Series on tenure honored

Kudos to Scott Reeder, Illinois Capitol bureau chief for the Small Newspaper Group, news series “The Hidden Costs of Tenure,” won the $10,000 Clark Mollenhoff Award for Excellence in Investigative Reporting. The series used information from more than 1,500 Freedom of Information Act requests to discover that just two teachers out of about 95,500 in Illinois are fired for poor performance.

“What we found was that (teacher evaluations) have for the most part become just kind of ritualistic endeavors,” Reeder said Friday. “Only one out of every 930 evaluations results in a teacher receiving an unsatisfactory. In the last 10 years, 83 percent of Illinois school districts have never given any tenured teacher an unsatisfactory evaluation. It would appear that the legislation had little impact.”

Naturally, our elected leaders jumped at the opportunity to fix this problem, regardless of any the political clout of the teachers’ unions.

As a result of the stories, legislation was introduced this year to mandate that school districts release general data on how many satisfactory and unsatisfactory evaluations they give. It was not enacted, however.

Of course it wasn’t.

I wonder just how many of our problems here in Peoria School District 150 could be fixed if the school board had the power to fire bad or mediocre teachers, and actually exercised that power?