2018 NJDOE Ranking Scores, Percentiles and Analysis for ALL Public Schools in Hoboken (Traditional and Charter)

"Pop-Up Park", Hoboken NJ 

In January of 2018, a new rating system devised by the New Jersey Department of Education and in compliance of federal laws, all 2000 of New Jersey's public schools with be assigned a score of 1 to 100 with 100 being highest. Unfortunately, the scores are not part of the summary reports and are instead embedded in the more detailed school report of each school. This overall 1-100 score combines standardized test results, graduation rates, and absenteeism. 

The New Jersey Department of Education said it designed the new ratings to comply with the Every Student Succeeds Act, the new federal education law that replaced No Child Left Behind.  The law requires states to "meaningfully differentiate" schools' performance based on a variety of metrics and publish that information on school report cards, said Julie Woods, a policy analyst for the Education Commission of the States, which tracks state policy. 

How did the public schools in Hoboken do? Here is a compilation of the most recent data (released January 2018): 

NJDOE Data Supplied by NJ.COM

Sometimes when we plot data we can visualize trends and relationships that are not always easily apparent when looking at data in a table. Here is a chart of the NJDOE scores for all Hoboken Public Schools plot with the score on the y-axis and the public schools in Hoboken listed along the x-axis: 

Chart 1: NJDOE School Scores for Hoboken Public Schools
Traditional and Charter Schools
Click to Enlarge 

Here is another chart of the NJDOE scores for all Hoboken Public Schools plot with the percentile on the y-axis (100 representing the best) and the public schools in Hoboken listed along the x-axis: 

Chart 2: NJDOE School Scores by Percentile for Hoboken Public Schools
Traditional and Charter Schools
Click to Enlarge 

The following are student enrollment numbers from the New Jersey School Performance Reports for the 2016-17 school year. This is the same year the rankings and percentiles were done above.

SCHOOL	ENROLLMENT
Conners	240
HobMiddle	197
HHS	411
Wallace	634
Elysian	290
HobCharter	298
Calabro	117
HOLA	363

Traditional	1599
Charter	951

Total	2550

Another way of looking at this data is to make the circle representing each school proportional to the enrollment of that school. With this visualization, a person can easily see the relative impact on the number of students. These graphs are a tube of scatter plot called bubble graphs which allow you to scale the data point to a new variable. The width of the circle is scaled to various school sizes. However, since it is a scatterplot, you cannot have categorical variables labeled on the X-axis (limit of excel). You can label the x-axis with categorical labels if it is a line graph (with disconnected data points); however, you won't be able to scale the circles. To overcome this, we just floated in text-boxes with the school names, so when it comes to re-sizing the graphic in excel, the school names will probably need to be shifted around.

Click to Enlarge

What do the enrollment numbers along with the NJDOE ranking scores and percentile scores tell us? First, students are not distributed evenly across all schools in Hoboken. That is no surprise nor is it a criticism. Second, since students are not evenly distributed, percentages help us understand better what a typical setting a student may be exposed to in terms of the NJDOE rating scores and percentiles. Here are some findings: 

1) 92.6 % of the students enrolled in the traditional Hoboken Public Schools attend a school with a NJDOE score of 43 or below (out of 100). 

2) 53% of the students enrolled in the traditional Hoboken Public Schools attend a school with a NJDOE ranking score of 23 or below (out of 100).

3) Over a quarter (27.3%) of students enrolled in the traditional Hoboken Public Schools attend a school with a state percentile ranking score of below 10%

4) 100% of the students enrolled in the 3 charter schools of Hoboken attend a school with a NJDOE score of 50 or more (out of 100) while only 7% of students enrolled in the traditional Hoboken Public Schools attend a school with a NJDOE score of 50 or more. 

5) 100% of the students enrolled in the 3 charter schools of Hoboken attend a school with a NJDOE percentile score of over 50 while only 7% of students that attend the traditional Hoboken Public Schools attend such a school. 

6) 69.5 % of charter school students in Hoboken attend a school with an NJDOE score of 66 out of 100 or more and a NJ state percentile score of over 75%.

7) 93% of the students enrolled in the traditional Hoboken Public Schools attend a school with a NJDOE ranking score of below 50 and a percentile score below 50. In comparison, not a single student enrolled in a charter school in Hoboken attends a schools with a NJDOE ranking of below 50 or a state percentile score below 50.