NJ Education Report

An informed parent in the Mercer County school district of Ewing Township, David Roscoe Brown, writes in the Trenton Times about the performance of black kids on state assessments:

I do not speak as an uninformed outsider when I characterize the test scores of Ewing’s black students as pathetic. And trust me, as a black dad who is very proud of his ethnicity, it is not (nor has it ever been) a happy moment to speak of how poorly black kids are typically performing (“typically” being synonymous with “average”) academically in my town.

How poorly are black kids doing in Ewing, a Central Jersey district with a DE District Factor Grouping? According to the DOE database, 65.9% of black 8th graders at Fisher Middle School failed the NJ ASK8 in math. Among white kids, 26.5% failed and among Hispanics 44% failed. For the NJ ASK8 in Language Arts, 22.5% of black failed, 10.3% of whites, and 16% of Hispanic kids. That’s slightly worse than other districts in their DFG and below average across the State.

Ewing High School reports a similar story. 13.5% of white 11th graders taking the HSPA Language Arts test failed; 28.5% of black students did. (Hispanic kids did better, with an 8.3% failure rate.) In math, only 13.4% of whites failed, but almost half of black kids did – 49.2%. Districts with comparable socio-economic ratings performed slightly better in language arts. Black students throughout the DE DFG reported a similar failure rate: 49.1%.

Mr. Brown attributes the “pathetic” performance of black students in Ewing to the lack of courage among school boards, superintendents, and principals to

summon the courage to go very politically incorrect and tell the typical — yes, I know there are lots of exceptions — black parent that he or she urgently needs to get his or her kids studying more each night. In order for such a “telling” to be successful, it must be loud, direct and incessant. If such a message is not unequivocally shared with black parents, there is not enough supplemental school aid in the world to significantly increase the likelihood that the typical black student in Mercer County will ever mirror the academic achievement levels of corresponding white or Asian students.

That’s a brave, politically incorrect statement. But what about preschool? NJEA just touted the academic success of 8th graders in poor districts:

So what accounts for that success? No doubt a number of factors contributed, but one stands out. Last year’s eighth grade class included the first wave of students who had access to the preschool program mandated in the former Abbott districts.

Ewing students don’t have access to free public preschool. Could that explain the dismal test scores? For comparison’s sake, we went right across the Ewing border to Trenton, an Abbott district where full day preschool is available to all takers. Here’s their 8th grade results at Grace Dunn Middle School: for the NJ ASK8 in language arts, 50% of white kids failed, 60.6% of black kids failed, and 61% of Hispanic kids failed. For the NJ ASK 8 in math, 54.5% of white kids failed, 75.8% of black kids failed, and 78.8% of Hispanic kids failed.

At least the achievement gap is lower in Trenton than in Ewing.

The answer to increasing academic achievement, at least based on the Ewing/Trenton comparison, is not as simple as preschool access (and it’s disingenuous for the people who write NJEA press releases to trumpet preschool as such, even when it’s serendipitously timed to the gubernatorial election). At the NJSBA Convention last week, Commissioner Lucille Davy said that preschool is “the game-changer.” It’s not in Trenton. Mr. Brown suggests that it’s more complicated than that. Our guess is that he’s right.