Teacher Evaluation

By John Mooney

Numbers across the board skewed high, including teacher effectiveness in classrooms and administrator’s 97 percent “effective” rating

By John Mooney

Christie administration heeds calls for slower implementation of some of its proposed changes

Three months after they were first proposed, the Christie administration’s voluminous revisions to the state’s teacher preparation and certification requirements are still being fine-tuned, with the state stepping back from a couple of the more aggressive changes.
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“You can see that they really reflected on the various comments that were made by the stakeholder groups,” said Joelle Tutela, director of teacher education at Rutgers University-Newark and president of the New Jersey Association of College for Teacher Education.…

By Adam Clark, NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

TRENTON — High ranking New Jersey Democrats are calling on the state to minimize the impact of PARCC exams on teacher evaluations again next school year.

Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-Gloucester) and Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex), chair of the Senate Education Committee, wrote a letter to Education Commissioner David Hespe this week asking him to keep the weight of PARCC data at 10 percent of teachers’ evaluations next year.…

By Adam Clark, NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

New Jersey parents and students may have heard that data extracted from the new state tests in English and math will count in the performance evaluation of some teachers for this school year.

That much is simple to explain.

But how that data is calculated, which teachers will have it applied to their evaluation and how it can affect a teacher’s performance rating is much more complicated.…

By Adam Clark, NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

TRENTON — Performance on the new state test for New Jersey students in grades 3-11 would not be used to evaluate students or their teachers under a bill passed today by the Assembly Education Committee.

The bill (A4190) would cover the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) a period of three years beginning with the 2015-16 school year.…

By Adam Clark, NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

TRENTON —New Jersey teachers whose 2013-14 evaluations are tied to student performance on standardized tests will soon know their ratings.

The state on Thursday released the data needed to complete its first-ever teacher performance reviews that weigh student growth on standardized tests.

The data, which applies to about 15 percent of teachers, was given to school districts Thursday and will be shared with teachers over the coming weeks, Assistant Education Commissioner Peter Shulman said.…

By John Mooney

Amid debate during first year of implementation, key juncture will be reached soon when teachers get their individual ratings

There’s been plenty of debate about the effectiveness of New Jersey’s new teacher-evaluation system during its first year. But the bottom-line verdict is likely to come in a few months, when final performance ratings are placed next to individual teachers’ names.…

By John Mooney

How was the first year of New Jersey’s new teacher evaluation system? Depends on whom you ask

There’s hardly consensus as to how well New Jersey’s teacher evaluation system worked in its first year — and no more agreement about how the second year will stack up.

The state Department of Education last week released a mostly positive report on the initial year of the system as dictated under the TEACHNJ tenure reform law, citing some challenges but praising the progress in meeting requirements for additional observations and goal setting for teachers.…