Most Burr Ridge Teachers Rate Highly

BURR RIDGE, IL – An overwhelming majority of teachers in two Burr Ridge school districts received the top ratings last year, according to state data.

A third district's numbers have been unavailable on the Illinois Report Card site for the last couple of years.

Last school year, Gower School District 62 placed all 72 of its teachers in the "excellent" or "proficient" categories as a result of evaluations. The other ratings are "needing improvement" and "unsatisfactory."

In the previous year, 93 percent of Gower's teachers received the top ratings. In 2020 and 2021, the district provided no data to the state.

For Burr Ridge School District 180, 89 percent of its 50 teachers were rated as either "excellent" or "proficient" last school year. No data was available for 2021 and 2022. In 2020, 100 percent of teachers were in the top categories.

For the last two years, Pleasantdale School District 107's data has been missing from the state's website. From 2018 to 2021, all 74 teachers received top ratings.

Asked about the missing data, Superintendent Dave Palzet said 100 percent of teachers were in the top categories the last couple of years. He said smaller districts have a harder time meeting state reporting mandates.

"Smaller districts have fewer layers of staff, but the reporting responsibilities are not any different," he said in an interview. "It's one those reporting pieces that are mandated and unfunded, often cumbersome to complete."

Patch found smaller districts tend to miss years in reporting data, while bigger ones get it done every year.

Last school year, all 255 Lyons Township High School teachers made the top categories. The same happened from 2020 to 2022. From 2017 to 2019, the number ranged from 98 percent to 99 percent.

In Hinsdale High School District 86, 100 percent of its nearly 300 teachers got the top ratings every year since 2018, except in 2022, when it was 99 percent.

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."