New Jerseyans  have different ways of scoring how their local school districts function but our Department of Education has just one. You may have caught wind of it if you happened upon a panicked school board member muttering, “we’re being QSAC’d!” 

What does this mean? Your elected official is referring to a state statute called N.J.A.C. 6A:30, subtitled “Evaluation of the Performance of School Districts,” which determines whether your school district is “high-performing” according to a complicated rubric called the New Jersey Quality Single Accountability Continuum (QSAC).  First created in 2005, QSAC is intended to ensure all school districts are compliant with the mountain of statutes and regulations that are intended to ensure that all students have access to our constitutionally-mandated “thorough and efficient” education. 

Here are some questions and answers about QSAC.

How does QSAC work?

The QSAC district performance review rubric is divided into five sections: Instruction and Program (I&P), Fiscal Management, Governance, Operations, and Personnel. The highest score on each section is 100 points. If a district gets a minimum of 80 points on each section it passes QSAC and  is deemed by the State Board of Education to be “high-performing.”  If your district gets less than 80% on even one section, it has failed. At that point improvement plans and state intervention kicks in, which can lead, in extreme cases, to a state takeover.

For instance, at July’s State Board of Education public meeting, Acting Commissioner Kevin Dehmer issued this notice saying the Department of Education (DOE) had evaluated 45 school districts. Twenty-one districts passed QSAC and 24 failed by not getting 80 points on one or more sections, and will now submit to another QSAC review in six months. Those 21 successful districts are off the QSAC evaluation hook for three years.

Why do school districts hate being QSAC’d?

It’s an enormous administrative time-suck. First officials create a committee that must include the superintendent, the business administrator, someone from the Curriculum and Instruction department, a local teacher union representative, a teacher, and a school board member.  Then this committee completes a self-evaluation using a District Performance Review (DPR) that divides each of the sections into multiple categories.

For instance, the Instruction and Program section (which most often trips districts up) is divided into 16 DPR’s and each of those DPR’s is  divided into as many as 11 requirements. These include whether the board has adopted the most recent version of the New Jersey Student Learning Standards, student achievement (scores on state standardized tests), achievement of subgroups (economically-disadvantaged, students with disabilities,  race, etc.) student progress (growth measured by Student Growth Percentile), whether teachers incorporate other disciplines into subjects, whether instruction is differentiated for students with disabilities and gifted and talented students, which textbooks are used, whether teachers employ pacing guides and integrate 21st century skills, etc..  Each of these DPR’s must be validated with documentation.

See here for a complete list.

Does the school district’s self-evaluation seal the deal?

No, after the self-evaluation the county education office, led by your County Executive Superintendent (you can find your county office here), comes in and does its own evaluation, changing any scores it deems inaccurate. (Before we had Executive Superintendents, the DOE had this job.) Then the county issues the final QSAC report, scoring the district on each of the five main sections. 

In rare cases, self-evaluations are not reliable. For instance, in October 2022 Newark Superintendent Roger Leon told school board members at a public meeting that their responsibility for QSAC is to say “we’ve met 100 points,” meaning the highest level of performance the district can reach based on all five components of the monitoring system. “Our job is not to say, oh, it shouldn’t really be less than 100 points. That’s the state’s job. That’s the job of people who don’t want the district to demonstrate greatness.”

The county begged to differ. Newark failed QSAC.

What happens if a district fails QSAC? 

If a district scores below 80% on any section, then the district has to develop a District Improvement Plan (DIP) to rectify those shortcomings. Failure to make progress leads to additional interventions and can, in the worst cases, lead to state takeovers.

Let’s look again at Newark Public Schools, NJ’s largest district which was taken over by the state in 1995 for uniformly dreadful outcomes. In 2007 NPS had a QSAC review and scored 39% Instruction and Program, 66% in Fiscal Management, 86% in Operations, 32% in Personnel, and 56% in Governance. Based on that evaluation the Commissioner gave the district back control of Operations, the one category it had passed by scoring at least 80 points. Over the next four years, QSAC scores in Newark went up and down, improving overall yet rarely reaching that 80% passing score and in 2011 the district sued the Commissioner, arguing state control should end. Newark lost that case but gained back full local control in 2020.

For another example, the DOE took over Camden City in 2013 and a major driver of that decision was QSAC scores: just 9% in Instruction and Program, 19% in Personnel, 33% in Governance, 47% in Operations, and 70% in Fiscal Management.  (The district is improving in all categories.)

Which of these categories is the most troublesome for districts?

Instruction and Program by  a mile. Why? Because state standardized tests are unforgivingly objective: If students aren’t meeting grade-level expectations in math and reading then there is little room of negotiation. While current QSAC regulations give equal weights to student progress and student achievement, learning loss from Covid-19 school disruptions have set many districts back. Here is a list of the 45 districts under review at the State Board of Education meeting in July 2024, which shows they all failed because of I&P; their scores on the other four areas were passing scores.

Does the public get to know their local district’s QSAC scores?

Yes. According to regulations, each local school board must hold a public meeting to share the district’s responses to QSAC and post the response on the district website for at least five days before the public meeting.

Is QSAC really an indicator of district quality?

It depends upon whom you ask and how you define “quality.”  QSAC is essentially a compliance monitor, requiring districts to prove that what they are doing is aligned with learning and assessment standards, state statutes, and government mandates. When the Education Commissioner deems a district “high-performing,” it is in reference to rule-following, which is important: Do your district’s buildings, discipline policies, teacher evaluation methods, instructional materials meet the bar set by the state? And there is accountability built in: if a district is ignoring certain rules, the state steps in and the public must be informed.

In this sense, QSAC is an important element of measuring school quality. Yet so much of a students’ experiences comes down  less to quantifiable factors and more to qualitative ones. How do your children fit into their peer group? Do their learning styles mesh with a teacher’s instructional approach and does the teacher differentiate instruction based on a student’s needs? Is a particular school’s culture inclusive and welcoming? 

You will find many important answers in a QSAC evaluation. For those more ineffable qualities, you’ll need to trust yourself and your children.