Lawrence High School Rises in NJ Monthly's Rankings

Lawrence High School is moving up in the ranks. The school is listed in 82nd place — up from the 120th spot in 2010 — on the just-released biennial ranking of 328 public high schools in the state by New Jersey Monthly Magazine.

NJ Monthly Magazine’s 2012 rankings of the top public high schools will be featured in the September issue, which hits newsstands today, Aug. 28.

The magazine notes that the average class size at Lawrence High School is 16.0, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 10:1, and that the combined average SAT score is 1527. 

NJ Monthly Magazine made changes to its methodology this year, including a new graduation-rate calculation, eliminating student/computer ratio as a factor and increasing the weighting for data on test results, according to an article announcing the top public high schools.

“We’re really excited. New Jersey Monthly Magazine recently ranked our own Lawrence High School within the Top 100. We were No. 82, which is up from 120 from 2010," Lawrence Township Public Schools Superintendent Crystal Edwards (nee Lovell) reported during Monday night's (Aug. 27) school board meeting. 

"For those of you who don’t know, New Jersey Monthly uses things like SAT scores, AP scores (the number of students scoring 3 or higher), the number of advanced proficient students in language arts and math, and graduation rates," Edwards said.

"So it’s a lot of data that they use to do these rankings. So we are extremely proud of our high school students, our high school staff and team, and we’re going to support them in keeping that ranking going down, down, down till we get down to No. 1,” she said.

Board of Education President Laura Waters noted that Lawrence High School's improved ranking may be attributed, in part, to the state Department of Education's improved system of "more accurately reporting graduation rates." 

Here's a look at how a few other schools in the area performed:

Hopewell Valley Central

The rankings from NJ Monthly come just a day after Inside Jersey published its own list of school rankings.

In that ranking, Lawrence High School ranked behind Princeton, West Windsor-Plainsboro South and North, Hopewell, and Robbinsville.

The categories and indicators used in the ranking by NJ Monthly, listed on NJ Monthly Magazine's web site, are as follows:

School Environment: The sum of the standardized rank scores for average class size; student/faculty ratio; percentage of faculty with advanced degrees; and number of AP tests offered, which was calculated as a ratio of grade 11 and 12 enrollment in order not to penalize smaller schools. (Senior class size is shown in the published charts for reference only; it is not part of the ranking calculation.)

Student Performance: The sum of the standardized rank scores for average combined SAT score; percentage of students showing advanced proficiency on HSPA; and students scoring a 3 or higher on AP tests as a percentage of all juniors and seniors.

Student Outcomes: A single score based on a new graduation-rate calculation (four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate) introduced by New Jersey in 2011, as mandated by the federal government. Essentially, the adjusted cohort formula divides a school’s number of four-year graduates by the number of first-time ninth-graders who entered the cohort four years earlier. For further information, visit state.nj.us/education/data/. 

Vocational schools: Schools defined in this category by the state Department of Education were ranked using the same methodology as other public schools, but with two exceptions. No average class size is available for these schools, since many students are shared with mainstream schools. Similarly, there is insufficient data on AP tests.

Special Notes: Some schools were missing only AP-related data, particularly the number of students who scored a 3 or higher on AP tests. For these schools (which had fewer than 10 students who took an AP test) a value was imputed for purposes of the ranking using an average of other schools in their DFG. Also, for certain districts where there were obvious errors in the data (Midland Park, Elizabeth and Paterson), corrections were obtained directly from the districts.

What do you think of all these rankings? Let us know in the comments section below.