All Hinsdale Teachers Rate Well Most Years

HINSDALE, IL – In most years, all teachers in Hinsdale's school districts are rated in the top two 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.

In Hinsdale District 181, 100 percent of its 290 teachers were rated either excellent or proficient in 2018, 2021 and 2022. In 2020, 99.5 of teachers reached the top designations. The district provided no data for 2017 or 2019.

In Hinsdale High School District 86, all 290 teachers were excellent or proficient every year from 2017 to 2021. In 2022, the number was 99 percent.

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 the 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."