State Says West Morris High Schools Have 13 'Partially Effective' Teachers

In what has been an otherwise banner year of high rankings both locally and nationally, the New Jersey Department of Education said a few of West Morris Regional’s teachers need to improve inside the classroom.

In a report released late Wednesday, the state, for the first time ever, released a school-by-school breakdown of teacher evaluations from the 2013-14 school year.

As previously reported by Patch, schools in Long Valley, the Chesters, and Mendhams, all reported having teachers either ranked “effective” or “highly effective” – the top two grades an educator could receive.

But underperforming teachers could have been evaluated by their colleagues and supervisors in the lower two categories, “partially effective” and “ineffective.”

According to the data, 13 teachers between West Morris Central and West Morris Mendham High School were ranked as partially ineffective.

The breakdown by school is:

• West Morris Central: 88 effective teachers, 14 highly effective teachers; 108 total teachers
• West Morris Mendham: 80 effective teachers, 18 highly effective teachers; 105 total teachers

Because the disclosure of evaluation data of any particular employee is, by law, completely confidential, discrepancies in the overall numbers will be seen. The Department of Education calls this its suppression rate, meaning it won’t release the figures of specific categories of educators. From the DOE, regarding suppression:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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 2013-14 school year was the first for the teacher’s association to be without a new contract, an issue that remains unsolved two years later.

The majority of teachers across the state evaluated well, the DOE reported, but there were still a percentage of teachers that would need further training or changes in their instruction techniques.

According to the report, some 2,900 teachers – providing instruction to more than 180,000 students that school year – across the state were considered ineffective or partially effective, the state noted. As a result of those ratings, AchieveNJ requires those teachers to receive extra support and demonstrate progress over time to earn or maintain tenure, the report said.

“The real story of the first year of AchieveNJ,” said Peter Shulman, Assistant Commissioner of Education and Chief Talent Officer in a press release, “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.”