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here to see 2012 HISD campus PSAT scores.
One kid is a 17-year-old senior getting ready to go on to college who says he can't read even though he's passed all his state tests. Now in his final year of high school, he's playing a gigantic game of catch-up because suddenly it has hit him that he may not be able to skate by in college.
"I ain't going to lie to you. I can't read at all," says Tony (not his real name). "I hate stories that's real long. I panic on long stories. I'm not going to lie. I never liked reading." To get through the book he had to read for English class, Tony read it aloud to his teacher, who coached him through it.
HOUSTON ISD: END OF COURSE TESTING FOR 2012-13 ACADEMIC YEAR
The State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, is the latest state-sanctioned test given to Texas public school students. Passing standards are phased in at a higher level each year; this chart shows how many students would be passing now if future passing standards had already been imposed. — George Scott. Click
here to view larger version.
Courtesy of Billy Reagan
Former superintendent Billy Reagan says many HISD students are not learning how to read, and he backs up the claim with an analysis of national statistics.
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A female classmate of Tony's says she can't get through the stories she reads in school unless someone explains them to her. She's passed all her state tests, too. How? She says she uses classroom-taught "strategies" on her English reading test and that if she underlines and highlights enough and narrows down her options, she has a better chance of guessing right by playing the odds. She failed her math state test because of the word problems, so she employed her English strategies there on the retry attempt and passed.
"You could tell me to read a book all day; I could read a book all day; I probably don't get it. And five minutes later you tell me to write an essay and I'll be over there struggling to write an essay because I don't understand," she explains carefully.
Another senior who passed every state test handed to him says he doesn't fare as well on his benchmark assessments (practice tests given during the school year). "I never thought I had a reading problem," he says. "I thought I had comprehended it but then when I have the questions, I don't know; I think I'm going to get them right but then I get the results and I'm wrong."
These students are not the exception. They are the rule at many schools in HISD, and as such they appear to be breathtakingly unprepared for either college or the work force.
Their HISD principal (we agreed not to name anyone) says that 80 percent of ninth graders arrive at the high school unable to read on grade level. And yet these same kids passed their state of Texas tests in all the years preceding. Most of these teenagers, this principal says, arrive reading at the fourth- or fifth-grade level.
There were several common refrains from these high schoolers in a series of interviews with the Houston Press: I can read but I don't know what the words mean. I can read but not if the story is long or boring. I forget what I read and the questions at the end don't make any sense to me. I wish we could learn one-on-one. I don't like to be embarrassed in class. I need someone to explain it to me along the way. I'd like to have a tutor. A few said they hope to become engineers, figuring that wouldn't require much reading, just math. All said they intend to go to college.
Houston Independent School District is riding the glory train these days. In 2012, it lined up support for the largest bond issue in its history. Winner of the prestigious Broad Prize in 2013 for urban education for the second time in 11 years, it is frequently cited as a success story with a visionary superintendent — Dr. Terry Grier — who knows how to get things done. Its Apollo 20 program — which has cost at least $56 million so far — was engineered to help students at the lowest-performing schools through intensified instruction. In the past few years, student scores were on the rise for the TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) test as it was being phased out to make way for the STAAR (State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness).
But for the past several years, former HISD superintendent Dr. Billy Reagan has done his own annual assessment of standardized tests in the district — which he sends to whoever is superintendent at the time — and according to his calculations, if you're a minority student in HISD — and most of them are — all these good times are passing you by.
An analysis of 2011-2013 results from the national Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test done by Reagan's consulting company, Unlimited Access Educational Systems Inc., shows HISD reading scores "have declined at most middle and elementary grades when compared to scores reported two years ago...Only 29.6 percent of middle school students and 29 percent of elementary students read at or above grade level." (HISD trustees voted in spring 2011 to stop administering the Stanford at the high-school level.)
Many of these kids don't understand the books they're handed — in fact, they don't even understand the written instructions they're supposed to follow, according to Reagan. "Students with scores below the 50th percentile are very likely struggling to understand the instructional materials they are required to read. Students with scores below the 40th percentile can read almost none of the grade-level materials for their grade."