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4-9-10 New School Performance Reports coming out tomorrow
Commissioner’s Weekly Message - Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Dear Colleagues, Tomorrow, we are planning to release our new School Performance Reports to the public...

Commissioner’s Weekly Message  - Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Dear Colleagues,

Tomorrow, we are planning to release our new School Performance Reports to the public. These reports are the result of nearly a year of work by our Chief Performance Officer, Bari Erlichson, and her team, in coordination with each of you. Developed in collaboration with representatives from the NJEA, NJPSA, NJASA, NJPTA, and NJSBA, these reports provide a wealth of new data designed to help you have deeper conversations with your educators and local communities in shared goal setting.

While these reports will spark a lot of conversation across the state, I wanted to share a few thoughts with you about why I think these reports are so important. We all share one fundamental goal – helping all students in New Jersey, regardless of birth circumstances, graduate from high school ready for college and career. In order to track our progress and guide our programmatic investments, we at the state are committed to providing as much information to each of you as possible to help you track your students’ progress at different points along that path, to see how they are performing compared to students similar to them across the state, and to help you measure the success of your investments. I believe that the best way that we can do that is to provide useful data to you that will help you reflect on the past and plan for the future. While no one data point can truly measure the work you do, we hope this mix of data can prove useful as you pair it with the qualitative data you collect about your students every day.

Over the past several weeks, we have provided you with an opportunity to review these reports and submit any edits or comments to us. In some cases, we have made adjustments to the calculations or criteria that were used based on your input. In other instances, however, we were not able to change data that had been submitted by your district throughout the year – with several opportunities already to review and correct. As we move into a new school year next year, Bari and her team remain committed to working with you individually to help ensure the accuracy of the data that is submitted.

While there is a significant amount of rich data in these reports, I want to mention briefly the importance of the new peer school comparisons. These replace the outdated DFG groupings, which many of you have said are often incorrect and do not accurately capture each of your schools. Based on a statistical calculation described in the white paper accompanying the performance reports, these peer groups are meant to provide you with a sense of how similar schools are performing to assist you in your local goal setting. Note that, for this first year, we have removed vocational schools from these comparisons because we recognize that they are unique in their student population. However, because there is no standard definition or data collection for other types of screened schools or schools that are not open enrollment throughout the state, we have kept all other schools in those categories in this first year.   

In addition, I want to point out the importance of the college and career ready metrics we are incorporating, ranging from elementary through the high school level. While we recognize that these metrics are not exhaustive of what it takes for students to be truly college and career ready – for example they do not capture the social and emotional development that is also critical – we think these data points are an important reflection point for all of us.

While the evaluation of student outcome data is crucial for school improvement, we know these data alone cannot capture the dozens of other essential elements of schools such as a positive school climate, participation in extracurricular programs and the development of non-cognitive skills. However, by focusing on college and career readiness and including meaningful comparisons for schools, we hope these new reports will inform conversations at the local level about where schools are doing well and where they can continue to improve. 

We are grateful for your participation in this process and look forward to continued dialogue moving forward.

Best regards, Chris