Niche School Rankings: See Lakewood's Grades

LAKEWOOD, NJ — The annual Niche ratings have been released for more than 11,000 school districts across the country, including the Toms River Regional School District.

The education platform's 2023 Best Schools and Districts rankings looked at 11,820 school districts, and its rankings incorporate input from students, alumni and parents in addition to test scores, academic performance and quantitative data from sources such as the U.S. Department of Education to evaluate teachers, resources and facilities, according to the platform.

Niche incorporated nearly 2.5 million school reviews from students, parents and teachers — the largest online collection of school reviews, it said.

Schools and districts were graded on a range of factors from academics and teachers to facilities to the food.

The Lakewood Public Schools received an overall grade of C-, with the following grades by category:

• Academics: C-
• Diversity: B-
• Teachers: B-
• College Prep: C-
• Clubs & Activities: B-
• Administration: B
• Sports: B
• Food: C-
• Resources & Facilities: C-

It was 174th out of 243 districts in New Jersey for athletics. Each school in the district was graded as well; those grades can be found here.

The academics grade was based on state assessment proficiency, SAT/ACT scores, and survey responses on academics from students and parents, according to Niche; the test scores appear to be from the 2018-19 school year, reported by the U.S. Department of Education.

Niche includes the following disclaimer: "Rankings are only published once a year and were most recently released on September 26, 2022. Due to the annual release, rankings and grades can become out-of-date as new facts and information become available. Such data will be incorporated into the next year’s rankings. Niche takes steps to ensure data integrity, but rankings may be inaccurate if Niche is supplied with inaccurate data from schools, data sources such as the US Department of Education, or spam and automated 'bot' reviews."

School rankings have their critics. In 2013, journalist and former professor and The Atlantic writer John Tierney argued that high school rankings are "nonsense."

"Parents might be able to use that information to find an affordable residence near good schools, while still leaving themselves within reasonable reach of their place of employment," Tierney wrote. "It's harder to fathom the logic for ranking high schools nationwide. Few are the families who will move out of state or across the country on the basis of claims about school quality."

The Best Schools rankings include categories for boarding, charter and magnet schools as well as schools for STEM and the arts among many others.

With reporting by Josh Bakan