Grades are in: See N.J. teacher ratings for each school

About 1,600 New Jersey public school teachers were rated "ineffective" or "partially effective," according to the 2014-15 evaluations.

TRENTON -- New Jersey's public school teachers are getting better at their jobs, according to new state evaluation data released Friday.

The second year of the state's new evaluation system for teachers found about 1,600 - or 1.6 percent of New Jersey's public school teachers - were rated "ineffective" or "partially effective" in 2014-15, according to state Department of Education report.

That is 1,100 fewer than the previous school year, when about 2,700 teachers, or 2.9 percent, got the lowest ratings, the report said.

SEARCH: Check your school in the teacher evaluation database

"When considering the individual performance of teachers, there are patterns of significant overall improvement, particularly for those who had poor evaluation ratings in Year 1," the report said.

N.J. triples weight of PARCC in teacher ratings

The data also shows the number of top-rated teachers who earned the rating "highly effective," went up by more than 10 percent.

The data shows the results of the second year of New Jersey's new rating system, which has been criticized as unfair by some lawmakers, educators and the New Jersey Education Association, the state's largest teachers' union.

The system, called AchieveNJ, classifies teachers as "highly effective" or "effective" if they are satisfactory. Teachers who don't make the grade are labeled either "partially effective" or "ineffective."

Teachers are evaluated based on classroom observations and whether students made academic improvements and increased their scores on standardized tests. Some critics argue it is unfair to judge teachers based on their students' test scores, especially if the educators work in low-income districts or with special education or immigrant students who speak limited English.

In 2013-14, the first year of the evaluations, New Jersey teachers were: 23.4 percent "highly effective"; 73.9 percent "effective"; 2.5 percent "partially effective"; and 0.2 percent "ineffective."

In 2014-15, the numbers improved to: 33.8 percent "highly effective"; 64.6 percent "effective"; 1.4 percent "partially effective"; and 0.2 percent "ineffective".

"This indicates that AchieveNJ is having a positive effect, not only on those who are struggling, but also on those who are taking their practice to the next level of excellence," the state report said.

Wendell Steinhauer, president of the NJEA, said the teacher evaluation puts unnecessary stress on teachers and students.

"By using test score data in evaluation, the Department of Education has created a climate of pressure and fear around testing that hurts everyone in our schools, Steinhauer said. "Instead of recognizing that and working to mitigate it, the Department of Education actually tripled the weight given to test scores for the current year, ensuring that the negative effects will be even greater going forward."

Part of the improvement in teacher evaluations in the new data may be due to the large number of low-rated teachers who left their jobs after the first ratings were released last year. Nearly 36 percent of the teachers rated "ineffective" and about 22 percent of those rated "partially effective" in 2013-14 are no longer teaching, the report found.

Under the new system, low-rated teachers are given extra support. But, if they don't improve, they could lose tenure.

The state also released data for individual schools and districts. However, it may be difficult for parents to know how their children's individual teachers were rated.

The data does not include names of teachers due to rules about keeping ratings confidential. Instead, the charts include the total number of teachers in each of the four ratings categories for each school.

However, the charts include asterisks in categories where fewer than 10 teachers received the rating and the state felt someone might be able to deduce the rating of an individual teacher. Schools with 100 percent of teachers in one rating category were also eliminated because the chart would reveal the ratings of all teachers in a school.