East Dallas’ public schools are supposed to be among the best in the DISD, which left a lot of people wondering why seven of them were rated so poorly by the state’s education agency.
“We’re angry and disturbed and upset by what happened,” says Ann Jones, the president of the Woodrow Wilson High School PTA, whose school was one of the seven. “Whether it’s fair or not, I can’t say. But it’s very disturbing to have someone say we have fallen so far in a year.”
The seven schools cited as either low-performing or unacceptable were Lipscomb, Zaragoza, Connor and Lakewood elementaries, Spence and Long middle schools, and Woodrow. Lipscomb and Zaragoza were low-performing; the others were unacceptable, Woodrow for its dropout rate.
“I’m not trying to make excuses, because I believe in accountability testing,” says Sandy Kress, who represents East Dallas on the DISD board of trustees. “But the first thing I tell parents who call me and ask me what this means is that the testing system has some flaws in it. The problem is that this system is a crude system, and the state doesn’t have the formula to do it right. They will get there, but they didn’t this year.”
Neighborhood teachers and administrators say the ratings, compiled by the Texas Education Agency, were based on test scores from some grades, and not the entire school. That means that if one or two grades tested poorly, the entire school was downgraded, regardless of what was happening elsewhere.
“I know that we have to look at the whole picture and not just at some test scores,” says Jones, whose youngest daughter is a junior at Woodrow.
“And we have to figure out what we can do to turn this around for those who tested poorly.”
Rodney Davis of the DISD says the district will work with unacceptable and low-performing schools to raise their performances.
“We’re going to give those schools more money this year,” he says. “They’ll also be receiving more staff and assistance, as well as new technology for keeping track of attendance and student relocation.”
The report rated every school and district in the state and is part of the legislature’s plan to improve public education in Texas. The DISD was rated acceptable, although 29 of its schools were rated unacceptable.
“I thought it was a little demoralizing to a lot of my colleagues who were working very hard,” says Jane Lampton, the principal of Robert E. Lee Elementary whose school was rated as acceptable and therefore wasn’t on her “list.” “All of us want 90 percent of our students to be passing the test.”
The report divided schools and districts into five categories: exemplary, recognized, acceptable, unacceptable and low-performing. The TEA cited the Richardson Independent School District, for instance, as unacceptable because of its student dropout rate, which was higher than six percent.
Joey Lozano of the Austin-based TEA, says the report was part of a bipartisan effort between the TEA and individual schools and districts to make real improvements, and not an “expose” on the poor status of schools.
There were several ways a school could be rated unacceptable or low-performing, including:
• If 20 percent or less of its students from a specific minority or economically disadvantaged group passed all the sections on the state’s standardized test, it was rated unacceptable.
• If 20 percent or less of all of its students passed each section on the standardized test, it was rated low-performing.
• If its dropout rate exceeds six percent overall, it was rated low-performing. If the dropout rate exceeded six percent for the aforementioned groups, it received an unacceptable ranking.
