This document from the board book of the December 17, 2013 El Paso Independent School District board of managers meeting raised my eyebrows.
The state of Texas now tries to measure each individual student’s academic progress from year to year. Some will argue that the standardized tests are not good indicators of what the students are learning, but the tests are what the state wants to use.
The board presentation summarizes the results by high school and the feeder schools that serve it. Three slides are shown for each high school, overall student progress, students that are categorized as English language learners, and finally special education students.
Overall student progress
The slides give us three numbers for each category of learning:
- The number of students that did not make adequate progress
- The number of students that did meet the state’s progress goal
- The number of students that exceeded the goal
The portions highlighted in yellow show areas where a school had half or more of the students that did not make the expected progress. There are some turquoise segments that show areas where the school and it’s students did better than expected.
Some of the results are horrible. At Ross Middle School out of 154 7th grade math students 144 of them scored below the state’s expectation. Then somehow at the same school when measuring the 8th grade algebra students the state found that out of 74 students a whopping 52 of them exceeded the state standard and only 4 of them were below the standard.
What does this mean?
Are the state tests inappropriate? Do our students have some disadvantage? Are the poor results and the good results the product of different teachers?
I suppose that this document can cause many debates.
The fact remains however that we are not meeting the state’s expectations. Does this predict accreditation problems in the future?
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Interesting! We are out of town and while chit chatting with role on two different occasions business people asked us what aparents did about our poor school system and the bilingual and duel language issue. There companies could not get familiese to move to the area. We are in a tourist area with good food service and people who are happy to help you they greet and speak to you in English food is excellent and on par with cost of poor quality in El Paso. The problem is we’re shut up to keep from being called bigots while our kids get the short r Sent from my iPhone
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System stinks keep the kids dumb in Ppttrrsville
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I don’t think anyone at EPISD knows wtf is going on. The supt. has no educational experience and the state managers board insists on paying him $300K+. And now he’s recruiting his “cabinet.” What is in their minds?
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