A ton of data on teacher effectiveness and student achievement in Hawaii’s public schools rained down in the past week or so, and the public can be forgiven for feeling confused by the information relayed.

According to the Educator Effectiveness System (EES) results for the 2014-15 school year, there’s nothing to worry about — the overwhelming majority of teachers ranked highly.

Only days later came the suggestion of a less rosy prognosis — the somewhat dispiriting news about dips in student scores on a key national test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

The obvious challenge for the state Department of Education will be to make practical sense of all this. Top educators must extract guidance from the EES that can direct teacher effectiveness where it’s needed: improving student learning, which then should be evident in future achievement testing.

The state Board of Education already seems aware that there’s a disconnect here. Even before the NAEP scores came out — showing that gains posted two years earlier reverted to 2011 levels — some board members were clearly surprised by the teacher-evaluation results.

The current evaluations scored 98 percent of teachers as "effective" or "highly effective," the levels that qualify them for pay raises their union gains through collective bargaining. Compared with the previous year, when the evaluation system was inaugurated, fewer teachers received "marginal" ratings, the level at which they’re given a chance to improve, or "unsatisfactory" scores, which can be grounds for termination.

A legitimate criticism raised by BOE member Jim Williams concerned the matrix used to gauge the overall rating. A teacher given a marginal score in one of the two areas studied — teacher practice and student growth and learning — could still be rated effective overall.

Of the workforce, 4,206 (35 percent) were rated highly effective, and 7,478 (63 percent) finished in the effective range. Though she lauded the general performance, board member Patricia Halagao said she’s "just wondering what does this reveal about the evaluation system itself," whether it’s rigorous.

That’s a good question. Here’s another one: What does this reveal about the capacity of the faculty to turn around student scores? Or: Does the test offer an opportunity for the DOE to tap the resource of effective teachers for the benefit of the students?

It’s a mistake to put too much credence in any one test — they’re snapshots and are better gauged over time — but the results of the NAEP, known as the "Nation’s Report Card," are hard to overlook.

After a steady rise in recent years, math scores declined by a point for grade 4 and two points for grade 8. In reading, average scores dropped by two points in grade 8 and were flat for grade 4. The bar graphs comparing the side-by-side results in Hawaii with the national averages were not encouraging; in almost every metric, this state was below par.

Reasons still remain for subjecting teachers to rigorous evaluations, among them identifying the ones who really are not up to the job. Only 18 teachers were identified as unsatisfactory, but the system owes it to their students to move aggressively to deal with their deficits and improve the student learning environment.

But beyond that, there is information the evaluations gather about teaching methods, identifying excellence through classroom observations and other measures. The DOE needs to find ways to share its discoveries more broadly to uplift all schools.

There are provisions for teacher feedback in the EES manual, but the department should look for ways to expand them. For example, effective and highly effective teachers will get a "streamlined" evaluation process in the subsequent year, which will not require them to complete certain components, such as the observations, working portfolios, core professionalism and student learning objectives.

The department should review these guidelines and make sure the system is gaining as much as it can from teacher evaluations. Stephen Schatz, the DOE assistant superintendent who has worked most closely with the evaluations, said the program is a work in progress.

Yes. And there’s more work to be done to see that students progress.