In January the Asbury Park Press reported that four former administrators at Asbury Park Public Schools are suing the district, charging they were laid off after exposing a “pervasive scheme” called “Buy Back” in order to inflate student grades. Then a month later the former superintendent sued the school board and the district because, he says, they fired him for trying to stop the practice of awarding diplomas to students who didn’t earn them. 

If these allegations are true and students are graduating without actually passing courses, how can local families gauge the quality of Asbury Park schools? And how are taxpayers supposed to square the district’s $30,949 annual cost per pupil? When grades, course completion, and graduation rates are inflated, how do we know how students are really doing? 

One way is to look at student outcomes on NJ’s annual standardized tests (NJSLA), which show that Asbury Park ranks last among all school districts in both reading and math. But how many people look at that? (Instead we have Gov. Phil Murphy and gubernatorial candidate Sean Spiller telling us NJ has the top state school system in the country; you can look at your district’s performance here.) How do we penetrate the fog of performative politics?

I don’t think Elon Musk’s m.o. of moving fast and breaking things is the answer, like he’s doing with the federal Education Department’s division that administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress (or NAEP, which shows NJ, protestations aside, doesn’t have the best school system). And, as always, tiny Asbury Park (down to 1,500 students pre-K-12) serves the unenviable role of canary in the coal mine, giving a clear view of what happens when oversight, at best, is lax. According to one of the lawsuits, chronically-absent students were simply disenrolled in order to protect inflated graduation rates or promoted to the next grade, even those who had missed 100 out of 180 school days.  Students with disabilities were denied hearings over discipline and their IEP’s weren’t updated. A student was suspended for 62 days without ever being provided with home instruction. 

If Asbury Park Public Schools were one of NJ’s public charter schools, which have to comply with far stricter accountability standards,  it would have closed long ago.

This is old news. Asbury Park’s practice of evading accountability is best recalled through the still-functioning 64 Floor scheme, which started a decade before those administrators filed their lawsuits. According to teachers there at the time, then-Superintendent Lamont Repollet initiated a plan that artificially inflated grades: When a student got an “F,” teachers couldn’t assign a grade lower than 64. When averaged in with other assessments, it was the rare student who failed a course, which led to soaring graduation rates (49% to 71% over just a few years)and Gov. Murphy’s decision to appoint Repollet as Education Commissioner, citing sharp increases in the district’s graduation rate.

We see the same attempts at masking the truth through analyses of Musk’s dismantling of the U.S. Ed Department. In a recently-published piece, two former Education Secretaries, Republicans Lamar Alexander and William Bennett, argue for keeping NAEP because it “gathers essential data, administers key tests of student performance, and informs the whole country as to how its kids are doing in the 3Rs as well as American history and civics and science.” 

(Is the Trump Administration being ironic when it calls eliminating the department “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities?”)

Almost all states, not just Asbury Park, use data from NAEP and state assessments to measure school quality because you can’t rely on grades or diplomas. In Princeton the average GPA is 3.6 (according to homes.com, which gets it from Niche) but only  39% of students meet proficiency metrics in math. At Montclair High School  40% of students can’t read at grade-level but the average GPA is also 3.6. (It’s not just rich districts: At Barringer High School in Newark, where 10% of students read at grade-level and fewer that can do math, the average GPA is 3.24.) 

And it’s not just New Jersey:

• Learning Heroes, a national non-profit, has found that 90% of parents believe their child is on grade level. In reality, 30% of K-12 students are at grade level in reading and math. 

• Rick Hess reports, in “Grade Inflation Teaches Students We Don’t Mean What We Say,” that in Los Angeles, the nation’s second largest school district, “83 percent of 6th graders received A, B, or C grades in spring 2022—even though just 27 percent met or exceeded the standards on state and national assessments.”

• In North Carolina more than one-third of students who got B’s in Algebra 1 failed to achieve proficiency in the subject matter.

• Nevada’s Clark County, in a less brash version of Asbury Park’s 64 Floor, uses a grading scale that bars teachers from giving less than 50% as the minimum grade.

Hey, Harvard University just announced it is implementing a remedial math program for its elite students who can’t do algebra.

What we once regarded as one long-troubled district’s flagrancy has, with the promised slashing of federal oversight, signaled a national trend, turbo-charged by over-conciliatory attempts to soothe families during Covid. (Anyway, we know how well sending block grants to states works: look no further than the $190 billion the feds sent out for “learning recovery.”) We need more honesty, not less. Sure, reform our state and national methods of gauging school quality. But don’t raze them.