While an ongoing lawsuit between a number of public school systems and the Texas Education Agency has kept Dallas ISD parents in the dark as to the district’s accountability rating, last school year’s STAAR results lend insight into how bad some of its campuses are still doing.
Kennedy-Curry Middle School, for instance, which is located in Dallas ISD trustee Maxie Johnson’s education district, earned a 59 out of 100 for its student achievement outcomes during the 2021-2022 school year, a score determined by the Texas Education Agency (TEA).
Per the accountability report from that year, only 27% of Kennedy-Curry students scored at grade level on their STAAR exams on average. Dallas ISD’s districtwide at-grade-level score was 41%, while the state average was 51%.
Last school year, according to a TEA profile that did not include an adjusted overall average for STAAR exam performance, scores did improve slightly; however, they still fell below district and state averages in individual testing categories despite the hard work of the school’s dedicated educators.
For instance, the share of students who scored at grade level on their reading/language art exams was 34%. The district’s share was 47%, and it was 53% statewide.
In math, only 32% of Kerry-Curry students scored at grade level, lower than the 47% clocked by Dallas ISD and the 39% across the state.
Eighth-grade students in social studies appeared to do the worst, with only 6% scoring at grade level. The district and statewide metrics were 26% and 31%, respectively.
According to the campus’ TEA profile from the 2021-2022 school year, 51.7% of its students were African American, and 43.9% were Hispanic. Some 91.2% of the student population was designated “economically disadvantaged,” and 32.1% were “emergent bilingual/English learners.”
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, Dallas ISD joined dozens of other school districts in spending taxpayer money to stall the release of accountability reports for the 2022-2023 school year, arguing the updated grading methodology would essentially move the goalpost and give parents the impression that their children’s schools deteriorating.
Polling conducted by The Dallas Express showed that almost half of respondents felt that mismanagement was the main reason for Dallas ISD’s poor academic performance.