Former Morris School District Superintendent Mackey Pendergrast has a new title: Assistant Commissioner.
“Throughout my entire career I looked to see where can I have as big a positive impact as possible. I was looking for those opportunities,” Pendergrast told Morristown Green on Wednesday, after the New Jersey State Board of Education unanimously confirmed his appointment, first reported here, as assistant commissioner of teaching and learning services.
With a staff of 75, Pendergrast will oversee policies for evaluating teachers statewide and promoting their professional growth. He also is tasked with assessing curriculum standards and testing for New Jersey’s 1.4 million public school students and promoting their “career readiness,” he said.
“We will look at data to see how to create conditions so each child will ascend and thrive,” Pendergrast said, echoing a theme from his nearly seven-year stint leading the Morris School District, which serves 5,700 pupils from Morristown, Morris Township and Morris Plains.
Thanking state Acting Commissioner of Education Angelica Allen-McMillan and the state board after the virtual vote, Pendergrast expressed pride in being a New Jersey educator for three decades.
“We are all stewards of a great public trust, especially now,” he said, adding he was “every grateful and excited…to serve in this new role.”
Pendergrast was named the state’s Superintendent of the Year in 2020. Previously, he taught history and coached high school basketball in Summit, was a guidance counselor, and became superintendent of the West Morris Mendham Regional High School District.
He retired last November, just before Omicron hit. Confident the Morris district was prepared to handle whatever remained of the pandemic, he was ready for a change, he recounted.
For about a month, he took a breather, hiking daily and reading a couple of novels. (Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, and Frank Herbert’s Dune.) He said he was open to out-of-state superintendent jobs — next year he and his wife, a history teacher, will be empty-nesters–when the assistant commissioner opportunity arose.
Pendergrast intends to apply things he learned in Morristown.
“The Morris School District is proof-of-concept that if you have high expectations, exceptional instruction and a healthy community, students will thrive,” he said.
He makes the formula sound simple: Surround students with talented, caring personnel who make youths feel valued and purposeful. In a community, he noted, where everyone pulls for each other.
Some parents knocked Pendergrast as overly cautious with COVID closures and quarantines. But nobody knew what to expect before vaccines arrived, he said. So he followed health experts’ directions.
“Especially pre-vaccine, yeah, I was going to be cautious with people’s lives.”
Criticism never bothered him, he insisted.
“I always felt we were there in many respects to try to help people through their different anxieties and issues,” Pendergrast said. “I felt bad that there were parents who were struggling through COVID.”
A disciple of data, Pendergrast now faces the challenge of gauging learning loss without two years of state achievement tests, which were suspended during the pandemic.
It will take careful parsing to avoid apples-to-oranges comparisons of students’ pre-COVID academic performance to today. Analysis is crucial for educators to identify gaps and tailor programs to bring students up to speed.
“The goal of data is to try to be closer and closer to the truth. You take all the data you can and try to paint a picture,” Pendergrast said.
He looks forward to crunching the numbers. Looking back, he has fond memories of the Morris School District. There is only one thing he is glad to leave behind.
“I will not miss snow days, and those 4:30 a.m. calls,” Pendergrast said.
This story has been updated with additional information and comments from Pendergrast.
