This is great news! Eastside Memorial High School in Austin will NOT be closed! For years, the school has been threatened with closure or conversion to a charter. The students, parents, teachers, and educators fought to keep their neighborhood school open. It is high poverty and 96% students of color, but the school refused to die.
School leaders brought in the Johns Hopkins Talent Development Group to help them. Everyone rallied to save their school, and they did it.
“At Austin’s Eastside Memorial High School, a new school year began for the first time in years without the familiar threat of closure, mass layoffs or reorganization from above. Its students earned a passing grade from the state last year, ending a run of more than a decade in which at least part of the campus came up short in the state’s ratings. In 2008, it became the first school in Texas closed for poor test performance. Austin ISD has been frantically trying to right the ship ever since.
“So on Tuesday, it was especially sweet to hear Education Commissioner Michael Williams in the school library delivering the good news: “We ain’t closing the school.”
The above quotes come from the Austin Statesman and they are behind a paywall.
The story appears also in The Texas Observer.
Eastside met state standards and raised its graduation rate. It is no longer a”failing school.”
A few years ago, I was in Austin to speak to the state’s school boards and administrators. When I had some free hours, I visited Eastside and spoke to a large gathering of educators, parents, and students. I felt their spirit. I knew they would resist. I urged them to keep fighting. They did. They elected a new school board member who supported the school. They worked together and they won.
Congratulations, Eastside Memorial!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Proof that it takes a village—not a CEO or corporation—to raise and educate our children.
There is great news in keeping the school viable and some evidence in the forward movement on graduation rates. But the news is not all glowing. Perhaps it cannot be given the demographics of the school–about 25% turnover in students meaning an unstable enrollment. You can also see the convoluted measures of “success” used by the Texas Education Agency. TEA has convoluted indices for what “we won” means.
Click to access EastsideAccountability.pdf
While it’s great news that this community school will continue to belong to the community, it won on school reformer’s terms. Rather than be labeled a community school in a low income neighborhood that desperately needs resources to compensate for the diverse challenges poverty presents, it was measured, apparently, through the filter of school reform policy. It lives and dies by the narrow terms set by school reform: test scores and graduation rates. Data driven outputs rather than an array of resources that support the dire human needs in addition to the academic ones.
What,in particular, did Eastside do well?
“The move to bring in IDEA was largely seen as the pet project of Superintendent Carstarphen, who rammed through the proposal–despite the community outcry–with the help of a compliant school board. Shortly after that decision, AISD announced it had received a grant from the pro-charter Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and was entering into a “Compact Collaborative” with a number of area charters and the Texas Charter Schools Association (which is currently suing the state to get more public funding for charters).”
–http://socialistworker.org/2013/02/06/keep-eastside-open
And so now Carstarphen is in Atlanta to work “school turnaround” magic in cahoots with Boston Consulting Group who is being paid by some unnamed philanthropic funders.
I graduated from this school back when it was called A. S. Johnston High School, and part of its problem is the neglect it faced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. JHS was part of 1980s court-ordered desegregation–many of us were bussed out of our (mostly white) neighborhoods to increase diversity at other (mostly non-white) campuses. My classmates and I have always said attending JHS was a positive experience–culturally, academically, and socially. But the district stopped bussing in new students to JHS in 1987, and all the bussed students were gone by 1989-1990. The school was ignored and neglected for a decade, turning over a principal every year, or even more frequently. It was closed and reopened as Eastside Memorial in 2008. Since then, they’ve tried program after program, rebuilding after rebuilding, all with the goal of raising test scores to avoid another closure. And I’m glad to see they’ve improved, especially the graduation rate. But the issue of poverty is huge in the school’s attendance area, and if we only focus on test scores, EMS will never truly be in the clear.
Melissa,
The junior high schooling I attended in Houston was Albert Sidney Johnston Jr. High. Eventually the name and the school disappeared as it was not considered right to honor Confederate heroes.
Austin ISD is now talking about changing other school names for that reason as well.