Two neighborhood high schools and one middle school are on the state’s “unacceptable” list due to results of the Texas Education Agency TAKS testing conducted in 2010-2011. Woodrow Wilson and Bryan Adams high schools, and J.L. Long Middle School, join 43 DISD campuses on the latest list of underperforming schools. (Test results are listed in detail below. And if you’re a misery-loves-company type, Hillcrest High School and Franklin Middle School in Preston Hollow also are listed as “unacceptable”.)
Before you push the panic button, or if you’re new to all of this state testing jargon and ratings, just know that during the past few years, all three of these schools have been flirting with the “unacceptable” rating even if they haven’t been on the list (and in some years, they have been “unacceptable”). As a result, the difference between any of these schools last year, when the test was conducted, and this year is probably negligible in terms of the type of education students are receiving.
Also, remember that all it takes for a school to be on the list is for one subgroup (African-American, Hispanic, white, American Indian, Asian, Pacific Islander, “two or more races” or “economically disadvantaged”) to perform below 50 percent passing on Reading, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies or the tests combined in two of the past three years. As you’ll note if you check out the Woodrow results, African-American students passed the math portion of the test at 49 percent in 2011 (compared with 52 percent in 2010), and the American Indian subgroup passed math at 43 percent compared with an 86 percent passing rate in 2010 (it must be a very small subgroup to have that big of a swing in results).
There are a lot of conclusions that can be drawn from a thorough study of the results, and the overriding one I see is that passing rates overall are low enough that even if none of these schools were on the “unacceptable” list, there is still a lot of work to be done.
However, as I have told myself and anyone else who would listen over the years, our public schools have a lot of challenges, and the test results simply point out the disparities in who is learning what each year.
Your kid and mine can still get a great education in any of these schools, even if they’re sitting next to other kids who aren’t doing as well — and it can be absolutely no fault of the instructors or administrators.
The school and its instructors can only do so much — if a parent isn’t holding a kid accountable at home, that kid is just about guaranteed to be on the wrong end of these statistics every time. And there are enough family units that fit this description every year that it’s a big hole to dig out of — and apparently, the hole was a little too big last year.
You can review the results straight from TEA by clicking on each school’s name:
