New Jersey School Report Card

The New Jersey School Report Card is an annual report produced each year by the New Jersey Department of Education for all school districts and schools in the U.S. state of New Jersey. The current School Report Card presents thirty-five fields of information for each school in the following categories: school environment, students, student performance indicators, staff, and district finances; however, initially the cards provided far less information.

The report cards were first proposed in 1988 by Governor Thomas Kean and mailed out in 1989. Although various types of school report cards had been released in California, Illinois, and Virginia, New Jersey was the first to send the reports home to parents and make them available to all taxpayers. In 1995, the New Jersey legislature passed a law expanding the scope of the report cards to include more financial matters and the withholding of state aid to inefficient schools. This was part of Governor Christine Todd Whitman’s push to decrease administrative costs in education. The report cards are still issued, and their annual release attracts attention in large papers such as the New York Times.

Governor Thomas Kean first broached the idea of school report cards in his 1988 State of the State address. He argued that "the more parents know, the more involved they can be. This is a way to arm them with that knowledge." The proposal initially faced strong opposition, and in the spring of 1988 some superintendents refused to release their test score data to the state because they feared it would be used in the report cards. The schools eventually consented to release the data and no report cards were issued that year.

In February 1989 Kean announced that report cards would be shipped for the first time that fall. They were released as planned that November. The first report cards did not offer a comparison or ranking of schools, and the version sent home to parents only included information about their individual school and the statewide averages. The released information included SAT and standardized test scores, student-teacher ratios, hours of instruction, attendance rates, and the average cost per pupil. Saul Cooperson, then the New Jersey State Education Commissioner, insisted that the point of the reports was not to rank districts or make comparisons between them; however, many reporters did just that. One statistic that received a large amount of coverage was that Newark spent $1,237 more per student than Sparta, but still had SAT scores that were 278 points lower on average.

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