The Administration’s Response To Our District’s Declines Was Everything We Expected and Less!

The First of Two Articles on the District’s Presentation to the Curriculum Committee on the BHPSNJ Declines in Math, Science and ELA

We finally received the presentation or work product from the curriculum committee that resulted from Ms. Penna attempting to protect Dr. Varley from having to answer questions the public had about our declining proficiencies. This was the document that Ms. Stanley and the OPRA Custodian were playing word games around to delay the release of the report – likely hoping to have it out during the summer on the belief that most residents wouldn’t be paying attention.

I agree with Ms. Stanley in her assertion that “there is no report” on the decline in proficiencies as what the District provided me (eventually) barely passes as a multi-page “everything is wonderful” infographic.

I have an email out to Ms. Bradford asking her if this presentation was the basis for her belief that everything is fine – because it is quite a fairy tale for one to accept as any kind of explanation or response – especially when one considers the “complexity” of educational statistics.

In any case, lets go slide by slide.

The first slides I will cover demonstrate a breakdown of our ELA and Math scores by grade in our District, with a second graph showing state performance as a whole.

So I’m guessing the argument here is “that we are doing better than the state aggregate so we are ok”, but that was never the point.  The point is that we declined further than six other schools in our surrounding area and dropped in the rankings.  The state aggregate includes a great number of schools that would not even qualify as a reasonable basis for comparison – many of which we were already historically out-performing.

We are doing worse than we were before Dr. Varley took the helm of our District – and we are behind schools we were once ahead of. Why?

I know and provided the answers to that question to the BOE, but this report addresses none of those factors as it would mean admitting some very difficult truths – the most basic being that the declines in Math, Science and ELA even exist.

Science, one of the three areas the District declined in, was not even mentioned in the report. 

Throughout the presentation, there are slides demonstrating data from internal testing.  None of that has to do with our declines in state proficiency, and none of that data is compared to a single school.  

Why would we compare ourselves to a state aggregate that includes schools that offer no basis in comparison and neglect the available data from at least six schools that are geographically and economically proximate to our District?

Why do our internal numbers paint a different picture than state testing? Where is the disconnect? What the report did accomplish was to create more questions, in my mind, on whether our internal mechanisms serve any real purpose on an aggregate level.

Both the external and internal data in the report doesn’t even present a comparison to prior years. 

The data is presented in a rather disingenuous way from my perspective as it attempts to give the appearance that we are doing well either with bad comparisons or with internal data on internal markers apparently unrelated to state measurements. It comes across as yet another example of the District’s difficulty with honest analysis.

If one were to look at this report without understanding the context, one would never even know that there were declines in Math, ELA and Science – the very thing that drove the need for this presentation in the first place. One wouldn’t even know we taught Science.

The only comparisons within the report connect to AP and SAT Test Scores across years.  Both areas demonstrate negligible progress, and one testing metric connected to AP appears to only involve 44 students (the heading to that metric is cut off so I’m guessing a little here). One has to wonder why SAT scores are even included as that has very little to do with our District’s performance – SATs are more proximate to IQ Tests than Proficiency Measures. In any case, the NJ Performance reports includes AP Scores, SAT Scores and several other sources of data. Even with this data included we still declined.

What this means is that when you take all the variables indicated in information pools INCLUDING AP AND SAT’s the results were a significant net loss.

Ms. Bradford, who spoke of her credentials in connection to “complex” educational statistics, did not speak to these concerns during her monologue at the last BOE Meeting.

You might say that I may be jumping to conclusions as I wasn’t present at the meeting to hear the context speakers provided to this data, but that was a decision Ms. Penna, Mr. Cianculli, Ms. Young, Ms. Bradford, and Ms. Stanley made in throwing this into a committee the public had no access to.  

It was also a choice on the part of the District to prepare a report (or whatever Ms. Stanley and the OPRA Custodian want to call it) that showed numbers with little to no context attached, comparisons, or explanation as to why internal data was used and what value that data has in relation to our declining state proficiency, ratings and rankings.

As a contrast to this presentation, here is the comparative data BHCW presented in earlier articles based on state testing:

As it stands, this presentation comes across as a terrible attempt to spin a serious problem in our District during Dr. Varley’s tenure.

The public should demand a more informed and comprehensive presentation from Dr. Varley directly, at the next BOE Meeting with the opportunity to ask questions that will actually be answered.

It is now over two months since the information became available and an explanation from Dr. Varley has been asked for by the public and two BOE member repeatedly.

The next article about this report will drill down on the use of AP and SAT scores in this report likely used to minimize the community’s concerns on the declines and the silly explanations the District has for the declines the District fails to even mention in the report.  The explanations contained at the start of the presentation (if one makes reasonable assumptions) and at the end of the report are things ​any school district has to contend with and would have nothing to do with our declines.

I am waiting on a response from the District on numbers connected to AP students as the presentation’s data is not fully clear on actual number of students in connection to the percentages associated with the AP slides. I can make some assumptions and given the District’s track record in answering questions I will probably be forced to.

Link to full Presentation

All the Articles on the BHPSNJ Declines in Math, Science and ELA

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