Houston ISD has let parents and students down, yet again. According to a Houston Chronicle article which cites 2022-23 reading screeners, students in the largest school district in Texas are declining in literacy. Despite the school district being plagued with controversy and constant complaints of under-performance, educators insist it isn't their fault.
"It's been like this since before the pandemic, but the pandemic put us in a crisis that unveiled to the world what was happening in HISD with students that are economically disadvantaged, emerging bilinguals or any other special population," says Michelle Williams, a Forest Brook Middle School teacher. According to analysis from Good Reason Houston, "the districts that scored better than HISD tended to have lower percentages of families on food stamps and higher median incomes".
While this may explain why HISD students under-perform students from higher income communities (debatable), it does not explain why HISD has a years long trend of declining literacy.
After the government lockdowns forced students into remote education programs, leaving parents to pick up the slack, HISD received billions of dollars in federal funds. Those funds were meant to decrease the negative impacts of remote learning by hiring more teachers and tutors, however HISD board president Judith Cruz doesn't believe the impact of those investments will show up in test scores until later in the school year.
Despite closing schools, receiving billions in federal funds, and continuing their long established trend of lackluster performance, HISD "adopted a tax rate that will raise more taxes for maintenance and operations than last year's tax rate". While the adopted tax rate for 2022 of 1.0372% is lower than last year, the district will end up with more money due to the enormous increase of tax assessments issued by HCAD last spring.
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