Student Achievement Rising In Urban Texas Schools

DALLAS (AP) – Achievement test scores at big-city school districts in Texas still lag far behind their suburban and rural counterparts but they’re making great strides and narrowing the gap, according to a report by an education think tank released Wednesday.

A study of 37 of the nation’s largest urban school systems by The Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., found that city schools are improving more than other school districts in their respective states.

In Texas, six urban school districts were included in the study: Austin, Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio.

Three of those – Dallas, Austin and San Antonio – are among the top 10 gainers nationally.

The study examined state test scores and demographic information, including race/ethnicity and the percentage of disadvantaged students (those receiving free or reduced lunch), from 2000 to 2007.

It was designed to determine how big-city school districts fared when compared to their suburban and rural peers. The study was able to standardize scores between states, even those using different tests.

Dallas showed the biggest improvement among the large Texas cities, and was 2nd overall nationally. New Orleans topped the list, while Detroit, one of eight districts whose performance declined during the years studied, was last.

In 2000, Dallas was outscored by 100 percent of the state’s school districts. By 2007, just 90 percent of suburban and rural districts did better than Dallas – a significant improvement given its demographics, the study’s author said.

Dallas school superintendent Michael Hinojosa embraced the latest findings.

“This is refreshing,” said Hinojosa, whose district is still reeling from a financial crisis that forced the layoffs of several hundred teachers last fall.

“Sometimes you can’t be a prophet in your own land,” he said. “We know we’re doing better but no one seems to recognize it. For the Brookings Institution to recognize this is a big boost to our community.”

Hinojosa credited a realignment of the curriculum so that students who move during the school year will find the same curriculum at each Dallas campus.

In addition, he said stable leadership that stresses academic performance may have also played a role.

Before 2001, Dallas had had a revolving door of superintendents, five in six years. Hinojosa arrived in 2005.

“We’ve put systems in place and taken away excuses,” Hinojosa said.

Elsewhere in Texas, Austin was 4th, San Antonio 7th, El Paso, 15th, Houston 17th and Fort Worth was 19th among the nation’s largest urban districts.

“We’re quite pleasantly surprised,” said Betty Burks, deputy superintendent for teaching and learning for the San Antonio school district.

She said San Antonio school officials are putting their focus on “what’s happening in the classroom” and making sure teachers get the training and support they need to educate children in an urban environment.

“It’s not where we want it to be; that’s what continual improvement is all about,” Burks said.

The next step, she stressed, is to graduate more students and send a higher percentage on to college.

Unlike their more affluent counterparts, urban school districts are more likely to grapple with high drop out rates, mobile or migrant students, poverty, limited/non-English speaking pupils and, in some cases, less qualified math and science teachers, experts say.

In some ways, the Brown Center research mirrors other recent studies including “Beating the Odds,” a 2008 report by The Council of the Great City Schools, which found student achievement rising in the nation’s largest urban public school systems.

The Brown Center study differs in that it computed how urban school districts are doing relative to other districts in the same state.

Calling the improvement “a good news story,” Tom Loveless, Senior Fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy and author of the report said Wednesday that “we need to temper our celebration.”

“Progress has been made but we still have a long way to go,” Loveless said.

Although accountability systems, mayoral control, school choice and class size are among the more popular interventions touted recently, he cautioned jumping to conclusions about what caused the achievement gains.

Loveless said more information is needed to really know what contributes to a district’s successes or failures and called for a national inventory of school policies and practices to track that data.

Still, the report acknowledged that Texas was ahead of the curve, having implemented an accountability system that rewards or sanctions schools and districts based on test scores long before it was federally mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

Last fall, more Texas schools received the state’s top accountability ratings than the previous year, with 370 districts ranked either exemplary or recognized in 2008 compared to 244 the year before.

Education Commissioner Robert Scott noted that test scores across the state were improving despite the increasing difficulty of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, the state’s standardized exam.

The number of school districts receiving the lowest ranking, academically unacceptable, decreased to 37 in 2008, from 56 unacceptable districts in the 2007 school year.

By LINDA STEWART BALL, Associated Press Writer

(Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)