How does Lake Highlands High School compare to other Dallas high schools in terms of TAKS scores and state academic rankings? Are this year’s drops indicative of something amiss at the school?
In this week’s podcast, we posed these questions (recently discussed on the Advocate Back Talk Lake Highlands blog) to LHHS social studies teacher Casey Boland. If your children haven’t been in one of her classes, you might recognize her name from the Hate Monster column she wrote for the Dallas Morning News last fall.
Boland, quite frankly, doesn’t spend much time thinking about the TAKS tests. That’s not because she doesn’t care about them; it’s because she doesn’t really need to. The students who take her rigorous Advanced Placement class — or any AP class(es), she says — have no problem passing, and she’s thrilled to see the “100 percent passing rate” when her students’ TAKS tests come back every year. Boland’s testing concerns have to do with the AP exam, with challenges such as how to teach American history to a student who recently moved to the United States from Nepal. For her, the biggest issue is college readiness, an area in which Richardson ISD is known to do well.
Boland shares why her “privilege” of knowing her students personally makes her believe that apples to apples comparisons are rarely that simple. It’s a podcast that every parent of a Lake Highlands student should listen to, and that any neighbor concerned about test scores and school rankings shouldn’t miss.
Listen to the Lake Highlands podcast by subscribing on iTunes, or listen to the podcast below.
