Putting It All Together – Rankings, Ratings, Proficiency and Budget

May 18, 202310 Comments

Exploring a connection between proficiency, rankings and budget…

I emailed the Berkeley Heights Board of Education and Superintendent the following summary (excuse typos):

I would like to share with you the ratings and rankings themselves along with the Budget. I’ve written about this before and I’m pretty certain you’ve read what I’ve written, however, it didn’t seem like you had any recollection of it last Thursday. The sources to the tables in this email are the NJ Taxpayers Guide, ACFR and the NJ School Performance Reports – the latter I spent the last few days giving you background on.

The ratings and rankings consider proficiencies in the overall measures. Again, over the last few days I’ve provided you with my analysis on these proficiencies so that you would have a better understanding on how those factors play out in the ratings below. In addition to proficiencies the ratings and rankings consider 4-year and 5 year graduation rates, student growth, english language proficiency and chronic absenteeism. While many districts who do not perform well try to spin the measure as invalid, it is actually a very basic and common sense measure and a useful tool for families and districts to evaluate how well they are doing, especially when you consider that you can pull samples out of the set and look at comparable districts.

I tied budget information into this email as the budget manifests a District priorities. When you look at our ranking and look at our Budget it’s one peice of the puzzle that makes sense. There are other factors that connect to the changes of the past 3 years that we will be writing about (and that I hope you take the opportunity to read). For the purposes of this email, I want to focus on the ratings/rankings and budget.

Let’s start with rankings and price per pupil – the following is a list of 7 schools (including our own) with price per pupil and ratings/rankings:

Governor Livingston went down 52 points in the rankings and ratings:

And the Youngest learners in this set are not doing much better:

You will notice that Berkeley Heights has the highest per pupil cost and the lowest summative score and ranking. This cost is not due to median salaries of teachers where we ranked lowest prior to the 3.2% increase and when applied, only moves us to the middle of the pack (assuming all of the other Districts salaries remain the same). This is an important point because the new teachers contract was mentioned as a reason for a high per pupil cost but that does not appear to be the case.

The high per-pupil cost probably has nothing to do with Special Needs. I couldn’t find a perfect indicator for this, so I looked at support services and state aid as guideposts. This is also important because many members of our community were under this impression.

Millburn spends about $100 less per student on Support Services (3227pp v. 3327pp) and Madison a little less (3161 pp) [NJ Taxpayers Guide To Ed Spending]. These are good examples since not only are the dollar amounts close but Madison and Millburn both have a higher percentage of Budgetary Cost PP for Support Services (18% and 17.6%, respectively) than Berkeley Heights (16.7%). Madison receives a similar amount to Berkeley Heights in State Aid (2.2M and 2.1 M, respectively), while Millburn receives 4.3 Million [NJ State Aid Summaries].

Considering these facts, consider the total per pupil cost for each District.

Millburn ~ 18k per pupil 3rd on the list in connection to ratings and ranking

Madison ~ 17k per pupil 7th on the list in connection to ratings and ranking

Berkeley Heights ~19k per pupil 20th on the list in connection to ratings and ranking

Of course, I could be using incomplete indicators concerning Special Needs, but these are the best I can find.

It also doesn’t appear to be our buildings.

One factor to the decline (and there are many we will be writing about that I’m not going to cover here) may be the continued lack of textbooks parents often talk about – this concern appears to be validated on our per pupil spend compared to other Districts:

Moving to Administrative Costs…

Berkeley Heights has:

More Administrators per Faculty

More Administrators per Student

The Highest Administrative cost per pupil

Than any of the Districts in the ratings/rankings table.

The 2021-2022 original budget was 1629 per pupil

The 2021-2022 revised budget was 1751 (+122 per pupil)

The 2022-2023 original budget is 1723 per pupil (+94 per pupil from 2021-2022 original budget)

Lastly, onto legal spend.

This area was a rather confusing one to figure out. Let’s start with the Berkeley Heights 2021-2022 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR). According to this source, our District spent ~157,000 on legal services. Dividing that total amount by the number of students for that year (~2600 students according to this year’s advertised budget). This would bring our per-pupil cost to about $60 per student.

The $60 per pupil cost is nearly double what is indicated for that specific year on the 2023 advertised budget ($36 per pupil) and, if the real number, would put Berkeley Heights at the very top of the list on the table of schools we’ve posted with a lot of room between ourselves and the other Districts.

As I’ve said this was a summary of what I have already shared publicly.

I am again requesting that the BOE instruct the Superintendent to present on the DOE Data Dr. Foregger and Ms. Khanna discussed during the last BOE Meeting at the next BOE Meeting.