Supeintendent's Report: Staff Evaluation Considerations to Reflect State Shifts

Though District Superintendent Jorden Schiff outlined four main Human Resources points in a report based on his first 100 days in the district, board members’ focused on revision to staff evaluation criteria.

Schiff’s goals for that section of his report included revising teacher and principal evaluation to reflect best practices and to comply with new state requirements, creating professional development for support staff and creating a teacher leadership institute in-house.

It’s the shift in staff evaluation that had board members questioning the method the district will use, however.

“I think this is very much needed,” Board Vice President Marc Rosenberg said. “I think it’s going to be a give and take from what the state tells us to do and what we want to do. I do think, however, that whatever comes out of this it’s going to take a balanced scorecard type of approach. It’s not one measure, it’s multiple measures and it’s not one data source, it’s multiple measures.

“For the most part, it’s not only how the kids do on tests,” he added. “It’s representative of the whole job of education and teacher. The last thing we want is a rush to teach to the test because that’s how pay and merit is awarded.”

The district is already considering the changes—state-required or otherwise—it will make to the teacher and principal evaluation systems, though it may not use the state’s proposed approach. Assistant Superintendent for Personnel Scott Rocco attended a workshop and grant introduction program on the state’s proposed teacher and evaluation changes, Schiff said.

“It seemed like the timetables were very tight with what the state was intending to do,” Rocco said. “We had to get the teacher’s association in to have conversations, the principal’s association in to have conversations. The timeframe was very tight for that.”

Because of the timing problems, Rocco recommended creating an evaluation criteria in-house, using the state requirements and input from existing staff.

“Instead of actually going with the pilot program from the state, to initiate our own committee of administrators, supervisors and teaching staff to begin the process of determining what we’re going to use for evaluation, how we are going to do it and, at the end of this committee, have a new evaluation tool for the majority of our staff in the district,” Rocco said. “It’s going to be a rather large committee that meets often and we’ll break out into subcategories that look at research, what other districts do, looking at programs the state recommended.”

Board member Judy Haas asked the status of the district’s current evaluation documents, stating that the district may not want to change evaluation criteria that already work.

“I would not jump to change it if we’ve been historically pleased with it, just because there’s a pilot program going on,” Haas said. “I mean, the pilot program might discover that all of these suggestions are hogwash.”

The state has recommended several specific methods for evaluating teachers in the pilot program, though Schiff expected the results would have districts basing evaluations on student achievement data and on classroom observation.

The district’s current criteria has been in place since before the mid-1990s. The same criteria are used for psychologists, teachers, and other staff, whereas the new process would differentiate between each position.

 Stil, Rocco noted the district would not use a single criteria for the new evaluations.

 “We’re not going to use one measure,” Rocco said. “We can’t use one measure. We can’t say that one assessment done at one point over a three, four or five day period is a great indication of students’ success. There are a number of other assessments we do throughout the year to show student growth.  .  .A child who is performing below level.  .  .may still be below level when they take that (standardized) test but all other indicators may show that that child has made a year’s worth of progress.  .  .We need to look at this very carefully.”

The state’s plans still need to go through state school board approval, as well as changes to the state’s tenure law, Schiff said. The tenure law changes would be subject to debate in the state legislature, he added.

“We are trying to be proactive rather than reactive in this process,” Schiff said. “I’m not sure that we won’t see a different iteration of the plan when it becomes the procedure in the State of New Jersey. I think we need to act. We need to explore these issues and we need to have these conversations with our instructional staff.”

“How we use student achievement data when we are evaluating teacher performance is critical,” he added. “We could be making the same mistakes I mentioned when talking about NCLB. We could be rewarding failures and punishing successes unless we are doing this very well.”