A REMARKABLE 9 out of 10 score on The Great School Rating! These stats were echoed in Strategic Planning, Linking Leadership, and even at Board of Education meetings. This high honor also appeared in forms submitted to the state. Appearing next to the debunked notion that ‘FTS is the leader of Hunterdon schools’ on the NJ Performance Report’s ‘School Highlights Reported by District’ section.
Here’s the thing when you look into it. The Great Score Rating is not a state/federal assessment or study, or even a competition; from all indications they are referring to a website. The website is called GreatSchools.org. GreatSchools, with no space between the words, is the company’s name and branding. They collect publicly released data combined with parent reviews to create a GreatSchools™ Rating. It’s like an unofficial Yelp page for schools. FTS has one review from 2010. The site’s own Terms of Use recommends not citing ratings for anything another than personal use because, “GreatSchools does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of information on the website.”
It’s an odd highlight to include in official reports and the wordplay is dubious, again indicating that they ‘lead’ somehow, but that may be beside the point. What’s really remarkable is that Franklin Township Elementary actually only ever received a GreatSchools rating of 6 out of 10 on the Greatschool.org website… And has for years. WaybackMachine/Internet Archives confirm this, archive screen shots attached for reference. (*There was one data abnormality on May 25th, 2024, where the rating popped up to an 8 out of 10, but the site’s algorithm returned it back to 6 out of 10 one week later on June 6th 2024.)
The fact is this, the near perfect ‘rank’ and ‘leader of Hunterdon schools’ claim were just made up by either the board of education or the out-going superintendent in the past 2-3 years, because this type of wording appears on both School & District materials, and they are the only ones with the authority to green light what gets submitted to the state. It all seems designed to confuse parents about FTS’ actual performance situation and/or to artificially inflate the administration and school’s credibility for when parents individually question their child’s reading or math levels. We can’t start a fix on the academic issues in the report until we address these glaring ethical issues on the cover. If anyone at the school has information or data that would counter our assertions, we welcome it. Until then Franklin voters are wise to be skeptical of any presentations the Superintendent and BOE put forward.
Or just think of it this way, the folks who run the school were asked to highlight the school’s best attributes and this is the best they could come up with for the first two sentences. All wild stuff.
2021 Great Schools Ranking
2023 Great Schools Ranking
We’ll leave it there for now and later in the week we’ll dig into how 22-23 NJSLA assessment scores translates to FTS’ overall student population. We appreciate you taking the time to read this.