For many first-year superintendents, surviving each new day feels like a large enough goal. When Jeffrey Moore came to Hunterdon Central Regional High School District, he was determined to do more than survive. He knew that examining disaggregated data could make inequities visible and create a sense of urgency about the need for change among administrators and teachers. From his work as curriculum director of Freehold Regional High School District, Superintendent Moore knew that a key aspect of data analysis was identifying students who “decelerated”—students who moved from more rigorous to less rigorous courses over time.

I started working with my leadership team in Hunterdon based on what we did in Freehold in terms of having the team think about how we identify equity and what different metrics we might want to consider. How do we measure access and success? My leadership team and I wanted to identify metrics to serve as needles on gauges that we could then rally folks around to take action—without having to do regression analysis or advanced statistics.

I introduced the idea of deceleration in mathematics. As a team, we looked at the traditional college-bound math track, which seemed to be the only math track that anybody talks about, and we saw that it was not working for kids who were not planning on taking calculus. So we are now working to introduce alternatives to calculus that are still rigorous, such as statistics or computer science. I want to broaden the conversation here in Hunterdon County about options and opportunity in mathematics.

The network and Superintendent Sampson’s [of Freehold Regional School District] mentoring of me were both crucial to my focus on those sorts of things as levers to shift culture around mathematics and rigor. In high-performing districts, test scores can represent too broad of a brush for painting a picture of access and equity. When you spend so much time with test averages, it can become ingrained in culture to say that everything is going well. It takes focus and effort to get into the data with your staff and move folks along to unpacking that, disaggregating that, asking questions, and zeroing in on the question of, “Are we offering the opportunity to all kids that we say we are offering?”

–Dr. Jeffrey Moore, Superintendent, Hunterdon Central Regional High School District

“Focusing on the Levers That Shift Culture”