RUMSON — Outstanding student achievement over the past three years has earned Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School the designation of being one of the highest-performing schools in the state.
The state Department of Education recognized RHF as ranking among the top 10 percent of all high-performing schools in New Jersey, with an overall proficiency rate greater than 95 percent and an overall graduation rate greater than 90 percent.
“We’re thrilled,” said Superintendent Peter Righi on April 13. “We think it’s a culmination of a lot of hard work that our faculty has put in over the past year on studying how to do our jobs better.”
According to the DOE, RFH was one of 112 Reward Schools that made the final list of Priority, Focus, and Reward Schools as part of the department’s new statewide school accountability system.
Righi attributed the high school’s success to many factors, from the community and faculty to students and administration.
“We’re fortunate to have a great community. We have great kids coming here to school, and even with those great ingredients, we also have a key ingredient, which is a hardworking, dedicated faculty and administrative team that has put a lot of time in professional development over the last five years to do our jobs better.”
The education reform initiative is a result of the Obama administration approving New Jersey’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waiver application in February, which grants the state flexibility from outdated accountability provisions and sanctions that had required schools to meet Adequately Yearly Progress (AYP) standards.
Instead, the new accountability system will identify and reward effective teachers as well as support teachers whose students are underperforming on state assessments. The DOE developed three categories of schools based on a three-year average of growth and proficiency: Priority, Focus and Reward schools.
The high school was named a Reward School with one of the highest-performing overall scores based on three years of data from state assessments like the High School Proficiency Assessment (HPSA).
“Our scores have always been very good. They’re getting better, and we’re just not satisfied with being very good. We just want to keep pushing the envelope, pushing the envelope, and keep being one of the best schools we can possibly be,” said Righi.
“We’re an educational institution. We need to learn our craft, but also as a larger part of the community, we want to share what we’ve learned with other people, so I would hope at some point the state takes the Rewards School and if we can impart something, share something with the Priority schools, that’d be great. We would love to do that.”
The accountability system will take effect in September.
According to a DOE release, it would “measure schools based on both growth and absolute attainment, and that focuses on state resources on drastically improving these schools that are persistently failing and/or have large achievement gaps.”
Despite the Reward designation, the superintendent isn’t necessarily a fan of the state’s approach to education reform, calling the new accountability system one of “punishments and rewards.”
“I’m not a fan of punishing based on something that we’re all reading that there’s no evidence for. It’s not researchbased. There’s a formula out there, and somebody thought this is a good thing, but you shouldn’t be evaluating teachers and putting merit pay or not or based on tenure or not, and those are the punishments built in,” he explained.
“The whole setup of effective teachers, non-effective teachers, there’s no science that I’ve seen that can truly evaluate a teacher based on student progress, yet our whole system seems to be gearing up to evaluate teachers based on student progress.”
Instead, Righi offered alternative ways to improve the educational system, including transforming the teaching profession into one that is highly soughtafter and revered, which would attract the “best and brightest young people to go into college to teach and become educators.”
The superintendent also recommended giving the teachers more input when it comes to deciding education practices.
“I don’t mind national curriculum or standards but how they’re implemented should be [specific] from one district to the next. There’s no one way of doing it,” said Righi.
“Until we look at it as a true profession and stop bashing the teachers for every problem that comes down the pike and start showing young people that this is a profession that we should be in, and putting money where it belongs: in the profession and hiring people with good starting salaries.”
Righi also suggested making the teaching profession a year-round profession, with teachers continuing work to hone their craft, even if the students have summer vacation. The only drawback, he said, is that it costs money — money that he feels would be better spent than for an accountability model.
“We’re spending billions of dollars on testing kids. I think we could do away with a lot of that money and put it in salaries, make school 11- or 11½- month positions with teachers going the extra month and a half learning, giving them commeasured salaries and making it a profession. I think you’re going to see more results,” he said.
“And other countries have done that. Finland’s model is like that. I think the teaching profession in Finland is as rigorous and revered as any other profession in that country. We start looking at education in that sense rather than a ‘gotcha’ model, I think we’ll see more results.”
RFH was also designated a National Blue Ribbon School last September by the U.S. Department of Education, gaining national recognition for its outstanding academic achievement.