Katy school draws fire for race-separated TAKS rallies

Houstonist has heard a lot of suggestions on how to improve students' TAKS test scores, but Mayde Creek High School's approach may be one of the most unusual: Earlier this month, the school held three TAKS rallies in which students were divided by race. The three rallies — one for black students, one for white students and one for Hispanic students — didn't sit well with some parents, including Deon Franklin. "To me, that"s segregation," Franklin told KHOU. "I don't feel that those kids are getting treated fairly."

The rallies (or "targeted interventions," as it calls them — honestly, that makes us think more of drug rehab than standardized testing, but whatever) were held for students deemed at-risk because of their test scores, and they were intended to help those kids do better on the TAKS, Katy ISD spokesman Steve Stanford said. Stanford defended the separate sessions by pointing to the way the state reports TAKS scores: "The state of Texas, when they look at how our students perform, they break it down by ethnicity," he said. But as Channel 11 noted, ethnicity is just one of a variety of ways TAKS results are broken down, which made some wonder why the school targeted that factor. I would think that they would bring all kids and talk to them at once," parent Amber Queen told the Chronicle.

Stanford said Mayde Creek Principal O.D. Tompkins didn't consider the separate rallies discriminatory and that the rallies didn't violate any school district rules. District officials said it'll be up to individual school principals to decide how, or whether, they want to conduct similar rallies next year.