All La Grange Teachers In Top Categories

LA GRANGE, IL – All teachers in three La Grange area districts rated in the highest two categories in their most recent reports, 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.

At Lyons Township High School, 100 percent of the more than 250 teachers rated as excellent or proficient every year from 2020 to 2022. From 2017 to 2019, the number ranged from 98 percent to 99 percent.

In La Grange District 102, no data was provided in 2021 and 2022. In 2017, 2018 and 2020, 100 percent of the district's nearly 250 teachers rated excellent or proficient. In 2019, the number dipped to 99 percent.

La Grange District 105's more than 120 teachers were all rated in the top two categories in 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022. In 2017 and 2019, the numbers were 98 percent and 99 percent, respectively.

In La Grange Highlands 106, 100 percent of the nearly 80 teachers rated excellent or proficient every year from 2017 to 2022, except 2020, when the number was 98 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 is 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."