FRHSD Chief Responds To New Schools Evals

While he thinks they are better than the state school Report Cards they replaced, the Freehold Regional High School District superintendent does not think highly of the new statewide performance reports, issued last week for schools statewide.

The results of the NJ School Performance report were released by the state Department of Education, rating schools in three categories against schools statewide and against a group of about 30 schools with similar demographics, as calculated by the state’s criteria.

On Tuesday, Freehold Patch reported a story on the results of the Freehold high schools’ ratings, which published Wednesday. We had asked Freehold Regional High School District Superintendent Charles Sampson for a comment the at that time.

We received a statement, by email, on Thursday. It is included below, unedited:

“While the school performance reports provide a much broader snapshot of data as it relates to school achievement than the school report cards, there are a number of concerns that we have raised regarding the selected data as well as the categorization of the designated peer groups. There is no inclusion of ACT or duel enrollment data. The Freehold Regional High School District utilizes the ACT and has a thriving duel enrollment program with high numbers of our students enrolled in college courses while in high school. The performance reports exclude these numbers.  Additionally, the reports allow for a limited look at AP performance which works against schools like ours that are able to offer a huge range of AP courses to students.  The designated peer groupings are very tightly grouped for high performing districts, and they are especially tightly grouped at the high school level where there are far few schools to draw from than middle and elementary schools.  As a result, schools with well over 90 percent of students or more scoring above proficient on state assessments may be deemed lagging while other schools that are performing only marginally better are deemed high performing.  The result of such tight coupling is somewhat convoluted as one of our schools can be at the top of another districts peer group, but middle of the pack within their own peer group with extremely limited distinction in performance.  The model also ignored indicators of community wealth and education levels which are highly aligned to student achievement.  Additionally, the inclusion of PSAT data does not gauge student achievement within our curriculum.  Finally, we have not been privy to how the formula is determined for these categorizations which makes it difficult to draw as many conclusions as we would like from the data.”