In case the district wants to listen.
Chavez High School graduate Ximena Acosta is about to leave Houston to attend Vanderbilt University.
That academic achievement happened in spite of, not because of, Houston ISD, Acosta said. She told media at the Houston Federation of Teachers’ office last week that high schools are removing high-performing students from eighth-grade algebra, “kids who could have gotten ahead are now being … denied” the chances Acosta received.
“In reality, we’ve had advocates. We had luck,” she said. “We had moments where someone stepped in and opened doors that the system would try to keep closed. HISD has always had many problems long before the state takeover, and my biggest concern is access to opportunity and the illusion of meritocracy. The takeover hasn’t fixed this. It’s only made it worse.”
Her testimony joined that of a few other HISD high school students, who seek to create student groups to protest the state takeover. The student activists are affiliated with Community Voices for Public Education, a group opposed to the takeover. The students complained about teacher turnover and a lack of wraparound services to provide necessities.
[…]
[Emily] Yanez, a Northside High School junior, said teachers were overwhelmed and many resigned because they were “forced into new… classrooms without warning.”
“Some were told to teach subjects they had no training in,” she said, among several examples of reassignments and turnover. “Like my biology teacher being reassigned to physics, which later caused freshmen to shuffle because my biology teacher had not once in her teaching career at my school taught physics.”
Yanez called into question why state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles is touting higher state exam scores when freshmen are placed in physics with no background in Algebra I and geometry as a strategy to increase biology state exam scores.
“Tell me, why is it that students, parents and teachers protest against you? Why is it that for three years there have been walkouts dedicated to your actions?” the high school junior questioned. “You should be grateful that we are protesting against you, because this should tell you that we are worried about our education and we want change.”
It’s good that the test scores are up, but it takes more than that to be successful. These students don’t represent everyone’s opinion, but I don’t see anyone out there protesting in favor of Mike Miles. Maybe that should tell us something.