An opinion piece in The Jersey Journal last month by Jersey City mayoral hopeful Jim McGreevey, a former governor, created a tempest of pushback in part because it pointed to state report card figures showing the city’s public school students lagging behind their peers in several cities and statewide.
The president of the squabbling city Board of Education, a teacher and a teachers union officer (who is also an educator) all scolded McGreevey for relying on such statistics.
It is commonly known and accepted that standardized tests unfairly skew against minority populations like those who make up a large part of the Jersey City public school student body, particularly students who are just learning English and those who live in poverty and face multiple family challenges.
And the three who wrote in response to McGreevey were certainly correct in noting that there’s much, much more to their story than the snapshot in time that admittedly faulty tests show. They were also correct to point out that the city’s schoolteachers are quite often heroic in their efforts to educate the city’s children and guide them to bright futures.
Still, fast forward two weeks and a new report – also admittedly imperfect – comes out showing what might be called a tale of two Jersey City school districts.
The latest U.S. News and World Report ranking of high schools across the United States placed three of the city’s public high schools among the top 45 in New Jersey and the other four close to or at the bottom of the list for the state.
The rankings are based on college readiness, college curriculum breadth, state assessment proficiency, state assessment performance and graduation rates.
McNair Academic High School was the top-ranked school in Hudson County and earned the list’s No. 6 spot among all New Jersey public and charter schools. It was also ranked 79th in the nation. Infinity Institute was ranked 32nd in the state and Liberty High School was ranked 45th.
Ferris High School, meanwhile, was 330th out of 406 Garden State schools; Dickinson was 339th; and Snyder and Lincoln were both at the bottom of the list in a group called “349th-to-406th.”
“We have dedicated staff across all the schools, and test scores reflect not just the school’s quality, but all kinds of factors in children’s lives, including economics, home environment, and trauma,” Jersey City Superintendent of Schools Norma Fernandez told The Jersey Journal in response. “On average, schools with the highest concentration of poverty score the lowest.”
Hmmm. This is all starting to sound like a cross between a blame-the-victim mentality and fatalism.
The students at Ferris, Dickinson, Snyder and Lincoln deserve better.
While it is true that standardized testing is not the best measure of anyone’s worth, it is an indicator of how students will be able to fare in a world where options are front-loaded the better you do on those tests.
Blaming poverty and moving on is an unacceptable easy out for administrators.
The parties in charge must stop kicking the can down the road and acknowledge that something hasn’t been working all that well for vast swaths of their students for decades and it’s imperative that they start digging into all the research and innovation out there to create pathways for these students to succeed.
There’s no time to waste as the gentrification steamroller in Jersey City is reshaping the neighborhoods around Ferris, Dickinson, Snyder and Lincoln, leaving many members of the community behind while, at the same time, jacking up their rents.
Fernandez and her administration, the Board of Education and the Jersey City Education Association teachers union must come together and strategize on the most basic element of their joint mission: the education of all of their students. Task forces, ad hoc committees, new positions focusing on the challenge – whatever it takes – must be implemented as frontline principals and teachers need broad support to turn this tide. Creative ideas are needed now.
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