Niche School Rankings: See Berkeley, Central Regional's Grades

BERKELEY, NJ — Annual Niche rankings have been released for more than 11,000 school districts across the county, including the Berkeley Township and Central Regional school districts.

Niche, known for its extensive rankings of schools, universities and communities, released their 2023 Best Schools and Districts rankings looking at 11,820 school districts. The platform combined user input — ratings from current students, alumni and parents — with quantitative data.

Districts are graded on everything from academics, to resources, to food.

Both the Berkeley Township and Central Regional districts got an overall grade of B-, with individual categories as follows:

Berkeley Township School District

• Academics - C+
• Teachers - B+
• Clubs & Activities - B-
• Resources & Facilities - C+
• Diversity - B+
• Administration - B
• Food - B+

Central Regional School District

• Academics - C+
• Teachers - B
• Clubs & Activities - A-
• Sports - A-
• Resources & Facilities - C+
• Diversity - B+
• College Prep - B
• Administration - B+
• Food - B+

Berkeley Township ranks fourth in Ocean County for most diverse districts, right behind Central Regional at number three.

Central Regional also ranks 92nd out of 243 in the state for best districts for athletes.

The individual schools were graded as well. Here are Berkeley Township's, and here are Central Regional's.

Niche offers a disclaimer: "Rankings are only published once a year and were most recently released on September 26, 2022. Due to the annual release, rankings and grades can become out-of-date as new facts and information become available. Such data will be incorporated into the next year’s rankings. Niche takes steps to ensure data integrity, but rankings may be inaccurate if Niche is supplied with inaccurate data from schools, data sources such as the US Department of Education, or spam and automated 'bot' reviews."

However, school rankings have their critics. In 2013, journalist and former professor and The Atlantic writer John Tierney argued that high school rankings are "nonsense."

"Parents might be able to use that information to find an affordable residence near good schools, while still leaving themselves within reasonable reach of their place of employment," Tierney wrote. "It's harder to fathom the logic for ranking high schools nationwide. Few are the families who will move out of state or across the country on the basis of claims about school quality."

The Best Schools rankings include categories for boarding, charter and magnet schools as well as schools for STEM and the arts among many others.

This article contains additional reporting by Josh Bakan.