Last week West Windsor-Plainsboro superintendent David Aderhold issued a 14-page broadside in response to data published by the non-profit Wake Up Call New Jersey (WUCNJ) showing, great reputation aside, 34% of WW-P students can’t do math at grade level and 41% of third graders can’t read read at grade level.  In his letter, “Debunking the Wake Up Call NJ Narrative,” Aderhold claims Wake Up Call is a for-profit scheme “intended to sow division, raise cause for concerns about public education, and lay the foundation for the large movement of privatization and for-profit education.” He also says WUCNJ is run by  “known members of the GOP,” that it only “claims to be a non-partisan, nonprofit educational advocacy organization,” that it “stinks of blatant politics grounded in the tone-deaf rhetoric of an anti-DEI, anti-LGBTQIA+ and an anti-culturally and racially inclusive curriculum,” and WW-P students are all “exemplary in their academic pursuits.”

In response, Laura Overdeck, one of the two founders, wrote a letter (see below) correcting Aderhold’s claims: WUPNJ is an IRS-certified non-profit, her co-founder Pete Shulman is a registered Democrat, and the organization’s goal is to improve public schools by offering transparency to parents who can be misled by inflated report card grades:

‘Wake Up Call is entirely dedicated to helping all public school students thrive exactly where they are: in public school,” Overdeck explains. “We want to ensure that parents have full transparency of how their students are doing relative to grade level, and that parents receive information in real time to make the best decisions for their children alongside their teacher.”

As described recently in NJER, a close look at WW-P’s proficiency scores shows alarming achievement gaps between the majority-Asian students and Black or Hispanic students. This WW-P  webpage shows only 1% of Asian students were not “graduation-ready” on the high school assessment (NJGPA) last year. But the numbers are far higher for others: 29% of Black students, 30% of Hispanic students, and 32% of students from economically-disadvantaged households couldn’t pass the NJGPA, which (barely) tops out at 10th grade reading and Algebra 1. Stellar reputation aside, too many parents are left in the dark about the children’s real academic progress.

(Check out David Brooks in last weekend’s NY Times who nails the collapse of the American political center which, in Democratic circles, killed the accountability movement which produced student growth across all demographics and ushered in the age of equity, which lowered standards and increased inequality. Poster child: New Jersey.)

Meanwhile, according to multiple studies (summary from Tim Daly here), grade inflation is a feature, not a bug, of K-12 student evaluation (college too); K12 Dive says in one, “almost 60% of the students’ grades did not match the course knowledge they showed according to standardized test scores.”

Here is the response to Aderhold’s letter from Wake Up Call’s Overdeck:

West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District Board Members, 

We saw Superintendent Aderhold’s letter, and appreciate the quick response to our campaign. We want to address several key points and clarify some misconceptions regarding Wake Up Call NJ. 

Like the Superintendent and all of you, Wake Up Call is entirely dedicated to helping all public school students thrive exactly where they are: in public school. We want to ensure that parents have full transparency of how their students are doing relative to grade level, and that parents receive information in real time to make the best decisions for their children alongside their teacher. 

Moreover, there’s nothing partisan about wanting kids to achieve at or beyond grade level by the end of the school year. Wake Up Call is not a political organization: we’re a 501c3 (attached). We are fully bipartisan – in fact, my co-founder Peter Shulman is a registered Democrat and I am a registered Republican. It’s moot because we don’t bring politics into anything we do at Wake Up Call. Educating our children should never be a political issue. 

We appreciate that the Superintendent shared the same state data we share. Those data confirm that, despite West Windsor’s stellar performance on some fronts, a quarter to a third of WW-P students are not succeeding. They’re being left behind, and those sizable fractions are not acceptable. Would we accept a fire department that didn’t respond to one-third of calls? Or a police department, where one in four officers weren’t prepared to help a citizen in need? 

Wake Up Call NJ is calling for key changes to ensure parents know if their children are meeting grade-level expectations. We call for school districts to detail what goes into report card grades, and to return local and state test results to students and parents right away. We’re happy to discuss and support these goals with WW-P any time – as we, like you, want your students, and all public school students in NJ, to thrive. 

Sincerely, 

Laura Overdeck and Wake Up Call NJ 

cc: Superintendent David Aderhold