Not that it matters…but our kids are smarter than your kids.
A brand-new study from WalletHub (yes, the very website we should trust for scientific findings of US education) just ranked New Jersey as 3rd best state in the country when it comes to public school systems. The major categories considered across fifty states were Quality and Safety. Breaking down the metrics over graduation rates, student-teacher ratios, school security measures and teacher salaries (this is WalletHub after all, $ had to play a part in here someplace), the findings found, as findings often do find:
- NJ #2 in reading scores and #5 in math for 4th and 8th
- NJ holding the #2 highest percentage of students scoring a 3 or higher on AP exams.
- Close to 9% of NJ public schools rank in the top 700 nationwide
What does it all mean? Are our kids smarter?
You decide. I’d venture that judging smarts statistically is probably not easy and as all statistic gathering might be contingent on who is amassing the info as from where and when that info is taken. What might be more impactful, beyond bragging about New Jersey kid smarts (and really, we already knew our kids were smarter than those in the rest of the country), is seeing how the COVID lockdown might have affected a certain generation of school-aged children (I would guess a lot) and how deeply social media and cell phones encroach on little mind learning (I would guess, a lot).
But then again, should we even care how smart or dumb or kids are, what is or is not affecting their brain development when they seem to be negotiating the social media enriched world just fine, don’t much care about sociability the way we used to define it, will have to contend with AI, and the skills and smarts we valued or even value presently won’t be worth much anyway.
Still, NJ is tops in education…
