Rankings Matter… Sometimes
It has been nearly two months since NJ released its performance reports, and Berkeley Heights and Mountainside residents discovered GL’s significant drop in rankings and the underlying drop in proficiency across ELA and Math. Berkeley Heights residents had more bad news as the proficiency in Math, Science, and ELA dropped across every school and was outperformed by six other schools in surrounding towns.
On 5/11/2023, Ms. Penna, Ms. Young, Mr. Cianculli, and Ms. Bradford prevented the Superintendent from providing evidence to support her assertion that the reasons Berkeley Heights experienced these declines were due to COVID and AP Students (which every school in NJ experienced). Ms. Penna threw the issue into a committee the public had no access to. On the 6/5/2023, we found out from Ms. Stanley (who sits on this Committee) that it had yet to discuss the issue and would meet the next day. Convenient as the public will now have to wait until August to bring this up at the next BOE meeting and be ignored by Penna et al.
On 6/6/2023, I emailed Ms. Stanley and the BOE requesting a copy of the Committee’s report and submitted an OPRA request. It has been over a week, and it has been radio silence.
Dr. Varley and the BOE Majority seem to be doing everything in their power to avoid discussing the decline in proficiency and rankings, which is odd when you consider the resume she submitted to Sarasota in her failed bid at new employment.
In her resume, she cites improvements in Florham Park’s ELA and Math scores:
However that’s not 100% accurate or meaningful, as I wrote on May 20th:
Whether she "improved" Florham Park is hard to tell as it seems students took the test for the first time a year into her tenure and the second year improvement could represent familiarity and comfort level with the test itself (but to be fair not all of it - they were big jumps). The final year shows declines in ELA, stability on Math and a pretty bad initial Science Score. If we were average out the areas on her last year - the District grade would be a 62.5 (D). ELA: (C+), Math: C, Science: (F) If we were to do the three year average on each area: ELA: 76 (C+) Math: 68 (D) Science- taking the highest grade of the 2 (43) F Overall grade: 62 (D-F)
ELA improvements did not appear to come close to 20%. On ELA, the improvement over the first year was 12.41% and there was a 5.7% decrease on her last year. The improvement in Math was actually 13.59% which occurred after the first year the school participated in the testing and remained stable on year three. All based on available data from the NJ Performance Report website.
Also, on her resume, Dr. Varley claims that she increased Sparta’s ranking by 10 points:
However, Sparta was not taking the test that connected to NJ proficiency-driven rankings during her tenure and the source of this ranking increase is also missing.
One hint as to where it may be coming from is the 32% increase she cites in the number of students who scored a three or higher on their AP exam – for that to be valid, we would have to understand how many students that 32% included. Was it two students, three students, or ten? Over what course of time? What did Dr. Varley do exactly to take credit for this? Did the ranking she use rely on SAT Scores, which are more a measure of IQ than what a school can provide? Also how meaningful is this metric to the overall student body?
When it comes to Berkeley Heights, where we have a three-year pre and post-snapshot on actual proficiency and two items that should have improved based on the amount of time and lip service Dr. Varley spent on DEI , she can’t even bring herself to talk about rankings or scores.
The BOE, except for two members, are playing coy and spinning to prevent any meaningful discussion.
Tack this onto the long list of evidence to support that if we need to get an honest picture of what is going on with our schools and our children while they are there – we either need to hire a CSI Unit or elect two new BOE members to turn over the majority this year.
Dr. Varley’s Full Resume:
Email to BOE Requesting Curriculum Committee Report on Proficiency Declines: