What Makes A School Great?
Our county prides itself on its high-quality public education. That takes tax dollars—and much more besides.
Joseph Occhino, principal of Northern Highlands Regional High School in Allendale, enumerates with considerable pride his school’s facilities, which he calls “second to none”: “Our science wing was built during a previous referendum,” he says. “We just built a field house that has a state-of-the-art fitness center. We have a fully turfed football field, which all schools have, but then we also have a lower field that’s fully turfed. It has another baseball diamond on it, and then a softball field and practice football and lacrosse fields. Our library media center is getting a whole makeover. Art rooms are being redone.”
And yet Occhino admits that those facilities go only so far to help explain the success of the school, which this year’s U.S. News & World Report rankings place third in Bergen County—and first among its open-admissions high schools. (Bergen County Academies in Hackensack and Bergen County Technical High School in Teterboro came in first and second, respectively, but their selective admissions policies allow them to choose the most promising applicants, giving them a leg up when it comes to student achievement.) And if gleaming media rooms and cutting-edge tech do not alone make great schools, what does?
That’s the question we posed to three principals and one school superintendent at four of Bergen County’s top-rated schools: Northern Highlands, Northern Valley Regional High School in Demarest (No. 3 in Bergen on U.S. News & World Report’s list), Tenafly High School (No. 4 on the same list) and Englewood Cliffs Upper School (a grades 3-to-8 school and No. 2 on a list compiled by NJ Advance Media). Is it just a matter of socioeconomics, with schools in wealthy communities getting top marks because parents and students in those communities put a premium on education? Or do the county’s top schools do something special that other schools—in Bergen and elsewhere—might put into practice to better benefit their students?
Our conversations with the schools indicate that, while socioeconomic factors do play into a school’s success, other elements also go into creating an atmosphere in which students are most likely to thrive. And of all those elements, our school leaders agreed that the most important is a first-rate teaching staff.
GETTING AND KEEPING GOOD TEACHERS.
Each of the schools puts the highest premium on attracting, retaining and encouraging effective teachers—for good reason. Multiple studies, including some from the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard, have shown that the single most important school-based factor contributing to a student’s academic achievement is the quality of teaching received. Based on our conversations with the schools, it appears that recruiting first-rate teachers is more than a simple feedback loop, in which great schools attract great teachers, who help keep those schools great so they can then attract more great teachers, and so on. Competitive salaries can help: James Morrison, principal of Tenafly High School, praises the superintendents he’s worked with for being “willing to pay what it takes to get a veteran to leave a tenured position somewhere else to come to us.” But for most teachers, pay tends to be secondary to a positive working environment. “Our mission really is respect, resilience, kindness and integrity—it’s what we look for in teachers, and it’s the way we treat them,” says Occhino. In other words, schools would do well to create a culture in which teachers’ needs and desires are given priority.
Keeping effective teachers happy is as important as hiring them in the first place, and one of the best ways to do that, it appears, is to afford them as much freedom to do what they do best as the system allows. Although New Jersey’s Department of Education sets the general curriculum for all public schools in the state, each of the schools we spoke with allows teachers a high degree of independence in deciding how to deliver the material. At Tenafly High School, says Morrison, “teachers take the state blueprint and find ways to make the curriculum engaging, going out of their way to try to make the lessons fun and to get students interested in the material.” That might, he says, be through lab demonstrations or hands-on projects or, as one teacher did recently, creating a mock trial of President Harry Truman for using the atomic bomb during World War II.
Another strategy of successful schools is to encourage educational approaches that make teaching more effective, and therefore more satisfying. James Santana, superintendent of the Northern Valley Regional High School District, says that teachers throughout the system, including at his district’s highly ranked high school in Demarest, support an approach to teaching that allows teachers to personalize instruction to meet each student’s needs. At the beginning of the school year, teachers assess their students through testing and other measures and then, says Santana, “differentiate their instruction accordingly and assign students tasks according to where they fall in the assessments.” The approach doesn’t just please teachers, of course; it also allows students to learn at their own pace, which leads to enhanced learning.
ENCOURAGING GREAT EXPECTATIONS.
The culture that prevails at all four schools reflects the assumption that students will succeed—a phenomenon Santana calls “collective academic optimism.” And while much of that optimism appears to stem from a home and community culture that elevates academic success, it can also be instilled by teachers. In fact, extensive research into the effects of teacher expectations on student performance, including a recent study published in the journal Social Psychology of Education, has shown a strong correlation between what a teacher expects of a student and what that student achieves. Teachers’ expectations often become self-fulfilling prophecies, so schools would do well to encourage a positive outlook regarding students’ ability to succeed.
GETTING KIDS EXCITED.
Something else that distinguishes all four schools is their students’ general sense of satisfaction with—and yes, even excitement about—their school experience. Besides hiring and keeping teachers who encourage a love of learning, schools can engage students in several ways. Tenafly High School, for instance, maintains what Morrison calls “a collegelike atmosphere” derived, in part, from the unusual freedom students are afforded. Students with free periods, for instance, can go to the cafeteria for a snack during those periods, or read a book in the library or leave the campus entirely if their parents allow it. If that free period falls first thing in the morning, they may sleep in; if it’s scheduled at the end of the day, they may leave early. While high schools often afford this so-called “individual decision time” to seniors and, in a few cases, juniors, says Morrison, “Tenafly is the only school I know that has an open campus for all four grades.”
Northern Highlands builds student enthusiasm through its electives, such as the Career & Academic Pathways Program that offers internships in fields that students find intriguing, including less expected choices like sound engineering and drone photography. Students there also have the opportunity to take college courses, given at the high school, in conjunction with seven participating schools; offerings include Multivariable Calculus (Seton Hall University), Computer-Aided Drafting and Design (New Jersey Institute of Technology), Tomorrow’s Teachers (Fairleigh Dickinson University), Forensic Science (Syracuse University) and Dynamics of Health Care (Rutgers). And they can earn an associate’s degree by taking college-level courses at the high school through a partnership with Bergen Community College.
INCORPORATING SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL LEARNING.
“We put a lot of emphasis on finding the balance between academics and social and emotional growth and character education,” says Colin Winch, principal of the Englewood Cliffs Upper School. Teachers and staff work hard to build personal relationships with each student so that they can easily see when those students may need extra attention socially or emotionally. In fact, studies consistently show that students in schools implementing social-emotional learning (SEL) programs do better academically.
The nonprofit educational organization CASEL describes SEL as an educational method that aims to foster social and emotional skills within the school curriculum and offers workshops to help schools integrate the method into every subject. Its main goals are to teach students to feel empathy, make responsible and caring decisions, and establish and maintain supportive friendships. For example, a so-called Socratic seminar allows students the opportunity to gather in groups to help one another understand the lesson that was just taught—a method that advances listening skills and the ability to find common ground.
MAINTAINING THE FINEST FACILITIES.
All of the education experts we spoke with agreed that even the best facilities don’t directly translate into academic achievement, but they certainly serve a purpose. Great facilities, says Occhino, encourage school pride and contribute to a sense of enthusiasm about going to school. For students raised on computers, tech facilities add a sense of relevance to the curriculum.
Even more significant, when facilities are subpar, they can distract students from the academic task at hand. Winch, for instance, notes that “10 years ago, we didn’t have AC units in the classrooms, and that was always tough because it would take focus away from classwork.” While shiny new science labs and gleaming turf fields look great on school websites, it seems clear that the best way to support students is to ensure their comfort and safety, so they can put more of their energy into what every top school values most: academic success.
