If you are like most parents, report cards are your first stop when looking for accurate information about your child’s academic progress. But don’t make them your last stop: Report cards can be a poor measurement of learning due to a wide trend of grade inflation. The result, according to a national survey, is that 90% of parents (regardless of income, race, or geography) believe their child is at or above grade level in reading and math even though only 37% are.  “We’re not helping parents in ways that we should be to make sure they have that complete, accurate picture of how their child is achieving,” says the non-profit Learning Heroes. Some people call this the “honesty gap.”

How can a parent find more accurate information about academic growth, as well as the overall quality of your local school district?  You have to dig deeper. A good place to begin is the New Jersey Department of Education’s database called “School Performance Reports.”

While this platform won’t give you your own child’s academic information—for that, you need to ask your child’s teacher to explain his or her results on both internal assessments and state standardized tests —you can glean learn a lot about your local school district from thus resource: not just test scores but metrics on school safety, school culture, absenteeism rates, college acceptance, cost per pupil, and more. 

Here are questions and answers about this information source for those who want a closer look at school performance. 

How do I get started?

Go to the NJ DOE homepage, scroll down, and click on “School and Student Information,” which will take you to the “Data and Reports Portal.” Under the heading “Accountability and Performance Data,” choose “School Performance Reports.”

(Or just go here.)

Now you’ll see alphabetical listings of both districts and individual schools. If, for instance, you wanted to look at a school in Newark, you’d click on the district list, go to the “N’s” and choose “Newark Public Schools.” If you want to look at nearby Millburn High School, go to the school list and look under “M.” 

This will bring you to a new page that offers you (in both English and Spanish) two different options: You can look at the district as a whole (“Summary Report”) or look at an individual school (“Detailed Report”). The summary gives you pie charts of student demographics, student growth, student proficiency, rate of chronic absenteeism (“students at risk”), graduation rates, and “college and career readiness”). It’s big- picture and useful in its own way.

What can I learn about my child’s school?

This is where the “Detailed Report” comes in, which will give you ten categories across the green banner at the top: Overview & Resources, Demographics, Student Growth, Academic Achievement, College and Career Readiness, Climate and Environment, Staff, Per Pupil Expenditures, Accountability, and Narrative.

Several of these categories are self-explanatory; others are not always reliable, in many cases because the numbers are self-reported by the district.. Let’s narrow our view to the most trustworthy and important indicators.

Where can I find that school’s standardized test results:

Everyone loves to hate standardized tests called the New Jersey Student Learning Assessments (NJSLA), which test student proficiency in math, English Language Arts (reading), and science. Sure, they reflect a moment in time but give important insights into whether schools are doing their jobs of properly teaching students what they need to  know to be successful once they graduate from high school.

The database offers  two ways of looking at school quality: the actual test scores —how many students reached grade-level expectations on the NJSLA (which are correlated with NJ’s Student Learning Standards)–and student growth over time. Let’s start with the first one. 

Go to your child’s school (through either the school or district alphabetical list) and, using the green banner, click on “Academic Achievement.” For this example we’re using the Newark elementary school called Quitman Street. 

Here you will see the percentage of students who met grade-level standards, as measured by NJSLA, for the whole school and then grade-by-grade. For instance, in spring of 2022-2023 12% of all students at Quitman Street met expectations in reading. Among fifth-graders, 16.7% met expectations in reading.

Why are there asterisks instead of real math scores? If the percentage of students testing proficient is lower than 10% the DOE redacts the data to “protect student privacy.” All you know is the percentage of students who reached proficiency is below 10%.

What about student growth over time?

Some experts regard student growth as a better indicator of school performance than raw test scores. How do we measure growth? Through a calculation called “student growth percentiles (SGPs).” SGPs measure the progress of students compared to their academic peers, which means students in the same grade who scored about the same on NJSLA the previous year. The scale runs from 1 to 99:  less than 35 is Low Growth, 35-65 is Typical Growth, and more than 65 is High Growth. (Here is a great primer from the DOE.)

Click on “Student Growth” and you’ll see that Quitman Street students fare better through this measurement than achievement scores, scoring 38 (“Typical Growth”) in reading. In math the score is 22, or “Low Growth.” 

Where can I find information on student safety?

If you click on “Climate and Environment,” you will see the number of verified Harassment, Intimidation, and Bullying complaints during the last school year, as well as the number of police notifications and Violence and Vandalism incidents. You will also see the number of students who were suspended. Quitman Street looks good! Only 11 incidents of violence and vandalism, two verified HIB investigations, no police notifications, and only 1% of students suspended.

How about SAT scores and college readiness?

Let’s hop ten miles west on I-78 to Millburn High School. There, like for all NJ high schools, the DOE database lists SAT scores, AP course offerings and participation, graduation rates, college enrollment, and more. Go back to that green banner and click on “College and Career Readiness.” Here you’ll find that at this high school (public only in that you can enroll if your parents can shell out more than a million dollars for a house), 81% of students take the SAT with average scores close to 700 points (out of a potential 800) in each and 67% of students enroll in at least one of the 38 AP courses offered. Click on “Graduation/Post-Secondary,” and you’ll see a graduation rate of 99.4% and that just about everyone goes to college.

Where can I get more information about my own child?

There are other resources not included in this database. One of the most important is your school district’s “interim formative assessments,” which are low-stakes, computer-based, adaptive evaluations given two or three times a year that measure each student’s progress towards the goal areas in each learning standard. (If you don’t know if your district administers these tests, just ask; if your district isn’t gauging student learning objectively, that’s something that needs fixing!) The results on these tests are free from grade inflation and can give you accurate information about your child’s academic progress. The most common formative assessments used in New Jersey’s K-12 schools, primarily for reading and math, are NWEA’s MAP tests and Curriculum Associates’ iReady tests. 

What is the category “Per Pupil Expenditures?”

Here you’ll find an approximate annual cost per student per school. For a deeper dive, go to the New Jersey’s Taxpayer Guide to Education Spending, cumbersomely collated in Excel spreadsheets but accessible for the more patient among us. 

The bottom line? Don’t rely on report cards to give you a clear understanding of your child’s academic progress. Instead, look at sources for more accurate information—like the DOE’s database.