Two self-serving fallacies have been put to rest: that the New Jersey public school system is #1 in the nation and that southern states like Mississippi and Louisiana have far inferior education systems compared to New Jersey.  New analysis reveals that in the real world where student achievement is adjusted for demographics (that is, comparing New Jersey’s lower-income students with lower-income students in other states), New Jersey students do worse than Mississippi and Louisiana students across the board.*  Yet New Jersey spends 42% more per pupil than Louisiana and an incredible 99% more than Mississippi.  Rather than taking undeserved victory laps, the NJEA should be answering questions about New Jersey’s enormous disparity between spending and results and asking what we can learn from Louisiana and Mississippi.

In the real world, the New Jersey public school system is #16, not #1. The NJEA frequently touts that New Jersey’s public school system is ranked #1 in the nation by US News & World Report.  But as our friends at NJEdReport noted, the US News study is “exceptionally crude, more noise than insight” and glosses over some serious shortcomings in our public school system.

NJEdReport accurately surmises that New Jersey’s #1 ranking is due to New Jersey’s “large cohort of high-income students who score very well on standardized tests, which skews averages and effaces the academic outcomes of low-income students, disproportionately Black and Brown.” In other words, by aggregating all student results, the strong achievement of New Jersey’s many affluent students masks the poor performance of our low-income students.  The more probative analysis comes from the Urban Institute, where the raw scores are adjusted for a student’s demographic profile. So rather than mask the poor performance of low-income students, these student are compared with like students in other states.  In this apples-to-apples comparison, New Jersey’s average ranking* of #16. Not bad, but not #1.

In the real world, Mississippi and Louisiana rank higher than New Jersey across the board.  In a recent guest post on NJEdReport, education researcher Chad Aldeman explains how the Urban Institute’s math works and it is highly revealing.  As NJEdReport said, the US News ranking really is more noise than insight.

This is how it works:

Unadjusted 4th-grade math scores:

• New Jersey: 240
• Mississippi: 239
• Lousiana: 235

4th-grade math scores adjusted for higher-income students:

• Mississippi: 256
• Lousiana: 254
• New Jersey: 254

4th-grade math scores adjusted for low-income students:

• Mississippi: 234
• Lousiana: 228
• New Jersey: 222

The highly revealing upshot is that higher-income and low-income students in Mississippi and Louisiana did better than their counterparts in New Jersey. It’s just that New Jersey has so many more higher-income students that it skews the overall averages. If you adjust the overall average for demographics, here are the 4th-grade math scores:

• Mississippi: 249
• Lousiana: 245
• New Jersey: 235

But it’s not just 4th-grade math. As Aldeman says: “this same pattern appears in all tested grades and subjects.” That is, Mississippi and Louisiana students outscore New Jersey student in 4th-grade math and reading as well as 8th-grade math and reading.

Yet New Jersey spends 42% more than Louisiana and 99% more than Mississippi. Here’s the real kicker. NJEdReport then provides the per pupil spending numbers:

• New Jersey: $24,831
• Louisiana: 17,541
• Mississippi: $12,490

The bottom line is that, once demographics (that is, real world circumstances) are taken into consideration, New Jersey’s student achievement is worse than Mississippi’s and Louisiana’s across the board, while New Jersey spends 42% more than Louisiana and an incredible 99% more than Mississippi.

We wonder whether the NJEA would want to tout those numbers!

* For 4th and 8th-grade reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).