James Madison High: Taks Report

¶ … James Madison High: TAKS Report

Please name the campus for which you are reviewing AEIS data and provide a link to the school's report card.

As an administrator and a participant in the formal assessment of the James Madison High School located in Dallas, Texas, it is my primary interest that each sub-group within is properly understood in terms of needs and strengths. The school's Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) performance report card, which can be found at http://www.tea.state.tx.us/cgi/sas/broker, provides useful array of data to the benefit of our full understanding of that which is required to help our students where necessary.

How did each sub-group perform on last year's administration of the TAKS test?

The performance of various subgroups reinforces the overall trend suggested in initial report card findings that there has been an overall positive trend for the school, with most subgroups consisting with this pattern. In all subjects, it is clear that women as a general population excelled, outscoring males in all categories and enjoying greater levels of improvement as well. African-American groups have evidenced to be statistically approved in all categories as well, with the most significant gains made in reading. By contrast, Hispanic students have experienced a declination in most areas. Special Education students, while in most regards persisting at lower percentage success rates, have nonetheless experienced modest to dramatic statistical improvement in all categories. This is especially true in social studies, where an apparent focus on improvement has rendered a remarkable report of 99% success and passage.

3. What sub-groups need support and how is your campus addressing these issues?

Still, existing at inherently low success rates, Special Ed. Students are a group in need of continued and individualized attention. Such attention must also be applied though to groups which have suffered a decline in a number of categories. Particularly, the Hispanic groups have been shown to experience a declining rate of success in reading and in science. So too has this been true for male students as a whole population, as they have experienced ongoing declines in reader, social studies and science.

4. What are you doing as a school to improve the tested subject areas?

These groups will be subjected to greater scrutiny as the school seeks to offer some resolution to such declines. Especially in reading and science where assistance appears to be absolutely necessary, the department chair will use elective classes as an opportunity to remove students in need from class and offer them intense one-on-one instruction in writing, reading and vocabulary. This training diversion will occur across six weeks, with a test at the beginning and a retest at the end to measure and profile individual progress in subjects of the greatest need.

Among these subjects, science is clearly that subject area, with declines for the entire school, for all groups, and even for those which have excelled in other areas. For those which have struggled, this area has presented the greatest difficulty with severe declinations of success rate impacting Hispanic students and males. The projected approach should help to pinpoint ways of meeting these shortcomings through students of the greatest need.