Over the years, District 64 has been a test site for a number of academic and administrative “pilot” programs, many of which never got off the ground or which crashed and burned shortly after becoming airborne.

But Monday’s edition of the Chicago Tribune carried an article about a kind of “pilot” program (“School districts retooling how they evaluate teachers,” by John Keilman) that should be a must-read for the school board members and administrators at Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 – but, given the District’s track in matters like this, probably won’t be.

According to that article, Evanston-Skokie School District 65 has embarked on a program of evaluating teachers using a two-part process that will include an appraisal of classroom teaching style and an examination of the test scores of the children taught by that teacher.  The test-score portion is based on the difference between test scores at the beginning and at the end of the school year.

For a teacher to earn an “excellent” rating on a scale of “excellent,” “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory,” he/she is expected to enable no less than one low-scoring child to improve one grade level, while also enabling the rest of the class to gain a full year’s worth of educational growth irrespective of the level at which the child started the year.  And to be fair to the teacher, a child’s test scores can be discounted for appropriate cause – for example, if the child missed a significant portion of school due to illness. 

In order to receive a “merit” pay increase, the teacher must receive at least one “excellent” rating over a period of several years.  That sounds a little like an escape clause, but we can’t tell for sure.

One impetus for such performance-based teacher evaluation is coming from the New Teacher Project, a non-profit group based in Brooklyn, N.Y. which focuses on improving teacher quality.  In a recently-released study, it found that administrators tend to give top ratings to teachers even at schools with miserable test results.  Consequently, teachers are rarely fired, and merit-pay rarely is based on true “merit.”

Ah, yes, the insanity of “tenure” (a/k/a “guaranteed lifetime employment”) for elementary and high school teachers.

Obviously, a change like this will be neither simple or easy, especially when dealing with an industry – and, make no mistake about it, public education is an “industry” which, in Park Ridge, consumes almost two-thirds of our property tax dollars when both elementary and high school are included – that has virtually institutionalized non-accountability of teachers, administrators and the school board itself.

But perhaps one small benefit of the current economic crisis is that such sacred cows as ever-increasing teacher and administrator pay, pensions, etc. are being held just a tad less sacred.

Given the relatively mediocre performance of District 64 students on the ISAT tests which, rightly or wrongly, get the most attention from parents and the media, we think the District owes it to its students and the taxpayers to give a serious look at “piloting” this kind of teacher evaluation – and a program of merit pay based on such evaluations.

Because with homes on the brink or going into foreclosure at record levels and residents hurting financially to an extent not seen in decades, District 64’s business-as-usual just isn’t cutting it anymore.

P.S.:  We want to give a big Watchdog bark-out to Dist. 207 Supt. Ken Wallace for foregoing a $26,950 merit-based pay raise as a symbol of his commitment to reduce District 207’s $17 million “structural deficit.”  He joins Park Ridge Mayor Dave Schmidt, who has foresworn his entire $12,000 annual mayoral salary, as two local government leaders who are at least showing some recognition for real-world employment insecurity and fiscal responsibility, two things about which the pandering politicians, bureaucrats and lifetime government employees too often seem oblivious.

Well done, Mr. Wallace!