Report: No teeth in teacher ratings.

Byline: Carlos Sadovi

Jul. 30--Even though 87 Chicago public schools were deemed failing by the district for two years in a row, none of the teachers in the majority of the schools received an unsatisfactory rating on their evaluations, according to a report released Monday.

The report, based on hiring and other employee information from Chicago Public Schools, calls for replacing the evaluation system for teachers with one that more closely links their performance with students' academic achievement.

"This system doesn't have any teeth and is not useful," said Tim Daly, president of The New Teacher Project, a New York-based non-profit group that conducted the study. The group, which has studied other urban districts, works with school officials, universities and state agencies across the nation to increase the teacher pool.

"If I'm a parent in the school district, I know there is accountability for kids: [They] get held back if they don't perform," Daly said. "I'd assume in a school where things are not going well there would be signs in the performance evaluation system [of teachers]. What shocked us was we didn't find those."