An avalanche of gushy headlines are flooding local media following yesterday’s reveal of U.S. News and World Report’s rankings of state school systems. “NJ Schools Are #1 in the Nation,” trumpets Advance Media. “New Jersey Has the Best Education in the U.S.,” boasts NJ Family. “U.S. News Ranks NJ Best in the Nation. See Why,” teases the Bergen Record.

Okay. Let’s see why.

U.S. News and World uses a methodology to rank state school systems that experts say is exceptionally crude, more noise than insight, relying on raw achievement data instead how well schools serve all students, regardless of their starting point. NJ has a 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. Instead of a clear-eyed view of how district assignment mirrors student achievement, we get a lot of distortion.

“There is no way that that is a good indication of whether that school is instructionally effective or not,” said Tom​​ás Monarrez, a researcher at the Urban Institute who studies school segregation. “It’s more noise in an already noisy environment.”

Data point: In Asbury Park (Black, Hispanic, low-income), which spends a hefty $34,000 per pupil, only 6.6% of sixth graders are proficient in reading and 1.3% are proficient in math. Six miles away in wealthy West Long Branch (white, Asian, high-income) 65% of sixth graders are proficient in reading and 52% are proficient in math.

To U.S. News’ credit, it does calculate an “educational opportunity” score, which looks at how well the state as a whole serves “underserved students” (Black, Hispanic, low-income) relative to their peers. NJ ranks #45 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia in educational opportunity.

Beyond that, NJ’s supposed status belies actual proficiency levels in math and reading. If we’re #1 and only 38% of eighth-graders read at grade level, why are we partying?

From a piece three months ago in NJ Spotlight: “The average New Jersey student is two-thirds of a grade level below 2019 levels in math and almost half of a grade level below pre-pandemic levels in reading. New Jersey had among the biggest drops in math performance for low-income students, according to the annual scorecard report from researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities. The average student in West Windsor-Plainsboro, Edison Township, Hamilton Township, Newark, Paterson, New Brunswick and Trenton remains more than a full grade equivalent below their 2019 mean achievement in math.”

Tom​​ás Monarrez told Chalkbeat that U.S. News and World’s overall approach is rudimentary and misleading. “Nobody that takes statistics seriously would have done something like that,” he said. A more accurate measure, researchers have long argued, would use academic growth to estimate how much schools contribute to student learning. The U.S. News rankings do not include a measure of growth or consider other factors, like attendance, safety, or diversity.”

Meanwhile, U.S. News and World Report, in their encomium to NJ’s gold-medal status, quotes gubernatorial candidate/NJEA president Sean Spiller, who says, “We’ve got great educators. We’ve got our students who are engaged. We’ve got parents who are part of that process. We’ve got community support. We’ve got a state that invests in our school systems. You put all that together and you’re gonna get quality schools.”

That’s fine if you can afford to live, like Spiller, in Montclair and buy a home (currently the median house price there is over $1 million) that comes bundled with “quality schools.” Ten miles away in Newark? Not so much.

We all need to get better in math.