Nearly All Burr Ridge Teachers Rate Well

BURR RIDGE, IL – All teachers in two of Burr Ridge's three elementary school districts rated in the highest 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.

Pleasantdale District 107 made no information available for 2022, but indicated 100 percent of its teachers were either excellent or proficient from 2018 to 2021. In 2017, 98 percent of teachers fell into those categories.

Burr Ridge District 180 has no data for either 2021 or 2022 on the state website. In 2020, 100 percent of its teachers rated excellent or proficient. From 2017 to 2019, the number ranged from 86 percent to 97 percent.

In Gower District 62, 93 percent of teachers were rated excellent or proficient in 2022. It provided no data for 2020 or 2021. In 2019, all teachers fell into the top two categories. The numbers were 91 percent and 98 percent in 2017 and 2018, respectively.

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."