework and attend PTO meetings and parent-teacher conferences. Make yourself a part of your school’s community.
The more involved you are, the more control you can have over what happens in your school. You owe it to your children and yourself.