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Newark, Elizabeth, Red Bank, Ocean City among them

11 school districts have been selected to participate in the Christie administration’s Excellent Educators for New Jersey (EE4NJ) teacher evaluation pilot program during the upcoming 2011-12 school year, the Department of Education announced on Thursday.

They are Newark, Elizabeth, Alexandria, Bergenfield, Monroe (Middlesex County), Ocean City, Pemberton, Red Bank, Secaucus, West Deptford, and Woodstown-Pilesgrove.

The districts were selected from among 31 applicants, and, pending final review procedures, will split $1.1 million in state and federal aid. Newark is participating through a separate aid program.

During the pilot year, districts will implement a new framework for evaluating teachers based on multiple measures of teacher practice and student performance. Pilot districts will help to shape a new evaluation system prior to what Gov. Christie plans as a statewide roll-out in 2012-13.

"New Jersey's teachers have a unique role in shaping students' lives by equipping them with the skills and knowledge they need to be successful in college and the workforce, and every New Jerseyan is cognizant of the great work being done in classrooms across our state," Christie said. "The pilot district program we are moving forward with today will help to develop fair and meaningful evaluation systems that finally recognize and celebrate great teachers and provide teachers at all levels with the support they need to constantly improve."

Pilot districts will implement a system containing the following principles:

Teachers should never be evaluated on the basis of a single consideration, such as test scores much less a single test, but on the basis of multiple measures that include both learning outcomes and effective practices, with approximately 50 percent associated with each.

Where applicable, the component of the evaluation based on “learning outcomes” should include, but is not limited to, progress on objective assessments such as NJ ASK. In untested grades and subjects, for example, student achievement might include a focus on student work or locally determined criteria.

To avoid penalizing teachers who work with our highest need students, evaluation criteria should favor student progress and not absolute performance.

To give teachers meaningful information to help them develop, the prior system of binary ratings (either “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory”) will be replaced by a four tiered system, including “ineffective,” “partially effective,” “effective” and “highly effective.”

Districts should provide a direct link between the results of the evaluation and professional development opportunities to help teachers at all levels continuously improve.

To assure consistency and fairness, plans should address inter-rater reliability – solving for the problem of differences in how individual evaluators review teachers across schools and districts.

Any personnel consequences connected with evaluations remain a matter of local decision and applicable state law and are not an element of the pilot program.

“On the whole, current teacher evaluation systems across the state are not as meaningful as they should be,” Acting Education Commissioner Christopher D. Cerf said. “Many teachers do not receive yearly evaluations, and most systems fail to measure the most important outcome of teacher practice – student performance. We believe this new framework addresses those issues, while still giving districts flexibility to develop evaluation systems that will best meet the needs of their teachers.”