Dallas ISD Versus the World: Playing Around With the Bush Institute's 'Global Report Card'

Dallas ISD Versus the World: Playing Around With the Bush Institute's "Global Report Card"

By Robert Wilonsky Tue., Sep. 27 2011 at 8:03 AM

From the Global Report Card/George W. Bush Institute

The George W. Bush Institute this morning unveiled its Global Report Card, which compares and contrasts 13,636 U.S. school districts with their in-state peers and national and international counterparts. Long story short: U.S. school districts, even those considered affluent, are squarely middle-of-the-pack'ers when it comes to math and reading scores. "Parents should be concerned that their children will be competing in the jobs market with young people abroad who are outperforming their kids," says study co-author Jay Greene, an education prof at the University of Arkansas.

Greene and co-author Josh McGee break it down in the new issue of Education Next, where they note that "affluent suburban districts may be outperforming their large urban neighbors, but they fail to achieve near the top of international comparisons." Among the examples cited: Plano, where the average student is "at the 64th percentile in math relative to our global comparison group." As opposed to, say, Highland Park, where the average student, according to the study, would perform better than 88 percent of their international peers in math and 91 percent in reading.

You'll find those figures here: at the interactive Global Report Card, where we find out this morning that the Dallas ISD's way behind ... well, most everyone, as you can see in the screen grab above.

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Mike

Why are these numbers bad? The AVERAGE Highland Park student is better than 90% of the global students? The AVERAGE Plano student is better than 75% of the global students. If your score is 50+, by definition, you are not falling behind. Suburbs that you'd expect to do well were over 50%. Suburbs that you expected to be mediocre were slightly under 50%.

Chris Danger

Not surprised at all by these findings...The main problem in this state (and country) is we've become fat and lazy when it came to education. Instead of attempting to achieve more, we settled. American education is going to have to do three things to improve itsself:

A) Get back to basics by making sure children know how to read/spell and perform basic math at or above their grade level.

B) Make parents more responsible for their "little darlings" who they drop off in what they think is "state mandiated day care".

C) Get rid of standardized testing as a whole and actually teach young minds to learn

Guest

How do we know we've done A without C? Not trying to be glib, just trying to find an answer.

Rangers100

Also, move out of the burbs and back into the city.

Not likely to happen as cities are messy and isolationism is easy.

Cities matter. Suburbs don't.

http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...

Sam

Hmm, Mexico is not listed. It would be interesting to see how Texas schools compare to those in Mexico...

Maybe this info will cause some suburbanites to get off their high horses..then again they probably won't.

You can definitely give Dallas schools a plus for acclimating kids to the real world. EQ if not IQ in some cases. And there are quite a few gems in the district where kids can compete globally through magnets, AP and IB, despite the dire results of the whole.