Rising tide lifting all boats

A familiar phenomenon often recurs when supporters and detractors of public education in Teaneck debate one another in venues such as this. Whether embittered, outraged, or simply astonished that Teaneck's well-funded school system delivers decidedly ordinary test results, a detractor will slap an unflattering label on Teaneck's schools. Advocates of the schools leap to the defense, citing their own positive experiences in the schools and the misleading nature of the aggregate statistics, which penalize the Teaneck schools for their socioeconomic diversity and mask the fact that the individual groups represented in the school system fare relatively well compared to their peer groups across the state.

There is still something vaguely unsatisfying about this response, though, and education officials are well aware of it. The fact that Teaneck's somewhat rare mix of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic categories accounts for its below Bergen County average proficiency rates does not bring much comfort. Not only does this statistical quirk portray the quality of Teaneck's schools unfavorably to observers, both inside and outside, but it highlights the achievement gap that exists within the schools and reinforces unfair stereotypes in the minds of students, faculty, parents, and others. Therefore, narrowing the range of educational outcomes among various reporting groups has become a priority within the district.

New figures from the Department of Education indicate some progress on this front at Teaneck High School (focusing on the two largest and most often cited racial groupings in the school). There are, of course, multiple ways that an achievement gap can be eliminated. For example, better students can flee the school system, lowering overall performance but narrowing the spread. Alternatively, the worst performers can boost their results and cut the gap. In the best of all worlds, everyone does better, with the scores of the lowest achievers rising faster than those of the highest achievers (because they have more room to rise), leaving you with better overall performance and a smaller discrepancy.

Since the 2002-2003 school year, the proficiency rate in mathematics for black students at Teaneck High has risen from 41.1 to 64.7. Over that period, the proficiency rate for white students has remained essentially flat around 88. This has propelled the overall pass rate in math from 58.4 to 77.1 and dramatically reduced the difference in performance between white and black students. On the language arts front, the gap has not shrunk much, but overall performance picked up, with 95.6% of white students now demonstrating proficiency vs. 85.6% back in 2002-2003 and 81.9% of black students reaching that standard vs. 68.6% in 2002-2003. This has boosted overall Language Arts proficiency to 86.9% vs. 77.1%.

While merely achieving "proficiency" as defined by these standardized tests is hardly an educational endpoint worth celebrating, it does serve as a useful minimum criterion for our schools, and happily, more of our students are getting there. And while there are still some stark differences among the test results of various groupings, these are diminishing through overall improvement, another welcome development. On the education front, things are okay and apparently getting better. The same cannot be said on the budgetary side. The prime target for critics of the public school system should be cost efficiency and not educational performance.