I do not speak as an uninformed outsider when I characterize the test scores of Ewing's black students as pathetic. And trust me, as a black dad who is very proud of his ethnicity, it is not (nor has it ever been) a happy moment to speak of how poorly black kids are typically performing ("typically" being synonymous with "average") academically in my town.How poorly are black kids doing in Ewing, a Central Jersey district with a DE District Factor Grouping? According to the DOE database, 65.9% of black 8th graders at Fisher Middle School failed the NJ ASK8 in math. Among white kids, 26.5% failed and among Hispanics 44% failed. For the NJ ASK8 in Language Arts, 22.5% of black failed, 10.3% of whites, and 16% of Hispanic kids. That’s slightly worse than other districts in their DFG and below average across the State.
summon the courage to go very politically incorrect and tell the typical -- yes, I know there are lots of exceptions -- black parent that he or she urgently needs to get his or her kids studying more each night. In order for such a "telling" to be successful, it must be loud, direct and incessant. If such a message is not unequivocally shared with black parents, there is not enough supplemental school aid in the world to significantly increase the likelihood that the typical black student in Mercer County will ever mirror the academic achievement levels of corresponding white or Asian students.That’s a brave, politically incorrect statement. But what about preschool? NJEA just touted the academic success of 8th graders in poor districts:
So what accounts for that success? No doubt a number of factors contributed, but one stands out. Last year’s eighth grade class included the first wave of students who had access to the preschool program mandated in the former Abbott districts.Ewing students don’t have access to free public preschool. Could that explain the dismal test scores? For comparison’s sake, we went right across the Ewing border to Trenton, an Abbott district where full day preschool is available to all takers. Here’s their 8th grade results at Grace Dunn Middle School: for the NJ ASK8 in language arts, 50% of white kids failed, 60.6% of black kids failed, and 61% of Hispanic kids failed. For the NJ ASK 8 in math, 54.5% of white kids failed, 75.8% of black kids failed, and 78.8% of Hispanic kids failed.
Labels: ASK, HSPA, preschools