Round Rock ISD is thrilled to be recognized by our exceptional Texas public school partners. Dacia Rivers, editorial director of Texas School Business, features Round Rock ISD’s advanced academics program in the 2021-2022 15th Annual Bragging Rights Issue. Texas School Business is a Texas Association of School Administrators (TASA) publication.
According to The Education Trust, across the country, Black students make up 15% of eighth-graders, but only 10% of the eighth-graders enrolled in algebra. Latino students make up 28% of eighth-graders, but they are just 18% of the students in the advanced math course. At the high school level, 15% of students are Black, but just 9% of Black students are enrolled in at least one Advanced Placement course. Latino students make up nearly 25% of high schoolers, but only 21% of them are enrolled in AP courses.
In Round Rock ISD, north of Austin, the district saw these discrepancies among its own students, and administrators decided that something needed to change. Since math skills tend to have the biggest impact on student success in college and beyond, that’s where they started, about three years ago. Through work with the National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity, administrators at the middle school level learned that their messaging and the way students enrolled in advanced math courses were causing inadvertent roadblocks, especially for students of color.
Lynda Garinger, principal of Hopewell Middle School, said the biggest obstruction for these students had to do with a lack of parent education. Parents in the district were trusting the process and going with the flow, and schools had stringent requirements in place for getting into advanced math courses. Garinger decided to get rid of these gatekeepers and go in a whole new direction.
“We had processes that were excluding students,” Garinger says. “Once we realized that, we wanted to do away with it.”
Everyone working at the Hopewell campus went through training for implicit bias and equity coaching. The area superintendent and curriculum director worked with teachers, coaching them on how to ensure they were using equitable practices in their classrooms. Teachers were trained on data-driven instruction, learning how to look at where students are struggling and then working with that data to make sure all students are successful.
With staff trained and on-board, Garinger moved on to address the parent education component. Round Rock ISD middle schools held multiple parent information meetings at all of the elementary schools that feed into their campuses, so parents could meet with middle school principals. At these meetings, staff started the conversation about the effects that accelerated math courses can have on students’ college successes.
To ensure that every family could attend staff held meetings at different times during the day, to provide the availability to families with different work schedules. They held meetings in Spanish. At these meetings, they invited parents to sign up their students for advanced math, with no testing requirements, no hurdles to jump.
“They basically said, ‘You tell us yes, they’re in,’” says Lora Darden, executive director of future readiness in the district. “Then they did a really intentional job of making sure the teachers and instructional coaches had the strategies to back it up. They’ve taken care of everybody.”
Garinger says that the schools examined the past assessment data for students who opted in. If they needed a little extra help, they were invited to attend a summer math camp to help get them up to speed before classes began.
Within three years, most of which have occurred during the disruption of a global pandemic, Round Rock ISD has seen the benefits. Garinger says that Hopewell has doubled the number of underrepresented students taking advanced math at the school. She believes that at the end of the school year, the school’s STAAR results will reflect the improvement. She has good reason to be hopeful — thus far, on common assessments, underrepresented students in advanced classes are performing just as well as their counterparts.
Due to the success at the middle school level, high schools in Round Rock ISD jumped on board about a year ago, changing the way students sign up for advanced classes. Through a partnership with Harvard University, doctoral student Danielle Duarte, now a doctor, came to the district to spend a year studying, learning, and working with administrators to help increase access to advanced academics.
Rather than deciding the adults in the room knew what was best, administrators started interviewing students, asking them why they took a particular class or why they didn’t. They invited underrepresented students who were already enrolled in advanced classes to serve as academic ambassadors, helping to encourage their peers to take advantage of the advanced courses as well.
“We learned that kids would really appreciate it if they could be placed in a classroom where there are other students who look like they do,” Darden says. “It’s not easy to be the only kid who looks like you, to have teachers who look nothing like you and don’t have that same lived and shared experience. We need diversity.”
At one Round Rock ISD high school, administrators pulled the academic records for any student who had an 80 or higher for several years in a row in a certain content area and invited that student to enroll in a class that would earn them college credit. Teachers, counselors, and administrators called these families at home, offering the advanced coursework option. Darden says more than half of those students said “yes” to the change. Out of that group, only two students have since decided to drop the advanced class.
The movement is expanding to other schools in the district. One school is planning to hold student breakfast meetings, inviting underrepresented students who show academic strengths to learn more about the benefits of taking advanced classes and earning dual credit.
Round Rock ISD’s student ambassadors serve as mentors to these students, helping them navigate the advanced courses.
“The teachers work with small groups, but the peers work together to help each other so they can all be successful,” Garinger says. “Kids are going to need more support in these classes, and with the right support, they can have the same access to opportunities as their peers. What we are passionate about is that students from any background should have the same opportunities when it comes to education. We’re a public education institution, and that’s our job.”
For other school districts that are trying to increase underrepresented students’ access to advanced courses, Darden and Garinger both suggest starting with the teachers and parents.
“You can’t just throw teachers into it,” Garinger says. “There has to be some work done on growing the mindset of the teachers. We’ve seen a fabulous turnaround in a lot of our staff members, not only from the training and the research that we shared with them but through the student growth they’ve seen in their classrooms.”
Garinger believes that Round Rock ISD’s parent information nights were crucial to the success seen in the district. By making personal connections, she has also been able to provide follow-through and support to students as they adjust to advanced courses.
“When students would come into my office and say, ‘It’s too hard, just put me in on-level,’ I’d give them the ‘why’ behind it,” she says. “Usually, they leave my office saying, ‘OK, I can do this.’ That’s when the growth happens.”
Darden notes that advanced classrooms have instructional coaches in addition to teachers for added support, something she feels makes a huge difference.
“Being able to have that second set of eyes, teachers feel really supported,“ she says. “The projects that we’ve worked on, and this is Dr. Duarte’s term, but they were coined ‘safe to fail,’ because no matter what we learned, even if the project doesn’t go the way you think it’s going to go, you will learn important things. You will be better off than where you were when you started.”
