All Western Springs Teachers Get Good Ratings

WESTERN SPRINGS, IL – All teachers in Western Springs School District 101 rated in the highest two categories in its most recent report, 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.

District 101 provide no data for the last three years. Every year from 2017 to 2019, though, it reported 100 percent of its 120 teachers fell into 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 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."