The state Department of Education released its new teacher evaluations on Wednesday with plenty of warnings to take the results of a developing new program with a grain of salt.
Starting in the 2013-14 school year, teachers and school leaders across the state were evaluated based on “multiple measures including observations, student growth goals set by educators and supervisors, and, for some, student growth on state assessments (test results).”
The first set of results were made public on Wednesday for more than 113,000 teachers statewide.
“As expected, the majority of New Jersey educators earned the top two of four possible ratings, Effective or Highly Effective, but districts now know much more about the outcomes of their work with students,” the state Department of Education said in a news release. “In addition, approximately 2,900 teachers were identified as Ineffective or Partially Effective – and these teachers provided instruction to more than 180,000 New Jersey children last year.”
In prior years, teachers typically received a rating of “acceptable” or “not acceptable,” often based on a single annual classroom visit by a supervisor.
The aim of the new evaluation program is to provide individualized feedback to teachers and to help districts tailor support for those who need it most.
Of 187 teachers evaluated in the Ocean City School District in 2013-14, 185 (or 98.9 percent) were rated “effective” or “highly effective,” leaving just two teachers rated “ineffective” or “partially effective.”
The ratings were broken down by school as follows:
- Ocean City High School: 103 teachers were evaluated, and since all fell in the same performance level (presumably “effective”), the breakdown is reported only with asterisks.
- Ocean City Intermediate School: 49 teachers were evaluated, and 46 were rated “effective.”
- Ocean City Primary School: 35 teachers were evaluated with 23 rated “effective,” 10 “highly effective” and presumably two rated “ineffective” or “partially effective.”
In an effort to prevent the public from trying to identify scores of individual educators, the state reported only with asterisks:
- Records that have n-size < 10 are suppressed, e.g., if 9 or fewer staff received a rating of Ineffective, the record will be suppressed (the record will not be part of the data file). The total will always be displayed irrespective of n-size.
- When one performance level is suppressed due to n-size, and all 4 performance level ratings are present, the next lowest staff count will be suppressed (record will not be part of the file), to disallow roll-up to find the rating count for the first level suppressed and thus potentially identify educators.
- Records with 100% staff in one performance level are suppressed, as per state law (since in this case, any viewer would know each educator’s evaluation rating). In such cases, only the total staff count record will be provided as part of the data file.
“The real story of the first year of AchieveNJ,” said Peter Shulman, Assistant Commissioner of Education and Chief Talent Officer, “is that educators have risen to the challenge of improving feedback for all teachers and leaders. While one year of this new data is insufficient for identifying sustained trends or making sweeping conclusions about the state’s teaching staff, we are proud of this significant improvement and the personalized support all educators are now receiving.”
The full report is available online. To learn more about AchieveNJ, visit www.nj.gov/education/AchieveNJ.
