Andy Smarick, late of the NJ Department of Education and currently a partner at Bellwether Education Partners and senior policy fellow with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, considers the release last week of NJ’s School Performance Reports.

While the reports reinforce just how tragically low-performing the state’s urban districts are, they also show that the preening of many leafy suburban communities is unwarranted. Said state commissioner Chris Cerf, this data “will make clear that there are a number of schools out there that perhaps are a little bit too satisfied with how they are doing when compared with how other schools serving similar populations are doing.”

This leads to the “harsher gauntlet” on the horizon, the 2015 implementation of the first round of the Common Core assessments, when schoolchildren will be tested far more rigorously.  What will the response of the education reform community when “lots of parents are going to be looking for solutions?”

Unless there’s a clear playbook for how we should respond, the vacuum will be filled by excuses (The tests are wrong! Everything is fine!) and old, ineffective, but popular and establishment-friendly interventions (More spending! Reduce class sizes!). 

If I were a state chief, I’d have a team, off to the side, working on this right now. We would be drafting new policies, working on communications plans, and much, much more. 

The reform community has a well-known tool-kit for our most distressed schools. But a counterpart for our suburban schools is conspicuously missing.