I lived in Dallas for 3 years while I was doing a postdoctoral fellowship. Kids in Dallas were going to class in trailers. I was also moonlighting doing curriculum design for TX state testing. I would have to grade sample questions answered by students, and like 90% of the responses I got from high schoolers indicated they were barely literate. (FWIW my background is in neuroscience/cognition, not education, and I was developing science test questions for standardized tests.) I opted not to have my family move down to Dallas during the fellowship after seeing how bad education was there.
There are lots of areas like that throughout Texas, unfortunately. In a disappointing number of the campuses in San Antonio, some of the lowest performing schools are the only place where many students get to eat, get new clothes that fit, enjoy HVAC, and not get assaulted by family or neighbors. Many of those schools have unofficial metrics that they prioritize: were the kids safe, did they eat, did they talk to someone if they needed help? What is considered a monumental success in those schools is if the teacher says something that low-performing students find engaging enough to write down.
These are the schools that the state is shutting down. Many of the students are left in a lurch without a safe way to get to their new school. These are generally in areas with high minority representation. It’s almost like Texas’s goal is to fail specific groups of kids.
I lived in Dallas for 3 years while I was doing a postdoctoral fellowship. Kids in Dallas were going to class in trailers. I was also moonlighting doing curriculum design for TX state testing. I would have to grade sample questions answered by students, and like 90% of the responses I got from high schoolers indicated they were barely literate. (FWIW my background is in neuroscience/cognition, not education, and I was developing science test questions for standardized tests.) I opted not to have my family move down to Dallas during the fellowship after seeing how bad education was there.
There are lots of areas like that throughout Texas, unfortunately. In a disappointing number of the campuses in San Antonio, some of the lowest performing schools are the only place where many students get to eat, get new clothes that fit, enjoy HVAC, and not get assaulted by family or neighbors. Many of those schools have unofficial metrics that they prioritize: were the kids safe, did they eat, did they talk to someone if they needed help? What is considered a monumental success in those schools is if the teacher says something that low-performing students find engaging enough to write down.
These are the schools that the state is shutting down. Many of the students are left in a lurch without a safe way to get to their new school. These are generally in areas with high minority representation. It’s almost like Texas’s goal is to fail specific groups of kids.