Most kids in AISD can’t read.
AISD is failing our Austin children. Look at this chart and weep. It shows third-grade reading proficiency in each AISD elementary school.
(Each green circle represents an elementary school. For comparison sake, each blue triangle represents an elementary school in Eanes ISD, a wealthy neighboring district. The underlying data is from 2019, pre-pandemic. Graph from Education Consumers Foundation.)
Bottom line: most kids in AISD can’t read.
There are elementary schools in Austin where 2 out of 10 kids can’t read.
There are elementary school in Austin where 5 out of 10 kids can’t read.
There are elementary schools in Austin where 9 out of 10 kids can’t read.
Pride Week parties divert resources from academic subjects.
Given these abysmal scores, how can AISD justify spending any resources on anything but reading recovery?
Teaching kids to read should be guiding every decision made by every employee of the district. Every dollar, every minute of time, every square inch of bulletin-board space should be put to teaching reading.
Did you know the district has a six-person equity team and around a dozen (?) Social & Emotional Learning coaches? Why not take all the salaries devoted to these programs—well over a million dollars in salaries for programs that cannot quantitatively show any improvement in student lives—and redirect them to literacy education? Take all those people, planning hours, inservice hours and park them at the school with the lowest reading scores.
Austin ISD employees talk nonstop about their commitment to equity. What a joke. Equity is found through academic achievement, which starts with reading. Even if baloney theories of equity were true, none of it matters until these kids can read.
Pride Week parties make teaching harder.
As one AISD teacher explains, in no uncertain terms, celebrating Pride Week interrupts teaching:
Every member of the Board of Trustees should be asked to explain how they allow these interruptions and allow resources to be spent on anything but reading.
Look at the interruptions planned in just one ELEMENTARY school:
No wonder teachers can’t do their jobs.
Party planning is easier than teaching kids to read.
Why would teachers and administrators spend so much time and so many resources on Pride Week?
Because splashy party planning is loud and attention grabbing; tutoring students is quiet and mundane. Party planning shines the light on the planner; tutoring students shines a light on the readers. Party planning fulfills the needs of the planner; tutoring students fulfills the needs of the student. Party planning allows for teaching about the planner’s pet interests; tutoring students gives the students skills so they can learn about their own interests. Party planning at a high-achieving school is more comfortable than driving across town and helping in a struggling school.
At the end of the day, party planning is easier than teaching kids to read.
Party planning distracts parents from the failures of AISD.
Splashy parties with t-shirts and art projects feel busy. They get noticed. The fill the halls with virtue-signaling pictures and posters. These parties act like lightning rods…to keep parents from noticing that a district is rotting from within.
And my goodness, if you were in charge of a district in which most kids can’t read (and if you weren’t very good at your job) wouldn’t that be what you’d want most—to keep everyone from noticing?
No matter how much you love Pride Week, teaching kids to read is always more important and, until AISD masters reading instruction, it should be the one-and-only focus of the district. In the long run, reading changes lives; whereas, party planning is just sound and fury, which in the end, accomplishes nothing.