Academic Standards

© Boomur

Aiming higher

Glen Rock academic performance has historically exceeded state averages, and continues to do so. We might look at that and think to ourselves “Well, we’re doing quite well – why worry?”.

I disagree. State averages are all well and good, but absolutes matter. That other districts have significant numbers of students performing below grade level (see statewide figures below¹) does not mean that we should be satisfied with just-above-mediocrity. In a relatively small, affluent district, virtually all of our students should be performing at grade level. This is particularly true by later grades – we all know that some kids take a little longer than others, but one would hope that the gap closes by the end of elementary school and the vast majority of students catch up.

That is…not quite what we see. Yes, we are well ahead of the quite frankly terrible statewide averages, where less than half of students are performing at or above grade level in math. Statewide performance, and issues with public education statewide, are well out of the purview of the Glen Rock BoE. Glen Rock’s performance, however? That’s very much within our purview.

So how are we doing?

Let’s take ELA first. As we can see below², the percentage of students performing at or above grade level ranges from ~70% (3^rd grade) to ~85% (5^th grade), with other grades somewhere in between. There is some good news here – there is a steady gain in performance from 3rd to 5th grade every year, indicating that students with slower starts are catching up…but then somehow performance falls off badly once students enter middle school, and we don’t really see the same steady increase that we see in elementary school to compensate³. There isn’t really much of a steady increasing or decreasing trend across years either – the last year for which we have official data was our strongest for 6^th grade, but there was a big dropoff in 9^th grade, so it’s unclear whether there’s anything really going on beyond randomness.

Now, Glen Rock academic performance has definitely been a topic of conversation among parents and educators. What I’ve heard a lot less discussion about, whether from the BoE or the community, is the gender gaps in achievement. Let’s look at the proficiency differences by gender in ELA:

There’s a pretty persistent gap of ~10%, with girls outperforming boys. Unsurprisingly, the gap is highest in the youngest tested age, and decreases through elementary school – but then it reappears, and (at best) stabilizes. A difference of 15 percentage points in most tested years for ninth grade is not small! There has been some increasing academic attention to the (global) phenomenon that boys are falling behind in academic achievement – but just because it’s global doesn’t mean we can’t address it⁴!

But now let’s turn our attention to math⁵. The overall pattern is quite different⁶. Proficiency starts high than it does in ELA, but there is no trend of increasing gains through elementary school. As with ELA, proficiency craters when entering middle school, and doesn’t quite recover. In general, there’s less year-to-year variation than you see with ELA. By the end of Algebra I and Geometry (generally 8^th and 9^th grade respectively), math achievement lags ELA, reversing the trend from elementary school.

Now let’s take a look at the gender gap. Boys end up outperforming girls here, which again raises a lot of questions that I have not heard being discussed. By middle school, the gender gap has solidified, with some frankly absurd numbers for certain years. Notice, for example, that the 6th grade results in 2022-23 and 7th grade results in 2023-24 are the same set of students, with a gap of over 20 percentage points! However, I find it more worrying that consistent achievement gaps in math are showing up as early as 4th and 5th grade. Needless to say, just as there isn’t really a valid reason for elementary-aged boys to consistently underperform in ELA, there is really no valid reason for elementary-aged girls to be underperforming in math. Why aren’t we talking about this?

Science results aren’t wonderful either. Statewide proficiency is very low, but under 50% in Grade 8, and well under 70% overall, seems pretty bad! There doesn’t seem to be a consistent gender gap either way (in the graph below, values above zero show girls overperforming, and values below zero show girls underperforming).

A comparison

If you look at all Bergen County school districts, there is one that stands out as having very similar size/enrollment, as well as similar average income – Tenafly. So how do we compare to them?

The answer is – we’re close, but we lag consistently. For simplicity, I’m using the overall numbers across all grades for the most recent year of official data (2024-25), but the pattern holds for pretty much every single grade, year and subject. It’s too consistent to be random.

So what do we do about it?

Honestly, I’m not sure, but a couple of things come to mind. As I mentioned in my post on Spending Money Wisely, Tenafly consistently spends less money per student on administrative costs. Making sure that the money we’re spending creates the maximum impact in the classroom could help close some of the gap.

Some of it also simply comes down to ambition. Glen Rock schools have good rankings on paper, and we do consistently beat statewide performance. Perhaps that has bred a certain amount of complacency. Rankings are all well and good, but we know that rankings are also imperfect, and as I said above the statewide averages are a very low bar to measure ourselves against. The fundamental goal of our district should be to have every student performing at grade level, and we should not be satisfied with anything less.

The last thing that comes to mind, particularly for younger students, is the opportunity for acceleration. We know that students come into kindergarten with different levels of preparedness – if nothing else, birth month alone makes a huge difference, since an 11 month age gap means a lot more in a group of 5 year olds than it does in a group of 18 year olds. It is true at all ages, but particularly in early elementary school, that some students are going to need more attention and support⁷. If kids who are already prepared can be given an opportunity to advance and accelerate, it can serve two goals – allow teachers to spend more time with kids who need it, while preventing other kids from getting bored or disengaged. Moving towards universal Gifted and Talented assessments in 2^nd and 4^th grades helps, but introducing other ways to allow for more flexibility without sacrificing the equally important needs for social and emotional development is well worth exploring.That will take resources, but in a wealthy district, that shouldn’t scare us away from doing what is best for our kids.

1. This data (and more) can be found at this link. ↩︎
2. NJ school performance data by district is downloadable at this link. It does take a little bit of filtering and manipulation to get the results that I used to generate these graphs – if you’d like me to send you a cleaned version of the data for Glen Rock only to explore, please email me. ↩︎
3. Participation rates are virtually 100%, so this isn’t a statistical artifact. ↩︎
4. The literature on this is fascinating. For example, the gap in standardized testing is lower than the gap in teacher-graded assignments, which might be a sign that something about classroom environments for ELA is more challenging on average for boys, though that in turn may be downstream of the different social expectations placed on boys and girls. ↩︎
5. But without calculators! ↩︎
6. A couple notes – I’ve excluded 8^th grade, because the majority of students take Algebra I, and I’ve excluded Algebra II because there weren’t many students taking it in some years. ↩︎
7. Here, I’m not referring to special services, just academic readiness. ↩︎