A Deeper Dive Into New Brunswick’s Low Graduation Rates

As discussions concerning the importance of higher education become ever-prevalent, the stepping stone to a college degree remains a high school diploma. In the last 20 years, college enrollment rates have seen a steady increase. However, as more people attend college, are more people subsequently getting high school diplomas?

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, overall high school graduation rates have increased since 2010. New Brunswick, New Jersey, like many other school districts across the country, has witnessed an increase in graduation rates. Still, graduation rates in New Brunswick have historically been lower than statewide rates.

New Brunswick’s low graduation rates are not a surprise, said Jadeline Perez, a senior at New Brunswick High School and the student representative to the New Brunswick Board of Education. “I am very aware of the low graduation rates,” Perez said. “The graduation rates have always been displayed to us.”

Simultaneously, New Jersey’s use of a high-stakes high school graduation exit test disproportionately affects students in New Brunswick and adversely affects graduation rates. Perez said that only 17% of her class passed when they first took the test.

Looking deeper into the New Brunswick school system, the overall graduation rate from New Brunswick High School in 2012 was a meager 58.76 percent. In 2022, that number increased to 73.7 percent.

Though the improvement in graduation rates has been drastic in New Brunswick, when compared to the rest of the state, New Brunswick students continue to face additional barriers to graduation, such as exit testing, which has disadvantageous effects on low-income neighborhoods like New Brunswick, exhausted teachers, and an overall underfunded district.

The percentage of students graduating from New Brunswick high schools is still significantly lower than the state average of 90.98 percent. Additionally, according to rankings from US News, the New Brunswick School District is ranked in the bottom quarter of the state’s school districts at 324 out of 426 districts in New Jersey.

According to former students in the district and researchers studying education and public policy across the state, the noteworthy difference in both rankings and more critically, graduation rates, between New Brunswick and the rest of the state is due to underfunding and overall attitude towards school and graduation, which comes as a direct result of a substantial part of the district being low-income and facing socioeconomic troubles.

Nonetheless, high school graduation rates have improved over time. New Brunswick graduates say the increase in graduation rates is due to many factors, including a shift in the conversation regarding higher education. Culturally, higher education has become a bigger part of the conversation, and government officials, parents, and educators are stressing its importance to students.

“Teachers always try to motivate students, telling them to try harder,” said Margarita Cejudo Arita, a New Brunswick Class of 2022 high school graduate and valedictorian of her graduating class.

Arita also said graduation rates have increased because students need diplomas to earn higher salaries. “It becomes hard to make a decent living without a high school graduation,” she said.

Within New Brunswick high schools, teachers have a respected reputation and go out of their way to support their students.

“Teachers are very welcoming,” Arita added. “All of them were nice enough that you could get to know them personally. Everyone I knew had at least two faculty members they liked and had a relationship with. They were understanding of students and would help us as much as they could with the resources they had.”

Many students in New Brunswick hail from low-income families where high school graduation is sometimes not even a prospect, let alone the thought of attending college, but educators can change those possibilities. Teachers help students in more ways than one and have played a crucial role in supporting students in their journey toward graduation. Teachers, faculty, and administration within a school are the adults students see for most of their day, meaning it is essential that they create a lasting impact and inspire their students.

But who helps the teachers?

Arita said despite all they do for their students, teachers don’t get enough help from school administrators. “Teachers are not supported enough. I think students support teachers more than teachers support them,” she said. Her teacher in Advanced Placement Calculus also taught two other sections of the course. He was overwhelmed and apologized to students for not being able to teach them more, Arita said.

“We were behind the curriculum, he knew it and I knew it. The closer we got to the exam, the more he would say he was sorry- sorry that we don’t have enough resources, more time to study, or extra time after school.”

Perez, the student representative on the New Brunswick Board of Education, said teachers are under a lot of pressure. “There is a lack of a voice. Teachers can only do so much and we realize that. They’re also reprimanded because they have to follow the board guidelines and other rules. It is difficult for them to be there for us fully because they have to cater to their job,” said Perez. “Seeing the mentors I’ve had put in everything for us is insane to me. When student outcomes are not successful, it is very saddening.”

Simultaneously, districts across the country have been pushing to get more students to graduate high school and as a direct result, go to college.

Across the country, there has been a concerted effort to graduate students faster, and within the four-to-five year window, said Julia Rubin, the director of the Public Policy program at Rutgers University. The courses put in place to help students graduate on time are not always great or improve students’ quality of education. “Districts ensure students graduate, not by teaching them more, but by offering shortcuts,” she said.

This approach raises questions, added Rubin.

Introducing shortcut courses and alternative grading methods to students, enabling them to graduate on time, or faster, is a practice enforced across the state that gets students to graduate high school, but it does not prioritize the quality of their education.

The Covid-19 pandemic was challenging in many aspects but it also exacerbated the practice of placing shortcuts in students’ education in districts such as New Brunswick, said Perez.

“It’s complicated to explain how graduation rates are different for my class, but due to Covid, our GPA scale is extremely inflated and we have better grades, but it is not our true average,” Perez says.

The reason for the inflation of grades is that the transition into high school after virtual classes was hard for many students, so the school treated the sophomores as freshmen in terms of grades and GPA scale to help them succeed, but that success is only measurable on paper, Perez added.

Lack of funding, facilities, and resources are all elements that set back graduation rates in New Brunswick. New Brunswick has a major problem with lack of funding for education, said Danielle Farre, the Research Director at the Education Law Center.

Farre said that as of this school year, New Brunswick is over $10 million below the funding level required as per the school finance formula, which comes out to $1,200 per student in funding deficit, some of which is owed by the state and the rest from the local levy gap and taxes that should be raised to help schools. “New Brunswick is behind in state aid and local funding. This has been an issue in New Brunswick for at least the last 10 years,” she added.

However, there has been significant progress in closing those gaps, Farre said. More recently, Governor Murphy’s proposed budget for the 2024–25 school year adds a 6.93 percent increase to the total funding allocated to New Brunswick, totaling $185,885,120. This is also the first time the school funding formula has been achieved since 2009.

The Education Law Center (ELC) is a non-profit organization that focuses on advocating for low-income students in former Abbott districts. The Abbott districts comprise of 31 low-wealth districts in New Jersey that fell under the Abbott vs Burke case, a landmark equal education ruling. The ELC advocates for improved funding, facilities, and quality of education. In totality, the ELC aims for better-equipped schools for students in Abbott districts, such as New Brunswick.

The high-stakes graduation exit test mentioned earlier is also the ELC’s current focus.

“Kids who don’t test well, or have other barriers that prevent them from passing those assessments, might be discouraged from continuing their education, or the test might just prevent them,” Farre said. “They may have completed all the graduation requirements, but not being able to pass the test may be the one thing that’s keeping them from getting their diploma which has a significant effect on their long-term outcomes.”

“We have been working to change those graduation policies so that our future aligns with the rest of the country. Not holding these arbitrary standards onto students that are not helping them, just hurting them,” said Farre.

Though New Brunswick has seen success in graduation rates and student outcomes over the last 10 years, systemic factors and funding continue to pose significant challenges to the future of students, but educators and policymakers are working to change that.