The teenage students who filled Joseph DePierro’s English classes at Carteret High School knew failure and had struggled with many subjects before they arrived in his classroom.

Some lacked the intellectual capacity to do the work. Others had severe emotional problems or could barely read, but their challenges did not stop DePierro from requesting to teach them more than a decade ago.

"I chose to work with those kinds of students. That was my forte," said DePierro, who is now dean of Seton Hall University’s College of Education and Human Services.

Getting his students to learn required deviation from the standard curriculum, DePierro said. Instead of routinely assigning American lit classics, DePierro said he used material that captured his students’ interest. He once brought in sales brochures for new cars to teach a lesson on reading comprehension.

If a new statewide teacher evaluation system goes into effect on a pilot basis as early as this fall, teachers like DePierro could be held accountable if their students don’t show significant gains on state tests — something many of DePierro’s students did not do. Christie administration officials have said the new system is long overdue, but some education experts and superintendents argue it will produce unreliable results and will be difficult to implement at the local level.

"Had I been concerned at the time that my evaluation was based on their performance in my class, I wouldn’t have chosen to work with that kind of student," DePierro said. "When the end-of-course tests came around, I would have come out as a failure when in fact I was doing something very good for these students that didn’t show up on the test."

On Thursday, a Christie administration task force recommended that teachers be judged 50 percent on their classroom performance and 50 percent on student test score growth during the academic year. The new methodology for gauging teachers’ effectiveness will serve as the bedrock for high-stakes decisions about tenure protections and pay.

Teachers rated highly under the new system will qualify for raises and teachers rated poorly will lose tenure, but not necessarily their jobs, if reform measures being pushed by the Christie administration are enacted by the legislature, Cerf said at a press conference last month.

"The worst sin here would be to continue to act as if all teachers or principals are absolutely interchangeable commodities and not professionals who can get better," said Cerf, who also described the current teacher evaluation system as "badly broken."

Cerf announced the state’s intention to overhaul teacher evaluations during an address at Princeton University last month.

"Engaging in this conversation is not bashing teachers," Cerf said at the time. "It is pro-teacher to say that excellence in the classroom should be rewarded."

He used statistics to drive home the immediate need for the new system.

BLEAK STATISTICS

Only 22 percent of students in Newark’s high schools graduate. In Camden, less than 20 percent of black and Hispanic elementary school students are proficient in language arts. These students, Cerf argues, deserve the most qualified teachers, and only a robust, data-driven evaluation system can parse the best educators from the worst.

Task force member Derrell Bradford said the new system will require principals to "shuffle" their time and resources substantially, but said such a change is necessary if teachers are to be held accountable for the quality of their work.

"We keep hearing we can’t design a perfect evaluation system, so we shouldn’t have one at all," said Bradford, executive director of the non-profit Excellent Education for Everyone. "What we’re trying to design is something that’s drastically more predictive of teacher ability and leader ability than what we have now."

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Bruce Baker, an associate professor at Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education, said the research shows it is difficult to measure student achievement over the school year. Under the new evaluation system, students’ performance in the classroom will count for half of a teacher’s chance at getting or retaining tenure.

"The ability of teachers to do well under this type of evaluation system is hardly controlled by a teacher," Baker said, noting that teachers cannot influence the makeup of their classes.

THE POVERTY FACTOR

Research shows, Baker said, that teachers working in high-poverty areas are more likely to get sequential bad ratings. It also shows the low probability of getting high ratings three years in a row. If state officials are aware of this research, Baker said, it’s "downright dishonest and wrong" to implement the system anyway.

Montgomery Superintendent Earl Kim echoed Baker’s concerns about the new evaluation’s reliability. Kim said value-added data analysis can help improve individual student learning, but it cannot be used to separate effective teachers from ineffective teachers.

Kim belongs to a coalition of educators advocating for high-quality teacher evaluations known as EQUATE (Educators for Quality Assessment of Teaching Effectiveness.) The group presented key research and policy recommendations to the state’s evaluations task force last month, Kim said.

"New Jersey is the second-highest-achieving state in the nation in terms of education. Can we improve? Yes, but this new system is not what will take us to the next level," Kim said. "That type of shift can’t be done through edict and can’t come through a poorly implemented evaluations design that would constitute educational malpractice."

Juggling implementation of the new evaluation system and the complications of last year’s budget cuts will be a heavy load, said South Brunswick Superintendent Gary McCartney. Last year, McCartney cut 21 percent of the district’s administrative staff, or a total of 112 full-time positions.

"The typical reaction in tough budget times is: Don’t cut teachers, don’t cut secretaries, don’t cut bus drivers, cut administrators, and we have," McCartney said. "The bottom line is, whatever the state asks us to do, we will need more administrators to do it."

Before the state can fully implement its new teacher evaluation system, it must first complete work on a statewide data system that has the ability to link students’ test scores to their teachers.

FINDING THE FUNDING

Known as NJSMART, the system currently lacks the ability to link educators to student-level data, according to a memo written by Bari Erlichson, director of the office of education data.

In its application for federal education dollars last summer, the Christie administration requested nearly $50 million to complete NJSMART. But the state lost that competition, due in part to a clerical error, and has not said how it plans to upgrade the system without those funds.

Erlichson declined requests to speak about the challenge of completing the system.

Cerf, however, said his department is "rapidly attacking" the task of shoring up the system.

"We will get this done," Cerf said. "I don’t know how yet, but it’s a top priority."

Staff-writer Jeanette Rundquist contributed to this report.