New Tech High School at B.F. Darrell is one of the North Texas schools most affected by COVID-19.
A new ranking by Houston-based nonprofit Children at Risk lists the Dallas ISD school as a “red flag” school. It a campus that’s usually ranked high academically but experienced “the most significant decreases in academic performance between academic years 2018-19 and 2020-21.”
“It is more important than ever to monitor our students’ progress in a meaningful way,” Children at Risk writes on its website.
The school, formerly known as A. Maceo Smith, is ranked second on the list of “red flag” high schools in North Texas. Nearly 2,000 schools were evaluated in North Texas. Of them, 105 were pandemic-resilient schools, and 388 were red flag schools.
Pandemic resilience indicates schools that have a history of high performance but have kept or improved academic performance throughout the pandemic and have 75% or more students classified as economically disadvantaged.
One other DISD school, Alex Sanger Preparatory School, was also on the red flag list.
Here are some other data points:
- Only 19% of schools with predominantly economically disadvantaged students were ranked as pandemic resilient. In Texas, almost 40% of schools serve predominantly disadvantaged populations.
- Of about 8,000 public schools in Texas evaluated, 27% were found to have a decrease in academic performance between 2018-19 and 2020-21.
