Lots of Woodrow news lately, starting off with our International Baccalaureate program progress update a few days ago. Since then, the DMN has written about a couple of additional neighborhood-school oriented issues, including:
• Former Woodrow football great Sergio Kindle was in the Morning News again, this time as he prepares for his senior year as a defensive end/linebacker for UT’s football team. In the story, both UT coach Mack Brown and Woodrow coach Bobby Estes talk about what they believe will be Kindle’s upcoming breakthrough season.
• Another big DMN research piece explored the connection between student demographics, Dallas-area high schools, their graduation rates and how well their students do at Texas public universities (the story didn’t take into account students attending colleges out-of-state).
According to the lengthy story, Woodrow’s students did extremely well when compared with other DISD schools that have more than 50 percent of students classified as "low income". In fact, among the six DISD schools examined in the survey, the percent of Woodrow graduates who earned a "B" average or higher at Texas public universities was 31 percent, exceeded among DISD high schools only by the School of Government/Law/Law Enforcement at Townview with 32 percent.
To be fair, it appeared that about half of the graduates from higher-income school districts such as RISD, Lewisville, Carrollton-Farmers Branch and Allen were pulling "B" or better grades, but along with higher-income parents typically comes more second- and third-generation college students, which obviously makes for an easier transition for the students.
And for what it’s worth, the top three in terms of students receiving "B" or better grades in Texas public universities were Highland Park (62 percent), Plano East (57 percent) and a tie between Carrollton-Farmers Branch, J.J. Pearce in RISD and Lake Highlands in RISD (55 percent).
