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Illinois lawmakers have approved a measure to undo a requirement that schools must evaluate teachers and school administrators based, in part, on students’ test scores.
The House voted 92-21 to pass Senate Bill 28 on Tuesday. Most Illinois House Republicans voted against the measure, while a few others voted in favor with the majority of House Democrats.
With the passage of Senate Bill 28, the state will allow school districts to decide whether or not students’ test scores evaluate teachers’ and school administrators’ performance in schools. The newly passed bill weakens the Performance Evaluation Reform Act, known as PERA, which was passed in 2010 and required schools to use student growth metrics to evaluate teachers, principals, and assistant principal evaluations.
Senate Bill 28 would take effect on July 1, 2025 if signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
Rep. Laura Faver Dias, a Democrat who sponsored the bill in the House, said it was really easy to move the legislation throughout the General Assembly since it received bipartisan support. The bill also received support from teachers unions and school management groups, which came together to say that using student test scores as a significant factor in teacher evaluations hasn’t been working and is overly burdensome for educators and school administrators, according to Faver Dias.
“We have to have a comprehensive approach to determine if students are learning,” Faver Dias said to Chalkbeat on Wednesday. “Senate Bill 28 does not take away any of that. It just allows that option and discussion to happen at the local level,”
These changes are being made more than a decade after the Obama administration encouraged states to link student performance to teacher evaluations. With the federal government at the time dangling money as an incentive, many states changed their teacher evaluation systems to include student test scores as a significant factor in a teacher’s overall rating.
The Illinois Federation of Teachers, the largest teachers union in Illinois, was a proponent of Senate Bill 28. Dan Montgomery, president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers, told Chalkbeat that the union is happy to see Senate Bill 28 pass because using standardized tests for teacher evaluations have been problematic in the past.
“Teachers, students, parents will tell you there’s just too much standardized testing going on in schools. I always think to myself, as a teacher, I taught my school English, you need some time between assessments, right?” said Montgomery. “You’ve got to work with the kids. You have to do certain kinds of interventions to help them learn better. So just repeated testing is usually not very functional.”
Between 2009 and 2013, the number of states linking test scores and teacher evaluations jumped from 15 to 41.
But since then, there’s been backlash to including student test scores in educator evaluations. Research in Chicago found Black teachers in schools serving high populations of low-income students were more likely to get poor ratings after the changes went into effect.
A 2024 report commissioned by the Illinois State Board of Education written by the American Institutes for Research notes that other factors outside of a teacher’s control can impact student learning such as family issues, health concerns, or limited access to resources. The report recommended that the state either remove the use of student test scores or reduce how much student test scores count in an educator’s overall evaluation.
Illinois has company when it comes to states shifting away from the Obama-era policies. As of 2022, only 30 states still required test scores to be included in teacher evaluation, down from 43 in 2015, according to a report from the National Council on Teacher Quality.
Some states have modified their laws to decrease how much student test scores factor into an educator’s overall rating. For instance, Colorado revised its teacher evaluation laws in 2022 to reduce the student growth requirement from 50% to 30% of an educator’s overall rating.
Samantha Smylie is the state education reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago covering school districts across the state, legislation, special education and the state board of education. Contact Samantha at ssmylie@chalkbeat.org.
