Rather, I want to focus the attention of readers on extremely important, disturbing data from recent years regarding student achievement in the Dallas ISD. Then, facing those facts, perhaps the community will be on firmer ground to improve and generate better student outcomes.
The nation’s best measure of student achievement is the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In the 2000s, urban districts began participating in NAEP through the Trial Urban District Assessment. Dallas ISD joined the program in 2011 and has seen its students measured every other year until 2019 at the fourth and eighth grade levels in math and reading.
Here’s the troubling news in Dallas: On both eighth grade math and reading, from 2011 through 2019, Black and Hispanic students showed a steady and substantial decline in achievement.
Fourth grade results, on the other hand, are more stagnant than down. In that regard, they resemble the results of other urban districts, such as Houston. So, while we would like more progress, especially given recent emphasis on early education, flatness has been characteristic generally across the land. Even so, however, some districts, such as Miami, have significantly outperformed the others. It can be done.
Yet, for several reasons, it is Dallas ISD’s eighth grade results that should draw our principal concern. First, they’re badly down.
In math, for example, Black students dropped steadily from 264 scale score points in 2011 to 252 in 2019. Hispanic students fell from 276 to 265 during the same period.
In reading, the drop for African American students was from 244 to 234, and for Hispanics, from 246 to 242.
During this period, all eighth grade students in DISD dropped from an average of 274 to 264 in math and from 248 to 242 in reading.