New Jersey encompasses more than 2,000 public high schools, but one factor divides them more than any other: poverty. Nothing else correlated as closely in our school-by-school analysis of test scores. Newspapers from the New York Times to the Philadelphia Inquirer have done similar stories. We took on the task after the state decided it would no longer produce its own yearly "school report card," and lawmakers debated how to meet a court mandate to help poor districts.
Getting state data
The state still collects much of the data for the report cards: test scores, drop-out rates, enrollment.