Nearly All Elmhurst Teachers Rate Highly

ELMHURST, IL – The vast majority of Elmhurst School District 205's teachers rated in the top categories last school year, according to state data.

The Illinois Report Card website showed 98.6 percent of local teachers rating either "excellent" or "proficient." That works out to 588 of Elmhurst's 596 teachers.

The other ratings are "needing improvement" and "unsatisfactory."

From 2018 to 2022, 97.3 percent to 99.7 percent of local teachers fell in the top categories.

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

Many districts have placed all of their teachers in the top ratings. In 2021, Chicago Public Schools did so for all of its nearly 22,000 teachers.

In 2010, the state enacted a law requiring schools to have performance evaluation systems. Teachers without tenure must be evaluated every year. Tenured teachers must go through the same process every two years, unless they are in the bottom two categories.

Last year, 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."