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Based on my experience as a Math Teacher in San Antonio for nearly 2 decades, primarily at the Community College level, it was painfully obvious to my colleagues and I that far too many of our students (70-75%) were entering college with serious deficiencies in reading comprehension and/or basic math skills. I am a data driven person, and my concerns regarding the quality of education received by our NEISD students come directly from two sources: NEISD and the Texas Education Agency (TEA). The data concerning high school grades over the past five years came from an Open Records request made directly to NEISD. It is summarized in the File Share section of this website with the excel spreadsheet file named "Grade Inflation NEISD". The data regarding recent STAAR test results comes from the TEA website and are also available in the File Share section. "STAAR Performance NEISD 2022-23 both years" and "STAAR Performance NEISD 2018-19" are pdf files directly downloaded from the TEA website, while "NEISD STAAR 2018-19-22-23" is an excel spreadsheet summarizing the relevant information. All of these files are available for download.
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I want to share an experience I had as a private tutor to a student at Roosevelt HS. During the Spring Semester about 8 years ago, I was asked to tutor a student taking the Advanced Placement (AP) class known as BC Calculus. Every high school in the District offers to different AP Calculus, AB and BC. If successful, an AB student would receive college credit for one semester of college level Calculus. A successful BC student would earn two semesters of college Calculus. My first question to the young man was to ask if he wanted me to help him prepare for the AP exam. He told me he was not going to take the exam and would be taking the first semester of Calculus when he got to college. I then asked him if wanted my help to improve his grade. He said no, as he was getting an A in the course. I then gave him the assessment of algebra skills we gave to our Precalculus students (how strong your algebra skills are is a reliable indicator of your ability to learn calculus. I was stunned that he struggled even with pretty simple problems from early in a high school Algebra I course. Based on the data from NEISD, and my extensive experience with recent high school grads, I'm concerned that this situation is far more typical than I could ever have suspected occurring in NEISD.
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