Schooldigger, I’m afraid your list somewhat betrays you. I assumed you noticed in the last year summarized, Ridgewood is down 2 points. Little by little Ridgewood has consistently gone downwards. A main problem is the unfairness of ranking private schools and county Academies–all of which attract the top students in any school–against public schools which must educate every student who applies. It is the true “apples vs oranges” comparison. That alone would automatically force lowering of the ranks of any public school. But Ridgewood is no where near being at the top of the public school list. Ridgewood has always had problems–terrible tenured teachers and some other very strange teachers who bullied their students–but basically it provided a great education for self-starters. Lazy kids still did not work up to their educational level–and I’m sure that is true today. Another main difference is that the respect for teachers and authority figures has declined drastically. Too many students think the whole world revolves around them and rebel against anyone telling them what to do. We also have more parents who’ll rush to the school or school board to complain that ” their darling child could never do anything wrong”. Believe me, this is not a new problem, it’s just gotten worse. A friend, who retired at least 15 years ago from being a kindergarten teacher, said that “she never thought she’d be happy to retire, but the kids today…”
The Ridgewood district has also chronically failed to adequately encourage and adequately develop students who early on demonstrate extremely very high academic potential, but also who have moderate emotional or behavioral challenges and/or ADHD, or who happen to be male. (Oops–was only thinking that last part, didn’t mean to blurt it out. How rude to admit the hard and naked truth of Nothern New Jersey public schools in 2019.)
Also it’s as if an aircraft carrier’s ship anchor is dragging down the math and science curriculum in the Ridgewood district. We could easily put out one and a half times or even twice as many top-flight math students than we do every June. Why don’t we make this a goal? Anti-Asian bias plays a part. And the fact that so many high-income, high-performing individuals who raise their families in Ridgewood are, perversely, proudly math-allergic and want their children to become elite men and women “of letters” like themselves, ready upon graduation from swank private school to take their place on the exclusive career track to upper management, financial sales, or Big Law. For these people, having a large variety of well-designed and rigorous STEM-related classes and sequences available for their children in the local public high school (and tracing back into the middle schools with improved STEM-related course offerings there) is by no means an attractor and would arguably constitute a red flag signaling that they should choose a different town to live in.