New Jersey School Report Card shows proficiency drops in high school assessments; Phillipsburg High School levels rise

The New Jersey Education Department's annual assessment of schools, released Wednesday, reveals an unexplained dip in high school students who reached top proficiency levels last school year.

Bucking the statewide trend is Phillipsburg High School, whose numbers rose while others in the county and many across the state fell.

The department's New Jersey School Report Card evaluates student performance, staff and financial data in each of the state's more than 600 districts for 2007-08.

Department spokesman Rich Vespucci said advanced proficiency levels dropped about 7 percentage points across the state for the High School Proficiency Assessment test, known as the HSPA. It is given to juniors as a graduation requirement.

"No major changes were made to the HSPA that would indicate why there would be a drop-off," he said.

Phillipsburg stands out

Phillipsburg High School students increased language arts advanced proficiency levels by 3 percentage points and math advanced proficiency levels by 4.5 percentage points. The school's failure rate for both subjects fell 11 percentage points.

"I really attribute this to how we're staffing at the high school, and that includes the administration, too," Superintendent Mark B. Miller said. "I can't praise them enough for what they do."

Miller said district-wide programs in Phillipsburg and other so-called Abbott districts, such as those providing extra time to students in need of additional instruction, also helped lead to success. Miller said he worries how cuts in these programs will affect the next round of assessment scores in the district.

Despite the improvements at the high school level, the district overall still failed to make the state's threshold for adequate yearly progress, mainly because of poor performance on the middle school level. Statewide, middle school performance dipped because the state changed levels of proficiency.

But other county high schools, including Belvidere, Hackettstown, Warren Hills Regional and North Warren Regional, witnessed a drop in high proficiency levels, most notably in language arts.

Among the most striking declines in the county were Warren Hills Regional High School and Hackettstown High School. Both schools saw a 17 percentage-point dip in advanced proficiency and a more than 5 percentage-point rise in failure rates.

Hackettstown Superintendent Robert Gratz said the district plans to take a closer look at the scores to see how significantly students missed the bar.

"That drastic a deviation makes us scratch our heads," he said. "We're trying to analyze and see if it was an anomaly of the testing group. Right now, we don't know."

Vespucci said the state also plans to analyze the data further to gain an understanding of the disparity.

"One of the things our testing office is going to look at is how significant the scores dropped," he said.

No correlation to pay

Administrative and faculty salaries did not appear to lead to higher scores in state assessments.

Schools with highly paid administration such as North Hunterdon Regional and Voorhees high schools, with a median salary of $112,000, still witnessed a sharp decline in proficiency levels. Hackettstown High School saw considerable drops with a median faculty salary of $60,000.