Nearly All Elmhurst Teachers Rate Well

ELMHURST, IL – All but a handful of teachers in Elmhurst School District 205 rated in the highest categories, according to state data.

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.

Over the last six years, the percentage of Elmhurst teachers who rated in the top categories ranged from 97.3 percent to 99.7 percent. At the high end, only two teachers were rated as needing improvement and unsatisfactory. That's out of nearly 600 teachers.

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 is unclear what happened in a year's time to cause the decrease.

In October, 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."