A neighborhood high school and middle school are on the state’s “unacceptable” list due to results of the Texas Education Agency TAKS testing conducted in 2010-2011.
Hillcrest High School and Franklin 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, Woodrow Wilson High School and J.L. Long Middle School in Lakewood/East Dallas also are listed as “unacceptable”.)
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. A quick glance at the numbers for each school, for example, doesn’t show any subgroups below the 50 percent line this year, indicating that the “unacceptable” ranking is likely a carry-over from a subgroup’s performance last year.
In fact, the TAKS results show progress in most of the subgroup categories year-over-year, so even though both schools are headed in the right direction, they’re still tagged with an “unacceptable” rating.
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:
