Nearly All Darien Teachers Get Good Ratings

DARIEN, IL – Nearly all Darien elementary and middle school teachers were rated in the top two categories in school districts' most recent reports.

The Illinois Report Card website provides the percentages of teachers who local school districts rated as excellent or proficient. The other categories are needing improvement and unsatisfactory.

Statewide, 97 percent of teachers were in the top two categories.

In Darien School District 61, 98 percent of its more than 100 teachers were rated as excellent or proficient in 2022. It reached 100 percent in 2017, 2019 and 2021. In 2018 and 2020, it was at 99 percent and 97 percent, respectively.

Center Cass District 66 made no data available from 2020 to 2022. From 2017 to 2019, it reported that 100 percent of its more than 70 teachers were rated as excellent or proficient.

In Cass District 63, 100 percent of its nearly 60 teachers rated in the top two categories in 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2022. In 2017 and 2020, it was at 98 percent and 97 percent, respectively.

In 2010, the state enacted a law requiring schools to have performance evaluation systems. Teachers with tenure must be evaluated every two years, unless they are rated as needing improvement or unsatisfactory. Teachers without tenure are evaluated annually.

In 2021, Chicago Public Schools rated 100 percent of its 21,974 teachers as either excellent or proficient. In 2022, that number dropped to 84 percent. It was unclear what happened in a year's time to cause decrease.

Last fall, Wirepoints' Ted Dabrowski questioned the state's rating system.

"It’s important to note that the inflated teacher evaluation problem is not limited to the Chicago Public Schools," he said. "It’s rampant everywhere. Across the entire state, 98.8 percent of all teachers in 2021 were evaluated as proficient or excellent. Try and square that up with the fact that in 2021, less than one-third of the state’s 1.9 million students could read or do English at grade level."