NJ Education Report

The New Jersey Department of Education received a bit of flack after its announcement of the first year’s results of using Student Growth Percentiles, as well as Teacher Practice rubrics and Student Growth Objectives, to gauge teacher effectiveness: 97% of N.J. teachers were deemed either effective or highly effective. Can any profession boast such proficiency?

But the results are more granular than that, and next week, on July 15th,  the D.O.E. will release a database comprising performance ratings for specific teachers. No names are published, but parents will be able to see how many teachers in each school received ratings of either ineffective, partially effective, effective, and highly effective. They’ll also be able to see principal ratings (by district, not school, to preserve anonymity).

Under our old binary system – satisfactory or unsatisfactory ratings based on subjective classroom observations – almost all teachers were rated satisfactory. In 2012-2013, for example, 99.2% of teachers were deemed satisfactory.

Here are a few preliminary conclusions from Peter Shulman, chief talent officer for the Department of Education, by way of the Star Ledger’s article on the D.O.E.’s presentation Wednesday to the State Board of Education:

• The online database is an effort to be transparent about the state’s findings from the first year of a new teacher evaluation system.
• “We are not going to jump to any conclusions off the first year.”
• “The new system creates more distinction between performance levels and allows the state to further analyze the data for useful trends.”
• “Teachers in their first or second year were twice as likely to receive a ‘partially effective’  review as more experienced teachers” (which tracks with studies that show that instructional improvement occurs in the first 3-5 years).