The vote was eight to seven, with one member recently appointed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to fill a vacant seat breaking the tie. 

Those who decided to put the program on a list of approved curricula said they don’t think the lessons push Christianity.

“There’s a line between indoctrination or evangelism and education,” said Will Hickman, a Republican board member from Houston. “In my view, these stories are on the education side.”

But Democrat Staci Childs, who also represents the Houston area, pointed to Louisiana, where a federal court has blocked a state law requiring public school classrooms to display the 10 Commandments, as a sign of the potential legal battles ahead.

That ruling is “closely aligned to what will happen if some kindergarten or first grade student’s parents were upset about what they were learning in class,” she said. 

The vote came after a day of public comments over the proper role of the Bible in curriculum at a time when evangelical Christians are gaining political strength. Conservative Christians also see the incoming Trump administration as a chance to further advance their faith in the realms of education and public policy. Supporters of the state-developed curriculum, first unveiled in May, say it’s culturally relevant and presents Jesus and other biblical figures in their historical context. As an added incentive, the state will pay districts up to $60 per student to adopt the materials.

Critics, however, maintain that even with recent revisions, the lessons remain biased toward Christianity, are sometimes misleading and teach complex topics better suited for older children. Others warn that the materials overstep parents’ rights to make decisions about the role of religion in their kids’ lives. 

“All those controversies are gonna bubble up at the local level,” said Eve Myers, a consultant for HillCo Partners, a lobbying and government relations firm whose clients include publishers. Districts with conservative board majorities, she said, would likely favor the program, called Bluebonnet Learning, “because it’s aligned with their values,” and those with diverse student populations would see resistance. 

Tuesday’s action was technically preliminary, but board members are not expected to change their positions before a final vote Friday. While Leslie Recine, appointed by Abbott just two-and-a-half weeks ago, had nothing to say during the board’s discussion, her vote proved crucial to the curriculum’s passage.

Democrat Aicha Davis, who expressed opposition to the curriculum earlier this year, vacated the seat Aug. 1 after winning election to the state House in the primary. Abbott could have appointed a replacement then, but waited until Nov. 1.

Tiffany Clark, also a Democrat, ran unopposed to fill Davis’ seat. She sought to have Secretary of State Jane Nelson, also an Abbott appointee, certify the results in time for her to join the board for Tuesday’s vote. But Nelson didn’t complete the process in time.

Clark, who will represent Dallas and starts in January, told The 74 that she should have cast the deciding vote and would have opted to remove Bluebonnet from the list.

“It’s disappointing that just days before the election, the governor chose to appoint someone else to serve temporarily in this seat,” she said. “It would have made a lot more sense to appoint the person who clearly was going to be elected by the voters in the district.” 

The governor’s office did not respond to questions about the appointment.

She attended the public hearing in Austin Monday, but didn’t get a chance to speak. The comments stretched over eight hours, with passionate arguments on either side.

Compared to a September public hearing on the program, when testimony was overwhelmingly negative, Monday’s statements were more evenly split between opponents and those who say the curriculum will bolster students’ reading skills and teach students the Bible’s important place in Western civilization.

The First Amendment “does not demand strict governmental neutrality towards religion,” Jonathan Covey, director of policy for Texas Values, said during his two minutes to speak to the board. “There is nothing the U.S. Supreme Court has laid down requiring equal time or equal treatment among religious sects.”

His group, which promotes biblical principles in public policy, recruited proponents of the curriculum to sign up to speak. Other supporters, blowing a shofar and shouting “Hallelujah,” turned their demonstration outside the board’s chambers into a worship session. 

But critics called the program a politically motivated curriculum that would leave young children confused about complex matters of faith. Barbara Baruch, a member of the National Council of Jewish Women, San Antonio, urged board members to vote against the program by quoting from their biographies.

“Mr. [Tom]Maynard, you believe in a parent’s right to direct the education of their children. You also work very hard for your denomination. Please don’t let the government direct my children and grandchildren away from their denomination,” she said. “Ms. [Audrey] Young. I know you are married to a pastor. Ask him if he wants the government to teach religion to his congregants, starting at age 5.”

Both Young and Maynard voted to keep Bluebonnet on the list. Maynard, a retired teacher and minister, said he was impressed by what he’s observed in districts that have piloted some of the lessons.

But Evelyn Brooks, a Republican opposed to the program, said there’s not yet enough evidence that the lessons improve reading outcomes.

“We want children to learn how to read and write well and do math without experimenting on them,” she said. “They deserve that.” 

Over the summer, the state made numerous edits based on input from the public, correcting factual errors, adding a few more mentions of other world religions and removing content that some members of the public, especially Jewish parents, found offensive. But a third grade unit on Ancient Rome still includes a lengthy passage on Jesus’ life, ministry and the Resurrection. And lessons on the nation’s founding still emphasize the evangelism of the colonists more than the separation between church and state. 

Other critics Monday said the authors of the curriculum did a poor job of using biblical material to teach both history and language arts. 

“Lessons still make numerous claims that are erroneous, made-up or just plain strange,” Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University, told the board. The state, he said. “contracted with people to write lessons about religion who did not know the material and did not treat it responsibly.”

While the state originally contracted with Amplify, a leading curriculum provider, for its Core Knowledge Language Arts program, it hired a variety of curriculum companies and subject matter experts to further revise the program. Two of them worked for the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, which advocated for the program’s approval. The think tank also supports a 10 Commandments requirement for Texas classrooms, which failed last year in the legislature, but is a top priority for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick next year.

Brian Phillips, a spokesman for the foundation declined to comment until the final vote later this week. But in a foundation video posted on X, former Gov. Rick Perry said he has high expectations of Bluebonnet. 

“Passing that curriculum will have every bit as positive [an] effect as what we did back in the early 2000s that took Texas from 28th in the nation to 2nd in the nation in high school graduation rates,” he said.

Because the biblical material — from the parable of the Prodigal Son to the Last Supper — is interwoven into larger language arts lessons, some said it might be hard for parents to request alternate lessons when they object to aspects of the curriculum.

“I do not think that many parents are aware of the nuances of these lessons,” said Kristi Giemza, a parent and advocate in the Lubbock district, which piloted the materials in a few schools. She expects the district to adopt it. “Because the state is dangling money in front of desperate districts, my guess is they are going to do what it takes to get funding.”

Espired, a partnership with Florida investor Brad Saft, sells right-leaning books and videos, from Fighting Indoctrination and The Truth about Climate Change to an updated guide on this year’s election, including the assassination attempt against President-elect Donald Trump.  Last week, Trump tapped Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister who hosts a talk show on a Christian network, to serve as ambassador to Israel.

But the company also sells The Kids Guide to the Bible, with animated Old and New Testament stories, like Noah’s ark and the Resurrection. The series features colorful illustrations drawn in the identical style as those in the Texas curriculum. A kindergarten lesson’s image of King Solomon, for example, and two more on the Golden Rule are lifted wholesale from covers of the company’s books.

Saft, a Princeton graduate and history buff, did not answer emails or messages on social media. Chad Gallagher, an eSpired spokesman and former Huckabee adviser, declined to provide more details on how the company contributed to the program, but called eSpired the “leading provider of curriculum to states searching for unbiased history” and “lessons that explain the literary and historical value of the Bible.”

Saft and Inspired by Education LLC, an alternate name for the company, were on a list of subcontractors for the curriculum that the Texas Education Agency shared with The 74 in May. Contacted earlier this month, officials did not respond to questions about how much the state paid eSpired or the degree of influence the company had over the lessons.

The connection to Huckabee’s business venture, also known as EverBright Media, comes as the State Board of Education is set to vote Monday on whether to add the program, called Bluebonnet Learning, to a list of approved reading programs. The state is heavily promoting the program at a time when some districts are operating in the red. The board’s blessing means districts would be eligible for extra funding — up to $60 per student —  if they adopt the program.

“Districts’ hands are tied because they are in desperate need of additional funding, yet the state of Texas is trying to force them to use this curriculum as the only way to get additional funding,” said Clinton Gill, a specialist with the Texas State Teachers Association and a former teacher in Lubbock, one of the districts that piloted an early version of the program. The state, he said, should involve teachers in developing the curriculum, “not some company with a political agenda.”

The curriculum has won praise from GOP leaders, classical education proponents and influential evangelists who want the Bible to be more prominent in public schools. But the first draft, unveiled in late May, drew sharp criticism from those who said the authors disregarded other religions and introduced topics of faith more appropriate for church and home.

The state has since corrected many factual errors, but the bias toward Christianity remains, according to several experts. Education Commissioner Mike Morath will need eight board members in favor of Bluebonnet for it to be added to the list, but the vote is expected to be tight. 

“This is the one of the hardest votes I’ve ever had to make in 22 years on the State Board of Education. I have lost sleep over it,” said Republican Pat Hardy, who was defeated in this year’s election. This week’s series of meetings are her last on the board. “I’ve literally heard from hundreds of people on both sides.”

Last week, Texas Values, a nonprofit that promotes “biblical, Judeo-Christian values” in public policy, held a “lunch and learn” event to promote the curriculum in Allen, Texas, part of Board Member Evelyn Brooks’ Fort Worth-area district. She’s among the conservative Republicans opposed to the program, and has called for more transparency over who wrote the lessons. 

Officials won’t identify who wrote the biblical material. Because a contract for the work fell under a pandemic disaster declaration, the state waived typical requirements that would have shed light on what those companies did and how much they were paid. 

Mary Elizabeth Castle, government relations director at Texas Values, said the curriculum has been unfairly accused of teaching about faith “in a devotional way” and only educates students to “understand the hundreds of idioms that we use in everyday language that actually come from the Bible.” 

Texas Values also recruited supporters of the curriculum to speak at Monday’s public hearing before the vote.

But opponents see Bluebonnet as part of a GOP-led movement to steer public schools to the right — one that is expected to accelerate under the incoming Trump administration. More than 15,000 opponents of the Bible-themed lessons have signed a petition, organized by Faithful America, an online network of Christians, with about 200,000 members nationwide. 

“We’re pushing back on the folks who are ignoring the teachings of Jesus because they are seeking political power for themselves,” said Karli Wallace Thompson, the group’s digital campaigns director. “There’s nothing in the Gospel that tells us we need to go out and force our neighbors to worship the way that we do.”

‘Sacred story’

The state made noticeable efforts to respond to many of the public’s concerns, according to biblical scholars who have reviewed the changes. Revisions in the final draft include a brief introduction to the prophet Muhammad, who was completely neglected originally, a chart displaying variations on the Golden Rule from six religions and a slightly shorter description of Jesus’s ministry.

But officials seemed to prioritize accuracy over making the curriculum more religiously balanced, said Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University who has reviewed the newest version.

“Some of the many embarrassing gaffes and factual errors are now gone,” he said. 

The original first grade American Independence unit, for example, incorrectly described the Liberty Bell as a “symbol designed to celebrate our freedom from being controlled by the British and our freedom to pray,” even though it was cast two decades before the revolution. Now the lesson reads: “Many people believe the Liberty Bell was designed to celebrate the traditions of religious freedom and self-government in the colony of Pennsylvania.”

The third grade unit on Jesus’s life and early Christianity no longer says that Christians hid in the catacombs to worship, a myth that scholars have debunked. The unit also excludes the miracle of the disciples’ overflowing fishing nets, reducing the lesson on Jesus from eight pages to seven. 

But it still cites Josephus, a first century historian, who reported that Jesus’ disciples said that he “appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive.” Biblical scholars largely reject his account, which they say was probably added by priests during the Middle Ages in an effort to prove that Jesus was the son of God. 

The state eliminated what Texas Jews said was an offensive activity in which students would play dice to mimic how Haman, a Persian functionary in the biblical story of Queen Esther, cast lots to decide when to kill the Jews.  

But while there is somewhat more attention to Judaism in the edited version, the bias toward Christianity is still “clear and indisputable,” Chancey said. 

If the board signs off on this version and districts adopt it, elementary school children “will learn the main contours of the Christian sacred story“ — from Creation to the work of the Apostle Paul, he said. “No other tradition gets similar treatment.”

Other modifications acknowledge that Christians have used their faith to justify discrimination and violence throughout history.  A fourth grade lesson originally titled “If You Were a Crusader” has been renamed “The Journey of a Crusader” and now includes the fact that in addition to capturing Jerusalem from the Muslims, crusaders “were given permission to persecute and kill non-Christians.”

A fifth grade lesson now explains that Martin Luther King Jr. directed his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to clergymen who supported segregation. “It was unfortunately also true that many people of the time supported those laws, including Christians like these clergymen,” the text reads. Critics of the original version said glossing over that point gave students an inaccurate portrayal of the Civil Rights movement.

Critical examinations of some of Christianity’s darker chapters are a welcome addition to the curriculum, said David Brockman, a religious studies scholar at Rice University who has reviewed both versions. But a third grade lesson still says Spanish conquistadors’ merely “shared” their Christian faith with indigenous tribes and doesn’t delve into slavery, forced labor and other harsh methods used to convert them.

The updates don’t “correct the overall problem of soft pedaling Christian involvement with violence and oppression in the past,” he said.

Presenting students with America’s virtues as well as its faults was important to Steve Meeker, a retired middle school world geography teacher from the Montgomery Independent School District, north of Houston, who was hired to review earlier drafts of the curriculum. 

He provided feedback on a second grade Civil War unit that discusses how an evangelical religious movement called the Great Awakening  influenced the Founding Fathers’ views on slavery. The text quotes a letter in which Thomas Jefferson expressed that he “ardently” wanted to see slavery abolished. But while children would learn that George Washington made plans in his will to free his slaves, Meeker feels there’s still too little attention to the founders’ role as slave owners.

Jefferson might have wished for the end of slavery, but “he certainly didn’t act on it,” Meeker said. “He owned more than 600 slaves and is only recorded as having freed ten of them.”

Meeker, who also teaches a class at his church on the Book of Revelations, appreciates the overall attention to familiarizing students with the Bible. Over his 42 years of teaching, he noticed that students were increasingly puzzled by everyday sayings like “my brother’s keeper” and the “handwriting is on the wall.” But he also noted that lessons about Jesus might make non-Christians uncomfortable. 

‘Exciting and engaging’

Some supporters of the state’s program are concerned that the intense debate over the biblical material has overshadowed other aspects of the curriculum, which, Morath says, is meant to improve students’ vocabulary and background knowledge. 

The state’s lessons will give students “great exposure” to Texas history with material that reinforces content from science and social studies, said Courtnie Bagley, education director at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. The state also hired her to work on lessons about geology and the state’s oil and gas industry.

“I could see how engaging and enjoyable it would be for a kid to read in second grade about the War of 1812 and Dolly Madison rescuing all the artifacts in the White House,” she said. “Those are exciting and engaging stories.”

The state, meanwhile, continues to expend vast resources to get the materials in teachers’ hands. According to grant documents, the agency is spending $50 million on printing and another $10 million to train districts how to implement the curriculum. That’s on top of the $103 million the state has already spent on the program. 

Work on the project began in 2020, when it paid Amplify, a leading curriculum provider, $19 million in federal relief funds for its Core Knowledge Language Arts program. Based on the work of educator E.D. Hirsch, the lessons teach basic reading skills as well as content from art, history and science.

But Morath viewed that purchase as just a starting point and began commissioning lessons, like the one on Queen Esther, based on the Bible.  

In 2022, the agency signed an $84 million contract with Boston-based Public Consulting Group, which includes a curriculum division. That company then subcontracted with a mix of curriculum developers and experts to modify the program with more Texas-related content and Bible-based lessons.

Espired and Saft, Huckabee’s business partner, were among them. The company markets primarily to a homeschooling audience, with ads on Facebook and Fox News. But in the first months of the pandemic, the Arkansas Department of Education, under former Gov. Asa Hutchinson, paid $245,000 for its coronavirus guide and distributed it to schools.

Gallagher declined to comment on whether the company has completed work for other state education agencies, but said, “ESpired has many clients for their curriculum development services because parents are generally not satisfied with much of the existing materials and curriculum that has traditionally been available.”

Learn Our History, another series of eSpired guides, “helps kids learn all about American history from a positive, patriotic and faith-based standpoint,” Huckabee said in a promotional video. Like the Texas program, it emphasizes the role of religious liberty in the nation’s founding.

The company, however, also has some unhappy customers, with several complaints to the Better Business Bureau about recurring charges for products that parents said they never purchased or guides they never received.

“I’m a pretty savvy consumer who doesn’t usually get bamboozled by the fine print,” parent Shannon Ashley wrote in 2020 after ordering the company’s COVID guide. “I knew I never actually gave them permission to regularly charge my card, and they never actually threw that fine print in there.”

An advisory board member for the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, which seeks to pass legislation based on “biblical principles,” Huckabee has defended those who argue the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. His 2020 book, Three Cs that Made America Great: Christianity, Capitalism and the Constitution, warns of the “dangers of corruption advocated by liberal politicians.”

Before serving as governor from 1996 to 2007, Huckabee was a pastor in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. He ran for president in 2008, but has also led tour groups to Israel, where “I have been visiting since 1973 when I was a teenager,” he posted on X. Huckabee, who has said there is “no such thing as a West Bank” and has expressed strong support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would lead efforts to bring an end to the war in Gaza, Trump said in a statement.

‘Rules of the game’ 

Texas’ move to write its own curriculum has also left traditional publishers, like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Savvas, wondering how competing against a state agency will affect their business — and whether districts will drop their materials in favor of a program that comes with strong financial incentives.

“Publishers have always sought after the Texas market because obviously it’s very large, with over 5 million students,” said Eve Myers, a consultant for HillCo Partners, a lobbying and government relations firm whose clients include publishers. “The biggest question is, ‘What are the rules of the game now?’ ”

Curriculum companies also frequently make their authors available to districts to train teachers and explain the research behind their product, Meyers said. 

But so far, the state has refused to identify the authors who transformed Amplify’s program into Bluebonnet. And even with the recent edits, some board members, like Brooks, say it’s too soon to know if it will improve students’ reading performance. In a recent podcast, she blamed “grassroots leaders who say ‘You have a Bible story in the curriculum, so it must be good.’ ” 

“There’s no time to say how effective it is,” she said. “It’s being rewritten and revised in real time.”

Four Republicans prevailed in five contested Texas State Board of Education races Tuesday night, solidifying a GOP majority on the board responsible for determining what the state’s 5.5 million public school children learn in the classroom.

Factoring in the election results, the board now comprises 10 Republicans and five Democrats. Democrats regained a seat after it was vacated by Aicha Davis, who stepped down to run for the Texas House.

Republican incumbents Tom Maynard (District 10), Pam Little (District 12) and Aaron Kinsey (District 15) defeated their Democratic challengers, while Republican Brandon Hall, who ousted longtime GOP incumbent Patricia “Pat” Hardy (District 11) in the March primary, was also victorious.

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In the race for the District 1 seat currently held by El Paso Democrat Melissa Ortega, who decided not to seek another term, Democrat Gustavo Reveles defeated Republican challenger Michael “Travis” Stevens.

Democrats Marisa Perez-Diaz (District 3) and Staci Childs (District 4), both of whom ran uncontested, held onto their seats. Tiffany Clark, a Democrat running to fill the District 13 seat vacated by Davis, also won after running unchallenged.

The 15 members on the board play an extraordinary role in determining what students learn in the classroom and what’s required for kids to graduate, as well as in overseeing a $56 billion state endowment to support Texas public schools.

The stakes of the board races were especially high this year, since the group’s responsibilities next year could include revising Texas’ social studies curriculum. Some conservatives on the Republican-dominated board campaigned on the idea that public schools are harming children with how they teach America’s history of racism and its diversity.

The board in recent months has fielded complaints about a Texas Education Agency-proposed curriculum that, if approved later this month, would insert Bible teachings into elementary school reading and language arts lessons. The group has delayed its vote on a long-awaited Native Studies course, covering the culture and history of tribes and nations across Texas and the U.S. And in recent years, the board has rejected science textbooks over their messaging on climate change and walked back its opposition to school vouchers, a program that would set aside public tax dollars for parents to pay their children’s private school tuition.

Of the eight races this year, here are the results of the five contested ones.

District 1

Democrat Gustavo Reveles defeated Republican Michael “Travis” Stevens in District 1, which encompasses El Paso County and part of Bexar County.

Reveles, who currently serves as communications director for the Canutillo school district outside of El Paso, said he ran to ensure that Texas’ border community continues to have a presence at the state level. While acknowledging that he has not worked as a teacher or an educator, Reveles said the board needs people who respect educators as leaders and experts in the field. Top of mind for Reveles is helping ensure that students of all backgrounds feel represented in curricula. He also would like to see a more rigorous approval process of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed.

District 10

In District 10, which includes Bell County and part of Williamson County, Republican Tom Maynard defeated Democrat Raquel Sáenz Ortiz.

Maynard, of Florence, has served on the board for 11 years. He is currently the chair of the board’s Committee on School Finance and helps oversee the $56 billion state endowment known as the Permanent School Fund. With more than 30 years in education, Maynard spent more than a dozen of them as an agricultural science teacher. He also worked as executive director of the Texas FFA Association. Maynard’s priorities include improving the quality of instructional materials, creating and implementing a library book review process and completing revisions to the social studies and mathematics standards as some of his top priorities. He also has said he opposes so-called “woke ideologies” in public education, according to his website, and has vowed to “continue to fight to ensure students are not subject to radical and inappropriate content in Texas classrooms.”

District 11

In District 11, which includes Parker County and part of Tarrant County, Republican Brandon Hall defeated Democrat Rayna Glasser and Green Party candidate Hunter Crow.

Hall is a youth pastor who has described Texas as having “a broken public education system” where kids “face an onslaught against their innocence” — particularly with how America’s history of racism is taught in classrooms and what he has called “obscene library books” and a “sexualized agenda.” Hall lists on his website his commitment “to making quality, conservative education a reality for all students” and to establish charter schools more easily. He also wants parents to “play a central role in shaping the educational trajectory of their children.”

District 12

In District 12, which includes Collin County, Republican Pam Little defeated Democrat George King.

Little, of Fairview, has served on the board since 2019 and is currently the group’s vice chair. A co-owner of a fence company, she has taught courses in small business management in community college, according to her State Board of Education biography. Little has voted against presenting a “biased view” of the fossil fuel industry and social studies standards that “water down our history,” according to her campaign website. She listed as her accomplishments while on the board, among other things, implementing phonics-based curriculum standards, approving personal financial literacy education and updating the Texas Dyslexia Handbook.

District 15

In District 15, which includes Ector and Lubbock counties, Republican Aaron Kinsey defeated Democrat Morgan Kirkpatrick and Libertarian Jack Westbrook.

Kinsey, of Midland, was elected to the board in 2022 and appointed chair by Gov. Greg Abbott last December. Kinsey is a former Air Force pilot who now oversees an aviation oil field services company in Midland, according to his online biography. At the Texas Republican Party Convention this year, Kinsey acknowledged he did not know much about the State Board of Education prior to running but that he did “understand the greatness of Texas” and that his family’s values were not being represented in public schools. Among Kinsey’s top priorities, he said at the convention, is for schools to teach Texas children “how to think and not to hate themselves.” He also advocated for curricula that embrace “capitalism and self-reliance as nobel quests.” Kinsey proclaimed at the end of his speech: “You have a chairman who will fight for these three-letter words: G-O–D, G-O-P, and U-S-A.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

LGBTQ youth advocacy organizations are reporting sharp increases in calls to suicide prevention hotlines, with the overwhelming majority of callers saying the election is the source of their fears. In addition to teens and children, the groups say that in recent days they have also been contacted by unprecedented numbers of families and teachers.

Starting Nov. 3, the number of crisis-service calls, texts and online chats received by The Trevor Project increased 125% over the week before, with an additional spike “beginning Nov. 5 approximately around midnight ET,” an organization spokesperson told The 74. Trevor also reported a 200% rise in the number of callers who specifically mentioned the election. 

After former President Donald Trump’s re-election, Trevor posted an advisory note at the top of its homepage: “TrevorText and TrevorChat are currently experiencing long hold times due to the election. If you need immediate assistance, please call the TrevorLifeline at 1-866-488-7386.”

The organization has a number of online resources for youth, caregivers and educators, including guidance on coping with intense emotions around the presidential election, a self-care flowchart and how to signal you are an ally in hostile environment. 

“The Trevor Project wants LGBTQ+ young people to know that we are here for you, no matter the outcome of any election, and we will continue to fight for every LGBTQ+ young person to have access to safe, affirming spaces — especially during challenging times,” CEO Jaymes Black said in a statement to The 74. “LGBTQ+ young people: Your life matters, and you were born to live it.”

The Rainbow Youth Project, which typically receives 3,700 calls a month, logged 2,146 between Nov. 3 and 6 alone. Young people generally make up the vast majority of contacts, but the rate of calls from parents, grandparents and teachers concerned about someone in their family or class jumped from less than 7% of all contacts to 28% during those three days. 

“Most of the time, we take calls from kids in crisis who don’t have supportive families, who are afraid of being evicted or afraid of being outed,” says Lance Preston, the organization’s executive director. “Parents are now calling us about, ‘What am I going to do? What if this turns into a situation like Texas, where if I support my child, I’m going to be investigated by CPS?’ Teachers reaching out and saying, ‘What if I am a supportive ally and my school decides that I [shouldn’t have a] license anymore? Is this election going to create a situation where I could lose my job?’ ” 

The weekend before the election, Rainbow’s hotline took a call from an Alabama 16-year-old who reported he was part of a four-teen suicide pact, Preston says. His colleagues were able to intervene to stop the plan.  

“They had decided that if Trump won the election, that they were going to kill themselves because that meant that the United States people did not want them here and did not want their existence to be accepted,” he says. 

“I’m so thankful that that young person reached out to report that, because we were able to get to the other kids, get their parents involved and do some mitigation and get them some help. But that would have been four kids that we would have lost. That is unacceptable.”

Last winter, the number of calls to Rainbow Youth from young Oklahomans more than tripled after transgender teen Nex Benedict died by suicide following months of in-school bullying. The suicide occurred in February, after a fight in a girls’ restroom that Nex had been forced to use under a new state law.

Nine in 10 callers reported bullying in their school, Preston said at the time. Since the start of this calendar year, the organization has heard reports of nine LGBTQ teen and nine adult suicides in the state. It now operates a crisis support center in Oklahoma City. 

The Southern Equality Project, which offers support services to families in the 25 states that have banned LGBTQ youth health care, also reports a “slight uptick” in requests from families of trans youth: “Many of the requests specifically mentioned fears about Trump, a national ban or needing to leave the country for care,” says Communications Director Adam Polaski. 

Because young people have no experience advocating for and securing LGBTQ rights, Preston says, they are particularly vulnerable to political rhetoric. “They didn’t fight for these rights,” he says. “They were born with them, and now they are seeing them taken away.”

He and other advocates say they expect the volume of calls to stay high through at least February, as a second Trump administration presumably begins acting on campaign promises to end gender-affirming care and curtail in-school LGBTQ protections throughout the country. 

“The best thing for us to do is to accept where we are, but also to send a positive message to these young people that we may be heartbroken, but we’re not broken,” he says. “We need to be putting that positive message out there that we need them to stay with us. They have an army of allies behind them, and we’re going to get through this.”

Houston ISD voters resoundingly rejected a $4.4 billion school bond package Tuesday, a victory for opponents of the district’s state-appointed leadership and setback for the district’s years-long push to upgrade campuses.

About 58 percent of voters opposed the bond package, which promised to rebuild or significantly renovate roughly three dozen schools, improve campus security, upgrade schools’ heating and cooling systems and expand preschool offerings, among other changes. The school bond proposal was the largest in Texas history, and it became the first Texas school bond totaling $1 billion or more to fail after the previous 23 passed.

HISD’s last school bond vote, held in 2012, received support from two-thirds of district voters.

The vote came a year and a half after a controversial June 2023 state takeover of HISD, in which the Texas Education Agency installed a new superintendent, Mike Miles, and school board. Since then, Miles has carried out a dramatic overhaul of the district, turning HISD into one of the largest education experiments in the country. 

The bond vote garnered extra attention because it represented community members’ first opportunity to vote on an issue that will meaningfully impact district operations since Miles’ appointment. Many voters saw it as a referendum on Miles’ leadership, with his critics rallying behind the slogan, “No trust, no bond.”

Steve McHenry, 76, who cast his ballot at a polling location in Houston’s Frenchtown neighborhood, said he was voting against the schools package because of issues with the district’s leadership. All his children attended HISD schools but are now grown, he said.

“I don’t like the superintendent and I don’t like the state running (HISD),” McHenry said.

Usually, large Texas districts pass bonds roughly every five years to keep campus facilities up to date, but HISD hadn’t held one for 12 years. In that time, the district has put off roughly $10 billion worth of needed maintenance and repairs, HISD administrators said during several bond-related meetings. The $4.4 billion total represented HISD’s most immediate needs for safe and healthy learning conditions, they said. 

The district will now have to pay for some of those upkeep costs out of its general fund, leaving less cash for other operating expenses, such as staff salaries.

Miles expressed frustration with the bond result in a statement HISD released Tuesday evening, arguing students across the district would bear the brunt of the community’s decision.

“In this instance, the politics of adults beat out the needs of our children,” Miles wrote. “I cannot promise our aging facilities and systems will never be a barrier to student learning. We will do our best to keep long expired heating and cooling systems running, but on very hot or very cold days, we are likely going to have to close campuses to keep students safe.”

Jackie Anderson, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, HISD’s largest employee union, celebrated the early voting results as a sign that a wide coalition of community members oppose HISD’s leadership. She hopes the vote encourages Miles and his team to take the union’s concerns more seriously.

“We hope that this sends a resounding message to them that we’re not going away,” Anderson said. “It would behoove them to sit down and talk to us.”

Two education advocacy nonprofits that have been high-profile bond advocates, Good Reason Houston and Houstonians for Great Public Schools, released statements shortly after early voting results were published that treated the bond result as a defeat. Both groups are backed by some of Houston’s wealthiest philanthropists, who helped raise about $2 million to support the bond through a political action committee.

“We are deeply disappointed that the HISD bond measure did not pass,” Good Reason Houston CEO Cary Wright said in a statement. “This outcome means we must continue to work within the current insufficient infrastructure, even though we know students deserve and need more.”

Because HISD typically has held bond elections during the November of even-numbered years, the district may be at least two years away from another bond vote. If leaders choose to wait until the state returns power to a locally elected school board, the timeline would likely extend until at least the 2028 election.

This article first appeared on Houston Landing and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Several GOP wins in the Texas House of Representatives on Tuesday will expand Republicans’ existing majority, giving Abbott an estimated 87 of 150 seats in the lower chamber. When lawmakers reconvene in January, that could finally give him the votes needed to successfully put forth legislation that offers a universal voucher, or education savings account — a proposal that many Democrats and rural Republican lawmakers have rejected in past legislative sessions.

“Frankly, it was a bit surprising that Abbott pulled this off,” said Jon Taylor, a political scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio. 

With flips of Democratic seats in Corpus Christi and Uvalde, the GOP now enjoys an 87-to-63 margin in the House. He noted, “At a minimum, the Legislature is likely to pass some form of an Education Savings Account plan,” which families could use to cover tuition or other expenses. 

Taylor added that two House districts in San Antonio came close to flipping the other way, from Republican to Democratic, but fell short by about four percentage points apiece, handing the seats to pro-ESA Republicans.

Abbott, who first began pushing for school choice in 2017, has aggressively fought for it ever since. In 2023, he called lawmakers into four special legislative sessions to pass a school choice bill, among other measures, and has proposed giving students about $10,500 per year, overseen by the state comptroller. 

He has also worked over the past year to oust lawmakers who fought his proposal to offer ESAs to all students, not just those whose families are low-income.

With deep pockets, Abbott targets ESA foes

Late last year, Abbott began actively campaigning against members of his own party who stood in his way, portraying them as weak on important issues like border security and property tax relief. He was aided by deep-pocketed donors and political action committees that poured millions of dollars into state legislative races.

Jeff Yass, a well-known school choice proponent and investor in TikTok parent company Byte Dance, contributed more than $12 million in this political cycle, while Miriam Adelson, owner of the Las Vegas Sands casinos, spent about $13 million, making the pair — residents of Pennsylvania and Nevada, respectively — Texas’ two biggest political donors.

Last spring, the effort helped persuade voters to unseat eight House Republicans who had blocked ESAs. One of them, Rep. Steve Allison of San Antonio, said in a September interview with The 74 that he opposed Abbott’s plan because Texas families already have many options, from magnet schools to charters to a Public Education Grant program that lets students in low-performing schools transfer to a better-performing school. Lawmakers, he said, have approved countless programs that provide “choice on top of choice on top of choice” within districts.

Abbott is already doing a victory lap. Taking to the social media site X early Wednesday, he wrote, “Every candidate that I backed in Texas House general election races won tonight. We even had Republican candidates win seats that had been held by Democrats. There are more than enough votes to pass school choice in Texas.”

Katherine Munal, policy and advocacy director of EdChoice, said Tuesday’s election results in Texas mark “a significant victory for school choice advocates, signaling a continued momentum for policies that prioritize parental empowerment and educational freedom.”

Texas, she said, “is poised to expand opportunities for students and families, allowing them to access a wider range of educational options that best meet their needs. This shift reflects a broader recognition of the importance of individualized education and the belief that every child deserves the opportunity to thrive in an environment that works for them.”

Mark P. Jones, a political scientist at Rice University, said that for Abbott, “the night really couldn’t have gone better.” 

The question now, he said, isn’t whether school choice will succeed in Texas in 2025. “It’s really what form of school choice legislation will pass. How robust and expansive will it be?”

The most likely scenario, he said, would have Abbott offering an ambitious proposal with more students covered than in his 2023 plan, and with less money going to school districts that lose students to ESAs.

While foes of Abbott’s plan can probably still negotiate to help districts, he said any hope that Democrats and anti-school-choice Republicans had of blocking choice in 2025 “vanished last night.”

Abbott has pushed for ESAs despite recent polling that isn’t necessarily conclusive: Just under half of respondents to a recent University of Texas survey said they support spending taxpayer dollars to help families pay for private school. Meanwhile, a poll from the University of Houston and Texas Southern University found 65% support.  

The Texas Education Agency last year estimated that about 500,000 children, or about half of the state’s private school and homeschooled students, would apply for the program in its first stages, with more each cycle. The figures prompted Democratic Rep. James Talarico to quip during a legislative hearing that it would be “a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top.”

He added, “It’s welfare for the wealthy.”

Elsewhere on Tuesday, voters in two states — Kentucky and Nebraska — defeated voucher-related ballot measures. A third measure, in Colorado, appeared headed for defeat.

Texas is clawing back more than $607 million per year in federal funding for special education services, a move local school district officials say will likely worsen already strained budgets for students with disabilities.

The School Health and Related Services (SHARS) program provides hundreds of school districts critical funding for special education services, reimbursing them for counseling, nursing, therapy and transportation services provided to Medicaid-eligible children.

More than 775,000 students receive special education services in Texas, according to the Texas Education Agency. It is not as clear how many of them are eligible for Medicaid, though school district officials say many of the kids who directly benefit from SHARS come from low-income families.

But in the last year, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, which manages the program at the state level, began imposing strict limitations on the types of services for which school districts are able to request federal reimbursement. The changes have accumulated into a $607 million slashing to the money school districts typically expect to receive under SHARS per year, according to health agency estimates.

Bewildered by the sudden changes, school district officials and special education advocates say little has been communicated about why these drastic changes are happening.

“We’re seeing an increased number of students that need more and more individualized care,” said Katie Abbott, special education director for a coalition of six East Texas school districts. “And yet, what are we doing?”

In response to their concerns, Texas has blamed the feds.

A 2017 federal audit report found that Texas was improperly billing for services not allowable under the SHARS program. The report concluded the state would need to return almost $19 million, a fraction of the $607 million currently being left behind. It also required that the Texas health commission work to ensure it was complying with federal guidelines.

Afterwards, the commission submitted “every possible denial and request for the opinion to be overturned” but was unsuccessful, the agency told The Texas Tribune. The recent changes reflected an attempt to bring the state back into compliance, according to the commission.

But federal appeals officers, in a ruling last year, said Texas produced “nothing at all” to dispute investigators’ findings that the state billed for unallowable services. The ruling also condemns the state for attempting to submit evidence after the deadline to do so had already passed.

Further, federal officials dispute the notion that Texas is being required to make certain changes to the SHARS program. In a statement to the Tribune, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services made clear that as long as states work within “broad federal parameters,” they have autonomy to make decisions about their programs.

School district officials say Texas has resorted to overcorrecting problems identified by the audit, flouting expectations from the federal government that the state administers the program using the least restrictive means possible.

Many school districts are formally appealing the funding cuts with the state, while other rural districts have decided to exit the SHARS program altogether because of the administrative burden recent changes have created. Those that remain are holding out hope that lawmakers will decide in next year’s legislative session to help fill the financial gaps left in special education services — a lofty expectation for a state with a poor track record in both administering Medicaid and serving students with disabilities.

“We’re talking about our most vulnerable kids,” said Karlyn Keller, division director of Student Solutions and School Medicaid Services for the Texas Association of School Boards. “We can’t afford to continue to make these huge clawbacks in funding when we’ve got kids that need the service.”

‘Faces of kids’

With the slashing to SHARS funding, the Texas Education Agency estimates the deficit between school districts’ special education expenses and revenue from federal and state money will grow to roughly $1.7 billion per year.

Students with disabilities make up a little less than 10% of the Shiner school district’s 700 student population. Factoring in the recent changes to the SHARS program, the rural school district located east of San Antonio can expect to lose more than $79,000, according to state health agency data.

Superintendent Alex Remschel says the loss will eventually hurt the Shiner school district’s ability to recruit and retain personnel who work to administer the one-on-one, small group special education services their students need. The district currently has three special education teachers and about a half-dozen aides who support them in the classroom. The district shares special education resources with eight other districts as part of a cooperative, which Remschel said had to dip into its fund balance this year to fill the gaps left by the SHARS reductions.

“When I look at the dollars that we have, I see faces of kids,” Remschel said. “And I don’t think that the people that are making these decisions see the faces of kids and how kids are impacted, and that’s what tears at my heart the most.”

Jason Appelt, executive director of the special education cooperative the Shiner school district is a member of, questions Texas’ decision not to take full advantage of the money being provided by the federal government. In total, the special education cooperative’s nine rural districts work with about 900 students.

In previous years, the group received about $1 million in SHARS funding, Appelt said, a number that has since been cut in half. SHARS revenue makes up nearly a fifth of the cooperative’s budget.

“We didn’t have any way to plan for this,” Appelt said. “Our districts are very fiscally conservatively minded. So if something doesn’t change with this, it’s gonna be really tough on all these districts, because there’s not too many other places to cut from.”

Larger and wealthier school districts also say they are feeling the effects of changes to the SHARS program. Of the Katy school district’s approximately 96,000 student population, nearly 18% receive special education services, said Gwen Coffey, the assistant superintendent for special education. The district will experience a cut of almost $8 million, according to the state.

Coffey also said the health commission has made participation in the program more difficult in recent years with constant “changing and shifting and adjusting,” resulting in more documentation and paperwork for staff whose workloads are already full. She said the agency does not seem to understand exactly what it’s asking of school districts.

On Oct. 1, for example, the state health agency overhauled the way school districts can bill for personal care services provided to students in a group setting — like bathing, dressing and feeding — which districts interpret as requiring second-by-second documentation of how and when they’re assisting students. Districts say the change is not feasible considering instructors typically are busy with helping multiple children at once.

“I think the bigger question that we all have is, why? Why is it being changed? What’s the purpose?” Coffey said. “Because if the purpose of the Health and Human Services Commission is to ensure that funding and services are being delivered to those students who require them right in a timely and efficient manner, then how does this accomplish that?”

Succumbing to fear

Kami Finger, who serves as assistant superintendent for school support and special services at the Lubbock school district, said ongoing cuts and changes to the SHARS program indicate a “cultural issue” in Texas where instead of maximizing reimbursement dollars available to the state, the state health agency is succumbing to fear because of the federal audit.

“We’re too fearful that we’re not going to do it the right way to begin with,” said Finger, whose district is losing more than $5.4 million from the funding cuts, according to state estimates. “All of that’s coming together at the same time, creating this very precarious situation for district administrators to make decisions about what least effective programs and services we may have to strategically abandon as a result of that.”

The federal audit was conducted from October 2010 through September 2011 and zeroed in on the Austin and Dallas school districts. It concluded that overbilling occurred because Texas “did not always follow its policies and procedures to ensure that the costs claimed for direct medical services were accurate and supported.”

In an appeal decision issued last October, federal officials further concluded that Texas had “multiple opportunities” during the process to present evidence disputing investigators’ earlier findings but failed to do so — until after the time to submit evidence had expired.

“The Board therefore will not reconsider its decision to address an issue that could have been but was not raised earlier,” one part of the ruling states.

MSB School Services is a vendor that provides consulting and support to roughly half of participating school districts in the Texas SHARS program and has also worked with schools in other states administering the program.

While acknowledging there were problems with the program as identified in the audit, Tabbatha Callaway, CEO of MSB School Services, said she has yet to see any documentation from the state suggesting that Texas was required to make funding cuts as drastic as it has. Instead, she said, the health commission has done “a phenomenal job of, at this point, making this seem hard and complicated.”

She also said Texas school districts possess the documentation that likely would have helped the state in its response to the audit. But she said the commission has not taken steps to work with school districts.

“We’ve tried really hard to get them to meet with us, have conversations, figure out what’s going on, and we haven’t been able to gain the traction necessary to understand the issues,” Callaway said. “What I can say is that there are solutions to recover these dollars, and they need to be looked at.”

The state health agency said in a statement it is working with state education officials to ensure school districts are up to date on SHARS and conducts annual meetings and training to ensure awareness. In working to identify “a greater need” for transparency and support, the agency said it recently created a Medicaid resource and training team for participating SHARS districts.

However, with drastic changes having already gone into effect, many school district officials are reconsidering whether participating in the program is worth it, while some rural school districts that didn’t receive significant funding from SHARS are dropping out, said Keller of the Texas Association of School Boards.

“If you’re counting on these kinds of programs to help you fund and then they go away after the fact, then you’re left in very dire straits,” Keller said. “They’re just making the decision that they’re not going to participate. They’d rather have to figure it out and know that they have the funding than guess and then be caught short.”

Legislative intervention

School districts and special education advocates are still holding out hope the Legislature will step up by increasing funding for special education services and transitioning to a special education funding model based on the individual needs of a student rather than how much time a child spends in a special education setting. This could help school districts cover some of the personal care services students need, advocates say.

But increases to public school funding have been difficult to come by in the last year as those dollars have been wrapped up in Gov. Greg Abbott’s failed push for a school voucher program, which would allow parents to use taxpayer dollars to fund their children’s private school tuition.

Texas also has a poor track record in administering federally mandated special education services. The state was previously fined $33 million for slashing funding for students with disabilities in a way that violated the Individual with Disabilities Education Act. Later, federal officials found that Texas failed to prove it did enough to overhaul its special education system.

Neither the political terrain nor the state’s recent history with special education has stopped advocates from trying to be optimistic, however.

“I feel like special education funding is one of the very few, if not the only thing in education policy that all of the legislators agree on,” said Andrea Chevalier, director of Governmental Relations for the Texas Council of Administrators of Special Education.

Rep. Mary González, the Democrat vice chair of the House budget committee, said after a recent legislative hearing where state health officials explained their rationale for changes to the program, she is working with other legislators to determine whether the state is “over-course correcting” in a way that further harms school district funding.

She is also advocating for more communication and transparency, as well as making sure school districts aren’t losing out on dollars while they’re appealing the state health agency’s decision to cut funding.

Katie Abbott, special education director for the coalition of six rural East Texas school districts that share special education resources, said more funding “would be very much appreciated,” but the services that SHARS has helped schools fund are still required — with or without the additional help.

“We’re passionate about what we do for kids, so I don’t see services stopping,” Abbott said. “It’s just squeezing blood out of a turnip to figure out how to make that happen.”

Disclosure: Texas Association of School Boards has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

He praised a new breed of “patriot pastors” who are mobilizing the faithful to engage in “biblical citizenship” by voting and getting involved on school boards. He’s among the far right religious leaders who say former President Donald Trump is God’s choice for president and that Christians should not only participate in government and politics, but take it over .

Republican leaders have spent a lot of energy this year putting those words into action. Much of the spotlight has been on Oklahoma state Superintendent Ryan Walters, who mandated that schools stock classrooms with Bibles. Louisiana passed a law requiring schools to post the 10 Commandments in classrooms, the subject of a federal lawsuit, while the Texas Education Agency has proposed a reading curriculum that includes stories from the Old and New testaments. 

But the question of whether those ideas will resonate with Christian voters on Nov. 5 is harder to answer.

One recent poll suggests they might not. On a long list of concerns influencing Christians this election, public schools ranked near the bottom, with less than 30% choosing it as a reason to vote for a presidential candidate. The economy and border security topped the list for at least 60% of voters. 

A lot of churchgoers are “still leery of bringing Christianity overtly into public institutions,” said George Barna, who runs the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, a small conservative college outside Phoenix. “They are more likely to desire the freedom to believe and practice their faith of choice, with their family, as they desire, without government intrusion.”

His recent poll suggests that many practicing Christians are so disillusioned by both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump that they may not even vote. Barna estimated that as many as 104 million “people of faith” — and of those, roughly 32 million regular churchgoers — won’t show up at the polls. 

Trump tried to shore up his support among the faithful this week during a North Carolina campaign stop with conservative pastors, suggesting a failed assassination attempt against him in July was a sign. “God saved me for a purpose,” he said. Conservative leaders are counting on Christians to support their preferred candidates — up and down the ballot. 

Walters co-authored an op-ed earlier this year with Steve Deace, a conservative talk show host, and David Barton, whose Wallbuilders organization teaches history from a Christian perspective. In grave terms, they urged Christians to vote for Trump if they want schools to embrace their values.

“Churches and community groups must transform into centers of evangelical activism, educating and equipping members to take a stand in this cultural and spiritual battle,” they wrote. “The election ahead is more than a political contest; it is our opportunity to affirm our commitment to our nation’s Judeo-Christian values.”

But that message doesn’t always grab voters, said Kendal Sachierri, a conservative Republican running for state Senate in Oklahoma and a former Spanish teacher. A Second Amendment advocate, she defeated an incumbent who proposed to increase penalties for having a gun on school property. 

When she was going door-to-door during the primary, Sachierri said she talked to voters who were unhappy with public schools.

“But no one was like, ‘We need Bibles in the classroom,’ ” she said. When she taught at Newcastle High School, south of Oklahoma City, she had both English and Spanish versions of the Bible available for students. “Did I ever make a kid use it? No.”

‘Biblical foundation’

In local races this year, there have been signs that the public’s support for candidates who align with fundamentalist Christian groups is waning. School board hopefuls backed by Moms for Liberty haven’t fared nearly as well in primary races as they did two years ago when they earned school board seats across the country. 

The organization primarily advocates against lessons on gender and sexuality, but their summit last year also featured Tim Barton, David Barton’s son and Wallbuilders president. He preached that America’s survival depends on rebuilding its “biblical foundation.” 

Whether Christian voters have tired of such rhetoric enough to stay home on Election Day is hard to forecast, said Michael Emerson, a religion and public policy researcher at Rice University. 

“Attempting to estimate who will vote and who will not is unreliable,” he said. “As we have seen in the past, especially with Trump, people often say they are not voting, or not voting for him, to pollsters, but then go ahead and vote for him.”

Christians, in fact, have an outsized impact on elections, he said. 

That’s especially true in Texas, where religion and politics frequently mix. In conservative communities, it’s almost expected that a candidate’s platform will include references to Christianity, said Calvin Jillison, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. 

“If you’re in a red district, you better be able to speak about these issues in a way that you know voters will respond,” he said. 

The state’s official GOP platform calls for schools to require instruction from the Bible, and wealthy conservative donors have thrown their support behind candidates who espouse a “biblical worldview” in public schools. 

They include state school board candidate Brandon Hall, a political newcomer who wants to emulate Walters’s effort in Oklahoma to purchase classroom Bibles.

“This is amazing. Let’s do it in Texas!” he wrote on Facebook.

For Hall, who identified himself as a pastor in campaign documents but also works for a finance company, promising to promote conservative Christian values in schools was a winning strategy. He sailed past a 22-year incumbent in the March primary with over 53% of the vote in a Fort Worth-area district.

Since then, he’s been busy promoting the Texas Education Agency’s new K-5 reading curriculum that features Bible stories and emphasizes the evangelism of the nation’s founding. As The 74 first reported in May, critics say it doesn’t reflect the religious diversity of Texas students and borders on proselytizing. (Wallnau has urged his 104,000 followers on X to ask state board members to vote for it next month.)

“Why do liberals hate the new curriculum so much? Second graders will learn courage through the story of Queen Esther,” Hall posted in September after speaking to a community group about the program.

Hall didn’t respond to voicemails or messages on Facebook — and hasn’t participated in candidate interviews with local media.

“Maybe he’s not concerned,” considering the makeup of the board has shifted more to the right in recent years, said Rayna Glaser, his Democratic opponent. 

But as she attends campaign events and house gatherings to meet voters, she’s hoping that Christians will consider what could happen if the public school curriculum becomes subsumed by theology. 

“We’ve got the Quran. We’ve got the Book of Mormon. Do you want Satan in there? Because I know you don’t want Satanism being taught in school,” she said. “As a Christian woman who believes in God and believes the Bible, I feel like if you open [schools] to one, you really have to open them to others.”

It had only been a year since Estelle Sievert and her wife, Jane, joined the foster care program at SAFE Alliance in Austin when they were introduced to 3-week-old Noah in 2022.

The couple immediately fell in love with their soon-to-be adopted son but knew the future might contain some challenges. The infant’s biological parent had a lifetime of severe mental illness compounded by years of using methamphetamines and PCP that went unaddressed, and studies show that trauma and mental illness can be passed down through generations.

This meant the early stages of this child’s life could be the key to ensuring a healthy physical and mental future.

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“We wanted to take a proactive approach to parenting to set him up with skills from very early on to identify emotions and validate his feelings,” Sievert said. “Kind of preparing for whatever may come down the line.”

Among the resources the couple found was Austin-based Mainspring Schools, a child care center that has built a nationally recognized mental health program for children as young as infants and toddlers.

Although a focus on mental wellness for infants, toddlers, and kindergarteners started to develop about 30 years ago, a growing number of child care centers, such as Mainspring, are emphasizing mental health as much as literacy in their curriculum — that the ability to express emotions and form relationships is equally crucial to school success as learning to read at an early age.

Additionally, Texas officials — after lagging behind other states such as Arkansas and Colorado for decades — are starting to study the current state of early childhood mental health care in Texas to determine the best way to create a statewide mental health system for the state’s youngest residents — an effort driven in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the pandemic accelerated incidents of mental health concerns, rates of childhood mental health challenges and suicide had been rising steadily for at least a decade before and have only risen further.

In Texas, more than 500,000 children were diagnosed with anxiety or depression in 2020, an increase of 23% since 2016, according to a 2023 Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute report on child and youth behavioral health.

Seventy-one percent of Texas youth with mental health issues will go untreated, compared with the national average of 61.5%, due in part to a severe shortage of child and adolescent psychiatrists in the state. Jarring statistics like these point to the necessity for early identification and intervention in facilities that touch the most children at very young ages — child care centers.

In partnership with nonprofits like United Way, grassroots organizations do much of the work in early child care mental health, a feat that has impressed the most ardent supporters of children’s mental wellness.

“You will hear people say, ‘Oh c’mon, it’s just child care,’ but no, it’s so much more. This can alter the direction of these kids’ lives,” said Colin Denby Swanson, executive director of Mainspring Schools.

Mental wellness in toddlers

While it’s too early to tell if Noah has inherited mental illnesses, he can become overwhelmed in certain everyday situations. The Sieverts found that a traditional day care setting was too intense for their child.

However, finding a preschool or day care that fits those needs was more complex than expected.

“We learned quickly not all day cares are created equally,” Sievert said.

Mainspring Schools, where Noah has been enrolled in since early 2023, prepares children ages 6 weeks to 5 years old for success in school through early education and mental wellness. This includes specializing in trust-based relational intervention designed to help children who have experienced adversity. Children with these needs often have trouble trusting adults, which frequently leads to perplexing behavior at a young age.

Mainspring Schools tries to address this issue through monthly family dinners and weekly family support nights, where the children and their parents can form a relationship while receiving parenting advice from licensed professionals. The school also has a low child-to-teacher ratio of four to one, allowing for more detailed learning and observation.

“We wanted a program that didn’t use the traditional punitive punishments for children,” Sievert said. “Mainspring School shared the same language that we used at home and understanding of support we felt was needed. We are already seeing the results of this work.”

At 1 or 2 years old, understanding and managing one’s behaviors and reactions becomes critical. At 2 to 3 years old, a child with good mental health will continue to interact with people and build healthy relationships, including copying what other people say and do — a primary reason why young children and their parents can benefit from a robust mental wellness program in a child care center, said Barbara Grant Boneta, director of the Success by 6 coalition, a childhood wellness program in Travis County.

“We are almost teaching adults how to allow children to be children again. We are focusing on forming a loving relationship and giving kids time and space to have big feelings and help them label those feelings,” Boneta said.

This is a change to the child-rearing process where literacy and education at an early age were given priority in child care facilities and preschools. Studies have found play and good mental health are just as key to success in school later on in life as much as literacy does.

“The two can go hand in hand,” Boneta said. “It’s one of those things you want to infuse throughout the curriculum.”

The pandemic’s impact

Boneta said trauma-informed care programs like those at Mainspring Schools doesn’t need to be limited to families who have dealt with severe trauma, since the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on young children is still being studied.

“Families were stressed, and it was a pressure cooker, and children could not form relationships,” Boneta said. “Some of these preschoolers and kindergartners never got to go to a library or gymnastics class before entering elementary school. They missed out on key experiences.”

Children born during the pandemic scored lower in gross motor, fine motor and social-emotional development than before, according to a Columbia University research study. Children with poor or underdeveloped social and emotional skills display more challenging behavior, including anger, withdrawal, anxiety, and aggression.

Additionally, since the onset of the pandemic, fewer toddlers and young children have been receiving early intervention services. Underidentification could increase referrals in elementary schools in the next few years.

The pandemic shuttered many child care facilities, making it hard for parents to find programs like Mainspring Schools, said Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, founder of the Center for Youth Wellness and former Surgeon General of California, when she visited Mainspring Schools last month.

In 2023, the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Institute for Excellence in Mental Health attempted to collect data from state programs and organizations implementing trauma-informed care to infants and early childhood. What they found was that there was no universal understanding of Texas’ approach to delivering infant and early childhood mental health care, meaning it currently looks different from community to community.

“This is precisely the type of program I was talking about when I said there were solutions to adverse childhood trauma, and it can make all the difference in the world,” Harris said. “We need to ask ourselves how we can all play our part as a community because if we address this in our children, we can transform the outcomes of entire communities.”

Texas’ progress

The state of Texas is ready to listen. In 2023, the federal government awarded the state $16 million a year until December 2025 to address the gaps in its early childhood system, which were made worse by the COVID-19 crisis.

This has led to a partnership between UT-Austin’s mental health institute and the Texas Workforce Commission to analyze the landscape of infant and early childhood mental health and present recommendations for a state system. The institute’s researchers interviewed 14 states and nine Texas child care stakeholders and conducted two surveys of statewide early childhood programs to determine the best way to create a statewide toddler and early childhood mental health care system in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Texas Legislature also directed the Statewide Behavioral Health Coordinating Council to develop a children’s mental health strategic plan to be published Dec. 1. The plan will cover children from birth through 17 years of age.

These efforts will complement the state’s Early Childhood Intervention program, which supports families with children from birth through 35 months of age who have disabilities or delays in any area of development, including social-emotional development. The program offers counseling, behavior intervention, occupational therapy, social work, specialized skills training and case management.

Although Texas has no statewide effort, many states for decades have used infant and early childhood mental health consultants as a critical component of their continuum of care, especially for children from birth to 5 years old.

Infant and early childhood mental health consultants primarily work in homes or in early childhood education settings with the adults in the young children’s lives to build their capacity to support their child’s healthy social and emotional development — before formalized intervention is needed.

Arkansas has a statewide program established in 2004 and overseen by the University of Arkansas School of Medical Services. The university provides all training and supervision to consultants across the state.

Colorado’s Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation program focuses on building a qualified workforce by investing in higher education pathways, such as the Colorado State University School of Social Work’s mental health consultant program.

Connecticut is the national leader in infant and early childhood mental health consultations. Established in 2002, it was the first state to standardize its state program model, which is overseen by a nonprofit organization called Advanced Behavioral Health.

Workforce strain

To achieve a statewide program similar to what other states have created, Texas officials must develop a workforce for this specific field.

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry estimates that the country needs 47 child and adolescent psychiatrists per 100,000 children. In Texas, there are roughly 10 CAPs per 100,000 children, illustrating the dire state of youth mental health services.

“There isn’t a lot of funding available, and you got to be trained in this and have the education around this, and unless you are in a place that can give you that training, it can be hard to get into the industry,” said Boneta.

Meanwhile, child care centers, where many of these youngest Texans can receive mental health services, have struggled since the COVID-19 pandemic.

About one-third of Texas child care centers and homes closed at some point during the pandemic, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

This is due to the cost of running a child care facility.

More than 75% of Mainspring’s students receive need-based tuition subsidies or scholarships, but state and federal reimbursements through programs like Early Head Start and the Texas Workforce Commission cover less than half of that amount.

“For a program like Mainspring, the cost is about $2,100 to $2,400 per child per month,” said Swanson, executive director of Mainspring, which has an annual budget of $2.3 million “We rely exclusively on grants and individual giving to support the family services piece.”

The Texas Legislature has attempted to address the child care crisis by allowing cities and counties to exempt specific child care centers from some or all of their property taxes, but local governments have been slow to adopt the exemptions.

In addition to a full property exemption for child care centers, Travis County leaders are allowing voters to determine in November whether to create a 2.5 cent property tax hike to infuse $75 million into child care.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to address child care in our county and support the mental health services needed here,” Aaron DeLaO, vice president of impact for United Way for Greater Austin, said about the tax initiative. “We are on the cusp of being able to address generational trauma in our communities.”

Noah just turned 2 years old this year, and the Sieverts and Mainspring Schools are starting to work on his emotional regulation and finding out how important it is for parents to model behaviors.

For the family, there isn’t an age too young or too old for mental wellness education.

“It makes just as much sense to them as anything else we are telling them at that age,” Sievert said. “So why not start talking earlier about mental health and just identify feelings and how to deal with them?”

For 24/7 mental health support in English or Spanish, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s free help line at 800-662-4357. You can also reach a trained crisis counselor through the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Nearly half of Texas high school students who earn college credits are Hispanic, study says

Nearly half of all public high school students in Texas who earn college credits before they graduate are Hispanic, a new study found. That makes Texas a national leader in closing the gap between Hispanic and non-Hispanic students who participate in dual credit programs.

Hispanic students in dual credit classes, however, graduate from college at a lower rate compared to peers who were also in those programs, underscoring the need to strengthen the transition from high school to college for students of color.

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“We both have to focus on equalizing access to dual credit and providing dual credit students with the supports they need to go to college and complete college,” John Fink, a researcher with the Community College Research Center, said.

The Community College Research Center used National Student Clearinghouse data to look at high school juniors and seniors in 2015 who were enrolled in a dual credit course and tracked where they went in their first four years out of high school. Researchers selected that particular group of students to study the long term effects of dual credit on educational attainment. The researchers said it’s the first of its kind to break down dual credit outcomes by race, socioeconomic status and age by state.

The study found Black student participation, meanwhile, has lagged behind. Black students made up 8% of dual credit programs in the state, compared to 13% of Texas high school enrollment, according to a report on dual credit released Tuesday.

When Texas students made plans after high school, about half of dual enrollment students returned to the community college where they took dual credit classes for at least one term, according to the report’s findings.

The number of dual-credit students in Texas and around the country has ballooned in the past 10 years. Education leaders have seen dual credit programs as a way to encourage students to pursue higher education by giving them a chance to familiarize themselves with a college environment in high school. Earning college credit while still in high school has been linked to a higher educational attainment.

Texas legislators even changed how they finance community colleges to incentivize dual credit last year. Community colleges now get more money when high school students earn at least 15 college credit hours on their campuses. As part of the new funding system, state lawmakers also created the Financial Aid for Swift Transfer, or FAST, program, which gives community colleges extra money if they offer college-level courses at no cost to low-income students who qualify for free and reduced price lunch.

In the past year alone, dual credit participation has grown at record numbers, with about 250,000 students taking advantage of the FAST program to take dual credit classes at no cost, Sarah Keyton, the interim commissioner of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, said in testimony in front of the Senate Higher Education Committee last month.

The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/10/16/texas-dual-enrollment-high-school-community-college/. The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

But in late 2023, Abbott began speaking out against him. With the support of other lawmakers and several political action committees, the governor began portraying Allison as weak on border security and property tax relief — two no-compromise issues for Texas GOP voters. In February, one PAC ran a campaign ad calling Allison “wrong for Texas.”

The San Antonio Express-News endorsed him as “easily the most qualified candidate in this race,” but the attacks stuck: Voters in his district showed him the door in the March 5 primary, overwhelmingly choosing Marc LaHood, a criminal defense attorney with no political experience, as the Republican nominee.

In an interview, Allison said his defeat came down to one unlikely issue: school choice, specifically his opposition to Abbott’s long-stalled effort to enact a statewide Education Savings Account to help families pay for private and homeschool expenses.

It’s a scenario that’s playing out in Texas and beyond as lawmakers, pushing to remake legislative maps, increasingly turn for assistance to groups like the American Federation for Children and the School Freedom Fund, a pro-ESA group tied to tech billionaire Jeff Yass. Yass, a well-known Pennsylvania-based school choice proponent and investor in TikTok parent company Byte Dance, has spent millions to promote ESAs.

The effort has already changed the ballot this November and produced an unprecedented shift in statehouses, with lawmakers increasingly approving taxpayer support for private education. Seventeen states now have universal or near-universal ESA programs. 

Whether it’s via a traditional voucher, which gives families tuition for private education, a tax credit, or a less restrictive ESA fund, the idea is increasingly finding favor in state legislatures. In Florida, families can receive 72% of what the state spends per-pupil; in Arizona, it equals 90%. The pro-school-choice group EdChoice has estimated that more than 328,000 students now take advantage of ESAs, up from 40,000 in 2022.

But many rural conservatives fear the funding won’t be useful in isolated areas where private schools are unlikely to open. In many small towns, school districts are the largest employer, making ESAs political kryptonite.

A few observers say the development also could backfire. Mark P. Jones, a political scientist at Rice University, warned that a rightward primary shift could spell defeat for Republicans in the Nov. 5 general election.

“It is possible, even after all the craziness, even after all the attacks and the millions of dollars spent, particularly by a particular TikTok owner, that you’ve got a situation where Abbott may not get his vouchers after all,” Jones said.

‘So wrong for Tennessee taxpayers’

For the moment, school choice efforts are moving full-speed ahead. FutureEd, a Georgetown University think tank, identified 118 private-school choice bills in 34 states, with most aiming to broaden options like ESAs.

The effort is playing out in states like Ohio, Iowa and, most recently, in Tennessee, where the School Freedom Fund spent an estimated $1 million against Republicans who stopped a statewide voucher in 2024. Among their targets: Sen. Frank S. Niceley, a 20-year legislative veteran who boasted a lifetime 86% score on the conservative Tennessee Legislative Report Card. 

The fund painted him as “liberal Frank Niceley,” with one ad targeting his vote to give undocumented students in-state tuition benefits at Tennessee colleges, adding, “No wonder there’s an invasion.” Playing on his last name, it concluded: “Nice to illegals, but so wrong for Tennessee taxpayers.”

Niceley said in July that allowing out-of-state PACs to label the most conservative senator as a liberal amounted to trashing elections in favor of pre-determined outcomes by interest groups. “Just call up and ask ’em who they want.”

A statewide voucher, Niceley said, ran counter to Tennessee’s reputation for curbing what he called wasteful spending.

Early evidence in other states suggests that while ESAs are popular, their benefits often take the form of tuition discounts for families whose children are already in private schools. In Iowa last year, 60% of applications for the state’s ESA came from such students. In Florida, it was 69%.

Despite Niceley’s plea for frugality, in August, primary voters ousted him by double digits in favor of Jessie Seal, a public relations director for a medical facility. 

Celebrating the defeat of Niceley and others, David McIntosh, a former Indiana congressman and the School Freedom Fund president, said, “Make no mistake: if you call yourself a Republican and oppose school freedom, you should expect to lose your next primary.” 

McIntosh declined an interview request.

Abbott’s ‘white whale’

On the flip side, teachers’ unions are well-known for supporting both Democratic candidates and anti-school-choice legislation. In this political cycle, the National Education Association has spent $21,800,773, according to Open Secrets, a nonprofit that follows money in politics. The American Federation of Teachers has spent $3,949,330.

In Texas, anti-ESA Republicans earned support from a PAC funded by H-E-B grocery store chain heir Charles Butt. It threw in more than $4 million last winter, equal to what the School Freedom Fund spent to oppose a dozen Republicans who blocked Abbott’s voucher legislation.

Voters have rewarded the Freedom Fund’s efforts: Over the past few months, they’ve sent more than a dozen anti-ESA lawmakers packing. Abbott has persuaded a handful of others to retire rather than face difficult primaries. 

Yass, the TikTok billionaire, has contributed more than $12 million in this political cycle, while Miriam Adelson, owner of the Las Vegas Sands casinos, has spent about $13 million, making the pair — residents of Pennsylvania and Nevada, respectively — Texas’ two biggest political donors.

School choice backers hope that kind of support ultimately results in a win for ESAs, a goal that has repeatedly eluded Abbott. 

Jon Taylor, a political scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio, joked that ESAs have become Abbott’s “white whale,” one of the few legislative wins he can’t seem to earn.

Jones, the Rice political scientist, noted that several red-leaning states, including Florida, Georgia and Arizona, have ESAs. Texas Republicans have enjoyed a unified government since 2003, he said, creating a kind of “dissonance” between Texas’ perception as the most conservative state and Abbott’s inability to seal the deal.

While the financial support of Yass and groups like the School Freedom Fund may seem unprecedented, Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform, said it merely serves to counterbalance “the enormously, humongously large coffers” of teachers’ unions and the educational establishment.

“The choice movement support, even with lots of wealthy people, pales in comparison to the tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars of in-kind and financial support that the unions put into legislative races,” said Allen, who also directs the Yass Foundation. She called the development “obviously overdue.”

Allison said he opposed Abbott’s plan because Texas families already have many options, from magnet schools to charters to a Public Education Grant program that lets students in low-performing schools transfer out. Lawmakers, he said, have approved countless programs that provide “choice on top of choice on top of choice” within districts.

Recent polling on school choice isn’t necessarily conclusive: Just under half of respondents to a recent University of Texas survey said they support spending taxpayer dollars to help families pay for private school. Meanwhile, a poll from the University of Houston and Texas Southern University found 65% support.  

‘We lost some very good members’

On occasion, the push to defeat lawmakers like Allison has taken an ugly turn. Last October, while he was down in Austin for one of several special sessions, an activist pulled a black pickup truck onto his suburban street. Mounted on the back were huge video screens that broadcast messages saying the former school board member “hates children” and “supports rogue administrators.”

“They also came up on the lawn and videoed and scared my wife and scared kids in the neighborhood,” he said. The truck’s commotion forced police to reroute a school bus.

Though lawmakers in Texas don’t convene again until early 2025, the effects are already playing out, said Allison. “We lost some very good members because of this — and some very experienced members.”

That could affect the legislature’s institutional memory and its ability to deal not just with education but other urgent issues, he said. “We’ve got a population that is growing by leaps and bounds. We’ve got some serious infrastructure problems: water, roads, bridges. Property taxes. I mean, it just goes on and on. So to single us out and to focus so much by the governor on this one issue is very shortsighted.”

Jones, the Rice political scientist, noted that while legislatures turn over regularly, the more immediate impact will be the “de facto purge” of House moderates. While he predicted that Abbott will likely gain enough support on Nov. 5 to pass some sort of voucher — perhaps not a particularly robust one — Taylor said Abbott’s aggressive pursuit of centrists could backfire, tilting as many as nine House districts into Democratic hands. Texas Democrats have said they hope to flip several seats based on what they call Abbotts’ overreach on education.

In what may be the final irony of his ordeal, Allison reluctantly predicted that LaHood, who beat him in the primary, may have difficulty winning the seat against newcomer Democrat Laurel Jordan Swift. LaHood in 2022 lost a race for county district attorney to a Democratic incumbent. 

One of Allison’s soon-to-be-former colleagues, Democratic Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, who represents a nearby district, in June said Democrats’ hopes to gain seats “increased tenfold” with LaHood’s primary win.

For his part, Allison didn’t hesitate when asked if he thought the district might flip blue in November. “I think there’s a very good chance,” he said.

A nonprofit group that grew El Paso’s charter school network and invested in teachers in traditional public school systems is receiving a $10 million grant as it marks its 10th anniversary.

The Council on Regional Economic Expansion and Educational Development, or CREEED, will receive a $10 million grant from the Woody and Gayle Hunt Family Foundation, which previously gave $12 million to the organization.

A key part of CREEED’s mission has been to increase the number and percentage of El Paso County students completing a college degree or credential, said Woody Hunt, the El Paso businessman and philanthropist whose family foundation has provided most of CREEED’s funding since 2014. That has meant changing expectations and measurements of success, he said.

“An academic’s going to say, ‘We’re doing a great job given the student population we have and given their economic impairment challenges.’ The business community is going to say, ‘We’ve got to get out of this environment. The way we’re going to get out is we’re going to have to not let that be an excuse, and we’re going to have to outperform the parental income levels,’” Hunt said.

He said a number of El Paso schools have shown over the past decade that students from predominantly low-income backgrounds can out-perform students from wealthier districts across the state. That has required a commitment from the business community and school leaders, Hunt said.

A major early focus of CREEED was expanding the number of charter schools in El Paso. But Hunt said a number of factors – particularly a declining student population in El Paso – may mean charters will play a more limited role in El Paso education than originally planned.

Charter school investments

In 2018, CREEED provided $12 million to recruit IDEA Public Schools, a charter school network that began in South Texas, to El Paso County. That effort continues to draw criticism from those who say that the expansion of charter schools in the region drew funding from and undermined traditional public school systems.

“What they want to do is have business drive what is taught and what is created in terms of products coming out of the school system,” said Ross Moore, president of the El Paso Federation of Teachers and Support Personnel, a union in the El Paso Independent School District.

Moore also said CREEED has amplified the emphasis on student testing, which “focused more classroom time on testing or test prep than on learning and developing critical thinking skills.”

Hunt said expanding charter schools was necessary for two primary reasons – to make El Paso more attractive to businesses looking to move to El Paso from areas with extensive charter school networks, and to push El Paso traditional public schools to improve from additional competition.

“I think that competition, which we’re all used to in the private sector, is generally beneficial,” he said.

Hunt noted that El Paso’s traditional public school districts are now open enrollment districts and competing with each other for students, much as charter schools compete for those students.

Texas Education Agency data shows that El Paso students attending school outside their home districts are as likely to go to another traditional school district as a charter school.

TEA records show that about 15,000 El Paso County students – about 9% of all students in the county – were enrolled at eight charter school systems last year. Hunt acknowledged that falls short of CREEED’s expectations of charter school enrollment.

“We’re behind that and that’s all attributable to where IDEA is versus their original plan,” he said.

IDEA Public Schools is the largest charter system in El Paso, with about 5,900 students last year. TEA has been investigating IDEA’s statewide operations since 2021 over allegations of improper spending, and earlier this year assigned a conservator to help oversee IDEA.

“They were expected to do 20 schools and 10 campuses (in El Paso), and they’re half of that, 10 schools and five campuses. We still have expectations that they will resume, but it hasn’t happened yet,” Hunt said.

Moore offered a different explanation for charter school enrollment struggles.

“Because those that do go to charters, more often than not, have a bad experience despite the publicity, and they share with their friends. And honestly, the school districts have been fighting back. Not as much as I’d like them to, but they have been fighting back,” he said.

Public school investments

Both Hunt and CREEED’s CEO, Eddie Rodriguez, said an important step for the organization and educators was defining successful school achievement.

A decade ago, El Paso school districts touted the number of students who scored at least “approaches standards” on state tests, they said. Now, the districts focus on the number of students meeting or exceeding the statewide standards set on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR tests.

“I think one of the things that’s happened over the 10 years is the recognition from the standpoint of the leadership in our region — I’m talking about the academic leadership, superintendents — that, no, we’re going to measure ourselves against the ‘meets’ or the grade level standard. So I think in that respect, we can think of the last 10 years as a positive movement,” Rodriguez said.

Hunt said the focus on students “approaching” standards was misguided.

“That really had no correlation to post-secondary success, whereas meeting standards or mastering standards … could have a correlation there with post-secondary success,” he said.

Hunt and Rodriguez said El Paso’s traditional public schools had been closing long-standing achievement gaps with the state averages until the COVID pandemic closed in-person schooling for parts of two school years starting in 2020. Student test results showed the gap widening again in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, though the gap narrowed the past couple of years.

CREEED’s investments in public schools have focused on improved teacher training, expanding the number of teachers qualified to teach classes that allow students to earn college credit in high school, improving parent engagement, and getting more students to take and pass Algebra I in eighth grade instead of the traditional ninth grade.

The TEA also now is pushing the teaching of Algebra I to eighth grade.

“I think the reality is that we started in that direction before the state did. And so as a consequence, I think that that speaks well to the recognition (by El Paso schools) that this is something that needs to be done,” Rodriguez said.

The future for CREEED, El Paso education

A common outcome driving CREEED’s investments has been getting more El Paso students to earn a college degree or credential after completing high school. Historically, El Paso has had the highest rates in the state of students who enroll in college after high school, but the lowest rates of students completing college.

“So you’ve got this question: What happened here? Are you turning out graduates that want to go on to post-secondary but haven’t been prepared to go on?,” Hunt said. “Or do you have graduates that want to go on, but because of family circumstances, family support income, are unable to sustain their post-secondary to completion? Or do you have a job market that doesn’t have the right pricing signals that’s telling someone, if I stay in school, I complete, I can translate that into a monetary uptick on my financial circumstances?”

Hunt believes all those factors play a role and have to be addressed. Improving educational attainment levels is crucial if El Paso is to be economically competitive with other areas, including other border communities, he said.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for El Paso County schools in the coming years will be declining enrollment. The number of children born last year to El Paso County residents was 21% below the number a decade earlier, according to state records.

Declining enrollment will reduce state funding. That will increase the need for schools – whether charters or traditional school districts – to compete with each other for a shrinking number of students.

“I think the open enrollment (for traditional school districts) will probably reduce the growth of charters. I think going to open enrollment at our traditional public schools is forcing more competition,” Hunt said. “I see that all being positive and really accomplishing the same thing as a charter system would do.”

Hunt said that with increasing competition among traditional school districts, “charters, instead of being 15 or 20% of the student population, end up at 10% or something like that.”

Rodriguez said in the next decade, CREEED will focus on institutionalizing increased college completion – whether technical certificates, associate degrees, or four-year degrees – as the goal for El Paso’s education system, from the youngest grade levels through college.

That will make El Paso – and El Pasoans – more competitive for the higher skilled and higher paying jobs of the mid-21st century, he said.

“The objective from our standpoint is we want to make sure that in these next 10 years, we really establish this process as so instrumental to what makes our community and our society work that people take that as an accepted component,” Rodriguez said.

Disclosure: The Council on Regional Economic Expansion and Economic Development and the Woody and Gayle Hunt Family Foundation are financial supporters of El Paso Matters. Financial supporters play no role in El Paso Matters’ journalism. The news organization’s policy on editorial independence can be found here.

This article first appeared on El Paso Matters and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Things are different in the Houston Independent School District. One year into the state intervention in the district, our results show meaningful growth for students and schools because we’ve embraced wholesale systemic transformation.  

This progress is the result of some innovative practices, but also strategies that education leaders throughout the country already know. The biggest challenge has never been knowing which policies work, but rather summoning the will to do what is right for children, even when the politics are treacherous.

Twenty years ago, leaders willing to transform school systems and the lives of their students boldly dotted the national map. But as the politics got tougher, too many educators and elected officials learned the unfortunate lesson that doing what is right for kids doesn’t always lead to reelection or a contract extension. Today, most leaders don’t dare utter the words “transformation” or “accountability,” and school systems take a piecemeal approach or abandon any effort to improve instructional quality because it is easier on adults. Never mind that honest-to-God transformation of our school systems is exactly what students need. 

In Houston, we’ve embraced transformational change with our New Education System model.  What sets it apart from many previous reforms is its wholesale systemic approach. Unlike piecemeal reforms that often falter due to a lack of coherence and sustained focus, NES aims to build a new system from the ground up, ensuring that all components work in unison toward the same goals.

In particular, it changes how students are taught and how we approach training and professional development for educators. The model combines instruction with real-time feedback through mini-assessments, ensuring that students who are behind get the extra help they need. At the same time, those who are ahead are continually challenged with multi-disciplinary projects that focus on writing over multiple-choice questions. This allows students to demonstrate critical and creative thinking. 

Effective teaching is at the core. The district has invested heavily in training principals to be instructional leaders. They conduct spot observations to better understand how to support teachers and then coach them to help improve their instruction. A new, rigorous evaluation system for principals gauges how well they achieve these goals. 

We have also established leadership academies to train and develop aspiring teachers and principals. This is essential as we work to tackle a shortage of educators. The district hopes to have at least 70 graduates from the Principal Leadership Academy by May 2025.

In addition, NES provides instruction that helps equip young people with the knowledge and skills they will need in a rapidly evolving job market and world. Amid advancements in artificial intelligence and shifts in the economy, we are expanding our offerings of electives with a particular focus on AI. One semester-long course for 11th and 12th graders provides an introduction to generative AI and how to use it safely and ethically. In addition, the district has launched a FutureReady Cohort that trains 200 school staffers on how to use the technology and begin integrating it into lesson plans. For instance, a teacher might explain a couple of methods to solve a math problem to a high school class, then use generative AI to present additional approaches to prompt a discussion.

We also want to impart and foster critical thinking skills, as these are and will continue to be essential for millions of jobs. The district has introduced a curriculum known as the Art of Thinking at all NES schools. It includes lessons on how to combine facts with logic, understand bias and correlation, and devise questions that could be asked in specific scenarios. 

After just one year of implementing NES at an initial set of 85 schools, the district has seen significant achievement gains. In grades 4 and 6, students at these schools improved their reading scores by 8 and 10 percentage points, respectively, while high schoolers jumped 10 points in algebra and 7 in English.

Coalition for Advancing Student Excellence Houston called these gains unprecedented.

Because our professional development and focus on better instruction extends to all schools, our districtwide transformation efforts have had effects even outside the NES model. Across the district, preliminary state accountability data shows that the number of A- and B-rated schools increased by 82%, from 93 in 2023 to 170 in 2024. Meanwhile, the number of NES schools achieving an A or B rating skyrocketed 480%, from 11 in 2023 to 53 in 2024, and the number earning a D or F declined from 121 to only 41 during that time period.

None of this has been easy. Even when everyone in a community knows things must improve, systemic change can trigger fierce pushback. But no matter how hard it is, students deserve a quality public education. It is up to superintendents, school board members and elected leaders who have a say over education to deliver it. District leaders can’t afford to abandon large-scale reform to the past. In Houston, we are seeing incredible results. We hope other districts will find inspiration to pick up the tools of transformation and join us.

A legal effort to block Texas from releasing school performance ratings has created a divide between district leaders who worry the scores are an inaccurate representation of their work and others who say parents need that information to make choices about their kids’ schooling.

A coalition of about 30 school districts recently sued the Texas Education Agency over the introduction of a computer system to grade the state’s standardized tests, which are used to calculate part of Texas schools’ performance rating. The year before, school districts filed a similar lawsuit arguing that the agency had raised too fast a benchmark that also goes into their score. Judges out of Travis County have sided with the school districts in both cases, ordering temporary injunctions that have kept the TEA from releasing the ratings for two consecutive school years.

The latest lawsuit has been met with wariness from some school leaders, a marked shift from when more than a 100 districts saddled up for the first suit to create a unified front against the TEA.

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While the state’s hands have been tied from releasing ratings this year, some school districts in Bexar, Dallas, El Paso and Harris counties have voluntarily released their own campuses’ forecast scores. One board trustee out of Midland’s school district unsuccessfully filed a petition with the court to intervene in the lawsuit, saying time and money were wasted on standardized testing if the public could not access school performance ratings.

“If I’m going to put billboards up and I’m going to put up a fancy website promoting our academic programs or early college high school programs, I believe I owe it to that same community, those same parents, [to] put out scores,” said Xavier de la Torre, the superintendent of the Ysleta school district in El Paso.

The TEA grades every public and charter school in the state on an A-F scale. A failing grade can trigger state sanctions and it can lead the TEA to take over a district in the worst cases. Poor scores can also push families to leave the district and, since schools get money from the state based on enrollment, could lead to less funds.

Some school leaders criticized the automated computer system used to grade the statewide standardized test this year, saying a third party should have reviewed the tool before it was rolled out. They believe statewide drops in reading scores were due to errors with the system and would result in an unfair school rating.

School leaders also said they didn’t get enough notice when TEA introduced stricter expectations for how schools show they’re preparing students for life after graduation. High schools can now only get an “A” rating if 88% of their seniors enrolled in college, pursued a non-college career or entered the military, up from 60%.

Bobby Ott, the superintendent of Temple’s school district, said he never saw the changes to the career readiness benchmarks coming.

“It wasn’t even a target we could prepare for, and that was just completely uncalled for,” he said. “In no real-time situation do you measure progress improvement by doing a ‘ready, fire, aim’ approach. There’s no system built like that … There’s no chance to build to that goal.”

But critics question if back-to-back lawsuits are the best means to raise concerns about the changes. Families have now gone five years without a full picture of how their schools are doing. Texas did not release school ratings in 2020 or 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic; in 2022, Texas lawmakers ordered the state to only release A-C ratings.

Ott agreed a legal fight wasn’t the ideal way to settle disputes with the changes but he said lawmakers left districts no choice because they haven’t addressed their concerns.

The Dallas Independent School District was among the districts that joined in on the first lawsuit. A year later, it was one of the first to voluntarily release their own ratings.

“We’re all being held to that same calculation. So the fact that [the state’s rating system] is imperfect does not mean that we shouldn’t measure it at all,” said Dallas ISD Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde. “I feel like I owe it to our community, and, frankly, to the state of Texas to say, ‘here is where we are.’”

Elizalde said her district joined the first lawsuit because she wanted one more year to understand the new college and career readiness benchmarks before they went into effect. Now that that year had come and passed, Elizalde said her district needed to be transparent about its rating so her team could set performance goals — even if she does share some of the same computer scoring concerns listed in the latest lawsuit.

“If I don’t talk about where we are now, how can I explain how we’re improving?” she said.

Dallas ISD expects to get a C rating this year, a drop from the B it earned in the 2021-22 school year.

Parents lean on A-F scores to understand how their local schools are performing and, if they have the resources, they can use that information to make decisions about where to send their kids to school.

In the El Paso area, school districts in that region are open enrollment, which means families can apply to enroll their child in any school within the district regardless of where they live. The Ysleta, Socorro and El Paso school districts all released their ratings so parents could make informed decisions.

Charter schools leaders say they also benefit from having that information out in the open since many parents find them after assessing local public schools and removing their kids when they are dissatisfied.

“If parents and communities don’t understand the levels of performance of the schools in their neighborhoods … across a state standardized metric, then parents are left in the dark,” said Jeff Cottrill, the superintendent of IDEA Public Schools, Texas’ largest charter school.

The fissures forming between district leaders over the A-F accountability system come as next year’s legislative session looms near. Lawmakers are expected to propose new school voucher legislation, which would let families use taxpayer dollars to pay for their children’s private schooling. Districts are also expected to ask for a raise in the base amount of dollars they get per student after five years of no increases.

Elizalde in Dallas worries that withholding information about public schools’ performance might weaken their ask.

“We know we’re going to be asking for funding for schools. Am I really in the position to say our schools need funding, but I don’t want to tell you how we’re doing? It didn’t sit right with me.”

When asked about how he expects the lawsuit to impact superintendents’ legislative requests, Ott said he hopes the lawsuit will be a catalyst for overhauling the A-F system altogether.

Families in his district have lost trust in the standardized testing system, Ott said. Instead, they want school ratings to measure if schools are safe as well as the experience and tenure of teachers, he added.

“There should be accountability and transparency,” he said. “But they have to be good, solid systems that people can trust and have credibility. And that’s the problem right now. It’s an antiquated system.”

The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

Disclosure: IDEA Public Schools has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/09/23/texas-schools-accountability-ratings-lawsuit-split/. The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

This was the enduring insight of E.D. Hirsch Jr., whose 1987 best-seller Cultural Literacy argued that there is a common body of knowledge, including names, phrases, historical events and cultural references, that “every American needs to know” in order to effectively communicate, navigate the world and be fully literate. 

Like the Texas curriculum, Hirsch’s book met with fierce opposition and was deeply misunderstood. Critics accused Hirsch of seeking to impose a dead white male canon on schools. But these criticisms missed his central and unassailable point: Words, phrases and ideas from history, literature, mythology and, yes, the Bible form the bedrock of much of English speakers’ linguistic heritage. Without complete command of these references, students — particularly poor, minority and immigrant students — will struggle to fully comprehend what they read, no matter how well they can decode the words on the page.

This distinction between decoding and reading comprehension is critical. The long-running debate over how to teach children to read is often oversimplified to a battle between phonics and whole language. However, when children score poorly on reading tests, it’s often not because they can’t decode the words on the page; it’s because they have difficulty making sense of what they’re reading. Most people probably think of reading as a skill, like riding a bike: Once you learn, you can ride any bike. But it’s not so. Any given text is the tip of an iceberg. Beneath the surface is a vast body of vocabulary, background knowledge and context that enable the reader to make meaning. Well-educated people perceive reading comprehension as a skill because it feels like one. But like the proverbial fish that doesn’t know it’s in water, literate people are unconsciously awash in knowledge and vocabulary that they employ reflexively and on which language comprehension depends. 

I often compare a reading passage to the child’s game Jenga, where every block is a vocabulary word or a bit of background knowledge. You can pull out a few blocks and the tower still stands; pull out one too many, and it collapses. The same thing can happen when readers and listeners lack the rich array of mental furniture that writers and speakers draw from. Language comprehension suffers or can break down entirely.

This is where biblical allusions come into play. Everyday language is peppered with references to biblical stories and phrases, many of which are used by English speakers of all faiths — or none at all: Good Samaritan, prodigal son, forbidden fruit, pearls before swine and countless others. Scrubbing biblical references from school curriculum may seem like a step toward inclusivity, but given how deeply such phrases and allusion are embedded in the language, such an effort would more likely impose a form of illiteracy on students, leaving them unprepared to engage with the world around them and at risk of a lifetime of verbal disadvantage. 

It’s equally important to recognize that no curriculum is handed down to teachers on tablets of stone and delivered robotically. “Most teachers do not use a single curriculum as it is written,” reported the RAND Corporation in its annual American Instructional Resources Survey. “Instead, they reported using multiple curricula, making substantial modifications, or creating their own

curriculum materials.” According to RAND, 99% of elementary school teachers and 96% of secondary school teachers rely on material they create or select to teach English language arts. Frankly, this poses an even bigger challenge for classrooms in Texas and across the country. Teachers, often pressed for time and resources, tend to select materials that underestimate what their students are capable of learning. The language and knowledge-rich Texas curriculum is a significant improvement over what’s available on the most commonly used lesson-planning websites, such as Share My Lesson and Teachers Pay Teachers, which one study described as “mediocre” or “probably not worth using.” 

Given the way classroom materials are actually deployed, it makes little sense to reject an entire curriculum over objections to a small number of individual lessons. That said, the Texas Education Agency shared with me a 22-page letter it sent to the board detailing modifications already made to the curriculum in response to criticisms made over the summer during the public comment period, many of which were repeated at the hearing.

Some speakers there also voiced concerns about a perceived over-reliance on reading aloud in the proposed curriculum. But this, too, misses the mark. Listening comprehension outpaces reading comprehension well into a child’s middle school years. In other words, children can understand complex texts when they are read aloud long before they can read them just as well on their own. Read-alouds are a crucial tool for building vocabulary and background knowledge until reading comprehension catches up with listening comprehension.

In short, the concerns over the new curriculum’s inclusion of Bible stories, while understandable, are largely misplaced. What’s at stake is not the promotion of Christianity but the cultivation of cultural literacy, an essential component of reading comprehension and academic success. If parents, policymakers and other education stakeholders want students to be fully literate, able to understand the world of ideas they will encounter in literature, conversation and the wider world, they must be furnished with the common knowledge that educated people take for granted. Removing these references from the curriculum and public education at large does a disservice to students, leaving them at a disadvantage not just in school, but in life.

A coalition of more than 70 Texas school districts has called on the Texas Education Agency to delay full implementation of a new data reporting system they say has led to thousands of unresolved errors that could pose grave consequences to their funding and accountability.

School district leaders sent the letter to the agency’s commissioner, Mike Morath, on Sept. 13 after dozens of them began sharing their concerns with one another about the transition to the new system used to collect student, staff, and financial data, which more than 300 districts piloted last school year. State officials use the information to determine whether schools are meeting performance standards and how much funding they receive each year. The Texas Tribune first reported districts’ concerns about the change last week.

In the letter obtained by the Tribune, the superintendents say they have not been able to verify the accuracy of the thousands of data points entering the new system created by the Ed-Fi Alliance. They warn that, based on their experiences during the pilot, the system is not ready to go live. School district leaders also request the agency “take the necessary steps to provide a safety net for districts this year” and delay the implementation until the system is fully vetted.

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“The unfunded mandate to transition to the Ed-Fi system in the 2024-25 school year when no one is ready has dire consequences for districts in terms of funding, accountability, and reporting,” the letter states.

The Texas Education Agency did not respond to a request for comment on the letter, which offers the first comprehensive look at how widespread the problems with the upgrades are. More school districts have signed onto the letter since it was first sent.

Each of Texas’ more than 1,200 school districts is required to regularly submit data to the state, including information on attendance, enrollment, students who receive special education, children experiencing homelessness and the number of kids who have completed a college preparatory course.

The state launched the new system at the start of this school year. The goal was to make it easier for school districts and the state to share data and reduce the amount of manual labor required from school staff. Districts were supportive of the proposed changes.

Before the upgrade, school districts would submit data directly to the state after working with software vendors that would ensure the education agency didn’t have any problems interpreting the information. Under the new arrangement, the software vendors are now responsible for transmitting the data to the state, a change that school officials say leaves them without a chance to fact-check the information before it goes out.

They also say a litany of errors and inaccuracies surfaced during the pilot program. In some instances, thousands of student records — from enrollment figures to the number of students in certain programs — did not show up correctly.

“Understand the position we’re in as a school district trying to work on this,” said Stephen McCanless, Cleveland school district superintendent, “along with all the other requirements and mandates that districts work on for the state and for the federal government during an entire school year.”

Still, agency officials expressed confidence this month that districts will have ample time to resolve any errors between now and the fall reporting deadline on Dec. 12. The agency noted that districts have until Jan. 16 — just days after winter break — to resubmit any data needing corrections. The agency also said it has resolved more than a thousand tickets submitted by school officials reporting problems with the new system.

But, to date, school district officials say their staff don’t know how to solve some errors, nor are they clear on what steps the state has taken to resolve them. And state agency officials have not directly answered what would happen if the problems go beyond the deadlines.

“The amount of time to investigate even one error can be extremely lengthy,” said Lori Rapp, superintendent of the Lewisville school district, which helped prepare the letter.

Many school districts recently told the Tribune that they are still in support of the system. But they say they need more time.

“The accuracy of the information is so critical because it has so many implications across the system, with first and foremost being funding,” said Richardson school district Superintendent Tabitha Branum, who also signed the letter. “In the previous system, we had tools to help us do that. With this new system, right now, those tools don’t exist.”

In addition to their calls to extend the pilot program, school district leaders are also calling for the state to provide more training to ensure their staff are prepared for the transition; to hire an independent firm to conduct an audit of the data submitted in the new system; and to provide transparency on data security with the system upgrade.

“The potential consequences for the state’s data accuracy and districts’ financial health,” the letter says, “are too large to overlook.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/09/17/school-district-letter-ed-fi-system/. The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Upgrades to the system Texas uses to collect student, staff and financial data from school districts are causing serious concerns among school administrators and data specialists across the state who say the changes have led to thousands of unresolved errors that could potentially cause them to lose out on state funding.

Each of Texas’ more than 1,200 school districts is required to regularly submit data to the state, including information on attendance, enrollment, students who receive special education, children experiencing homelessness and the number of kids who have completed a college preparatory course. State officials use the information to determine whether schools are meeting performance standards and how much funding they receive each year.

Three years ago, the Texas Education Agency announced major changes to the reporting system. The goal was to make it easier for school districts and the state to share data and reduce the amount of manual labor required from school officials. Districts were supportive of the proposed changes.

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Almost a dozen other states are using the same standard on which Texas based its system upgrade, said Eric Jansson, vice president of technology for Ed-Fi Alliance, the organization that created the standard. Texas is the largest state to implement the changes.

More than 300 districts participated in the pilot program during the last school year, according to the TEA. All school districts began using the new system this school year.

Before the upgrade, school districts would submit data directly to the TEA after working with a software vendor that would ensure the education agency didn’t have any problems interpreting the information.

Under the new arrangement, the software vendors are now responsible for transmitting the data to the state, a change that school officials say leaves them without a chance to fact-check the information before it goes out.

They also say a litany of errors and inaccuracies surfaced during the pilot program. In some instances, hundreds of student records — from enrollment figures to the number of students in certain programs — did not show up correctly.

A TEA spokesperson said the agency is confident districts will have ample time to resolve any errors between now and the first reporting deadline on Dec. 12. The agency also noted that districts have until Jan. 16 to resubmit any data needing corrections.

But districts say they have no idea how to solve some errors. Their concerns, shared in interviews with The Texas Tribune, have not been previously reported.

In an August letter to TEA Commissioner Mike Morath, Lewisville Independent School District Superintendent Lori Rapp requested that the agency delay the full transition to the new reporting system until all districts are able to submit “100% of all data elements” successfully.

Rapp said thousands of errors surfaced after the district’s software vendor submitted data to the new system during the pilot. Her staff spent “tons of hours” trying to figure out why the miscalculations had occurred, she said in an interview.

While Rapp’s staff had made some progress working with the new system since the pilot started, “[w]e have not been able to fully send, promote, and validate our data to the point where a successful submission could have been made,” Rapp’s letter said.

After receiving the note, the TEA organized a virtual meeting with Lewisville ISD officials to discuss their concerns. Rapp said the state did not seem concerned about whether school districts were prepared to make the transition.

“Maybe because there’s no ramifications to them and the stakes aren’t as high, they don’t have a concern,” Rapp said. “But for districts, the stakes are extremely high, and it’s a gross oversight on their part if they are failing to recognize that.”

While the TEA says it has resolved more than a thousand tickets submitted by school officials reporting problems with the new system, officials from nearly a half-dozen districts told the Tribune the state has not explained what’s causing some of the errors or told them if they have been resolved.

School administrators and data specialists who participated in the pilot say the implications of adopting a system that still doesn’t have a clear process to correct mistakes are massive. An inaccurate assessment of the students enrolled in Texas public schools could mean school districts receive less funding from the state. Schools are funded based on students’ average daily attendance, and they receive additional dollars if they have children with specific needs, like students with disabilities or kids learning English as a second language.

Funding has been a major point of contention between Texas schools and state officials in recent years. Many districts entered the school year having to spend more money than they have, largely because of the state’s rising costs of living and a half-decade of no increases to the base-level funding they receive from the state. Public school leaders remain upset that last year’s legislative sessions ended with no significant raises despite the state having a record $32 billion surplus.

Texas’ school accountability system also relies on the data school districts submit to the state. Some parents rely on those performance metrics to make decisions on where to enroll their children. Poor performance can also lead to state intervention — like it happened when the state ousted Houston ISD’s locally elected school board and superintendent last year.

Full accountability ratings have not been released in five years due to litigation over changes to how districts are evaluated. Many have publicly released their unofficial ratings to share their progress with their communities.

School districts say they can’t afford to have mistakes in their student data.

“I think everybody understands the situation that public education is in right now,” said Frisco ISD Superintendent Mike Waldrip. “And there is no confidence by anyone that I’ve spoken with that that data is accurate or will be accurate when it comes time to submit it to the state.”

School districts that have piloted the new system say they understand errors are part of the process. They just wanted more time to troubleshoot them before it went live.

“We need more answers around not only supporting the system to be successful, but while we are making sure that it’s successful, how are we going to continue to assure that we’re not suffering consequences for a delay or inaccuracies in the data?” said Mark White, assistant superintendent of accountability for the Tomball Independent School District. “And none of those assurances have been received by districts.”

A TEA spokesperson said the agency did not see a need to expand the trial period because the pilot showed the channels through which it receives data from software vendors worked.

The TEA said it plans to continue working with districts to help resolve any errors well before the first reporting deadline. The agency said districts should reach out if they are still experiencing problems.

Tammy Eagans, who oversees the student data reporting process for Leon ISD, said the agency was helpful throughout the pilot year whenever the school district had problems submitting information. She added that the task of switching to the new system may not pose the same problems for her small district of fewer than 800 students as it might for larger districts with thousands of children.

Still, she said she is “not 100% confident” that the system as it’s being rolled out works as intended. Extending the pilot “would not have been a bad idea,” Eagans said. But she is also hopeful that the education agency will be understanding of districts’ concerns and not blame them for errors out of their control.

The upcoming reporting deadline “just kind of puts a little extra pressure on us,” said Eagans, adding that she’s “a little nervous, a little apprehensive, but hoping that it goes smoother than I think it will.”

Other school officials say the pilot was unsuccessful, and if adopting the new system requires more time, the state should be willing to cooperate.

While districts’ summer data submissions are the largest and have major funding implications, each reporting period is significant in helping paint an accurate picture of a district’s latest demographic, financial and personnel situation. For Tomball ISD Superintendent Martha Salazar-Zamora, the looming fall reporting deadline — the first since the adoption of the new system — is the most important.

“If the data is inaccurate, then we live with that inaccuracy throughout the entire year,” she said. “So it has a lot of relevance on many levels.”

Mary Mitchem, a former TEA employee, said she started worrying about the system’s readiness shortly after she was hired in June to make sure the system met the needs of its users. Mitchem no longer works for the agency as of early August.

Within days of being hired, she said it appeared that no one had done the work to ensure the data coming from software vendors accurately translated into the education agency’s system. Having helped manage data systems for Texas school districts and worked on statewide software projects across the country, she said she was also surprised that, two months before the pilot was set to conclude, no one had audited or tested the system.

“You’re converting a state accounting system, and you have to make sure it balances — you have to,” said Mitchem.

Mitchem sounded the alarm up the chain of command, but a supervisor told her that anything beyond making sure the data was flowing into the new system was the responsibility of the software vendors and school districts.

“It just blew my mind,” Mitchem said.

In early August, she sent an email to Morath saying, in part, “You will be in litigation if you don’t help fix it, and it will be with the largest districts in the state of Texas.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

During several hours of public testimony before the State Board of Education, multiple speakers noted negative or inaccurate representations of Judaism and a lack of attention to contemporary Jewish life or Americans. 

Sharyn Vane, one of the speakers who addressed the board, called the new program, branded as Bluebonnet Learning, “wildly problematic in its depictions of Jews and Judaism.” She referred to a second grade lesson on Queen Esther in which Haman, an official of the Persian king, cast lots to decide when to kill the Jews. The lesson includes students playing a game of dice. “This is shocking, offensive and just plain wrong. Do we ask elementary schoolers to pretend to be Hitler?”

Another speaker pointed to how fourth graders are asked to highlight positive aspects of the Crusades.

“We were being murdered en masse,” Emily Bourgeois, public affairs director for Shalom Austin, said about the persecution of Jews during the Middle Ages. “There’s not really a whole lot of benefit to that.” 

The public’s comments, while more critical than favorable, demonstrated the intense pressure on board members to either tone down the emphasis on the Bible, add more references to other world religions or accept the proposed curriculum as is. The Texas Education Agency, which developed it, now has until Oct. 14 to complete any revisions before the board votes in November on a final list of approved materials. Groups opposed to the biblical content have urged the board to reject lessons that they say come close to proselytizing. But conservative organizations, especially religious ones, have encouraged their networks in recent weeks to bombard members with emails calling for approval of the state-developed materials with no changes. 

​​”The Bible is the single most impactful piece of literature. It is the single biggest influence on the formation of Western civilization,” Aaron Harris, a political consultant who has been countering opposition to the materials, said during the hearing. “Any denial of that fact is just silly.”

Some board members seem to have already made up their minds. In her summer newsletter, Audrey Young, a Republican whose district includes Houston, said not including the Bible in the curriculum will “continue to severely limit [students’] opportunity for academic success.”

“Separation of church and state as a legal concept does not mean the two realms never interact,” she wrote. “It only means that one does not control the other.”

Julie Pickren, a conservative Republican board member — who often posts Bible verses on social media — defended the Bluebonnet Learning curriculum throughout the meeting, saying she’s received 12,000 emails in favor of the program, but just a “minuscule” number opposed.  

‘Y’all must have done something right,” she told Colin Dempsey, a director at the agency that has managed the review process.

Others, however, are still probing for information on who influenced the development of the curriculum, which was adapted from Core Knowledge Language Arts, a widely used reading program published by Amplify. At least twice, Board Member Pam Little, also a Republican, asked whether the agency engaged a religious committee to provide input on the lessons. 

The state has posted a list of the members of the advisory committee. But a spokesman for the agency said he was unaware of a separate group of faith leaders who were involved in the process.

One group involved in the development of the materials — and now promoting them — is the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-leaning organization. Two experts with the foundation, Thomas Lindsay and Courtnie Bagley, worked as “subject matter experts” on the lessons. Lindsay was also on the advisory board. The group’s involvement has spurred some critics to raise questions about whether improving reading scores is the primary objective of the new curriculum.

“Gov. Greg Abbott’s education commissioner is outsourcing the education of a generation of Texas school children to people more interested in pushing political agendas than in educating kids,” Carisa Lopez, deputy director of the Texas Freedom Network, said during a press conference Tuesday. “That should be alarming to all parents regardless of their religious or political beliefs.”

Last month, the watchdog group, which monitors far-right movements, issued a report on the curriculum, saying the authors present Christian beliefs as “straightforwardly true.” Author David Brockman, a religious studies scholar at Rice University, cited, for example, a third grade lesson on Christianity that states, “In the years that followed, many heard about the resurrection of Jesus.” 

“Students may well gain the impression that the Resurrection was a historical event — a faith claim a public school curriculum has no business conveying,” Brockman wrote.

State officials, meanwhile, have already accepted many of the corrections submitted by the public, according to a report now posted on the agency’s website. Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University, submitted dozens of corrections. The state revised, for example, a line that said the word “genesis” originated with the first book of the Bible. But they made no changes to the statement: “God gave King Solomon wisdom on all things.” Chancey commented that the wording promotes “a particular religious belief.”

‘A position of authority’

Bluebonnet Learning, which will be optional for districts to use, is just one of 142 programs in reading and math publishers submitted to the board. The fact that Tuesday’s speakers exclusively spoke about Bluebonnet highlights the intense controversy the Bible-infused curriculum has ignited since late May when the agency released it. 

Expecting the polarizing comments, Board Chair Aaron Kinsey asked Austin Kinghorn, a deputy state attorney general, to weigh in on the constitutionality of the curriculum. Kinghorn asserted, as most supporters of the curriculum have, that it’s permissible to teach about religion in public school and that the Bible played a pivotal role in American history. But if lessons amount to proselytizing, he said, they would violate the First Amendment. 

Multiple times, he noted the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, in which the court upheld a high school coach’s right to pray in public at football games, as the most recent legal test of whether references to religion in school cross the line. Coercion, he said “doesn’t exist nearly as often” as some perceive.

But other legal experts said the Kennedy decision doesn’t necessarily answer the questions raised by the Texas curriculum, or similar actions in other GOP-led states. In Oklahoma, state Superintendent Ryan Walters has mandated that teachers use the Bible in instruction, and in Louisiana, a new law requires the 10 Commandments posted in all classrooms. 

“The entire premise of the Kennedy ruling is that the coach was not acting from a position of authority, but was acting solely in his private capacity and that those who joined him in his private prayer did so voluntarily,“ said Derek Black, a constitutional law professor at the University of South Carolina. Schools can “expose students to portions of the Bible as an example of literature or religious text, as long as it is in the context of exposure to lots of other historical literature. But they cannot teach the Bible as religion or truths that someone should or should not follow.”

‘World religions’

High-level debates over what children learn are nothing new in Texas. 

About a decade ago, the state discontinued use of an online curriculum system, called CSCOPE, after conservatives complained it was anti-American. The majority of districts in the state used the materials, but some critics didn’t like that lessons introduced students to other world religions, like Islam. 

A similar controversy derailed plans in 2022 to adopt a new social studies curriculum. Republican lawmakers argued the material would violate the state’s law against teaching “critical race theory” because it included lessons on race and LGBTQ issues, among other topics.

For reading, the state spent $19 million in 2020 to purchase the Amplify program. At the time, the state rejected two of the units Amplify submitted that covered the world’s major religions. As The 74 first reported, the state asked Amplify to add some stories from the Bible, like the one on Queen Esther. The company wrote a draft, but it ultimately bowed out and didn’t bid on the next phase of the project

In 2022, the state contracted with Boston-based Public Consulting Group to further revise the Amplify lessons. Notes from an April 2022 “project kick-off meeting,” which the Texas Education Agency shared with The 74, show officials planned to “bring world religions back in.” Another notation said a second grade unit on ancient Greece, which focuses on mythology, would be a “form of teaching other religion.”

The proposed materials, however, include sparse mentions of Islam and Hinduism while predominantly featuring stories and passages from the Bible. And religions like Sikhism aren’t mentioned at all.

That lack of representation “takes away the opportunity for students to develop a genuine understanding of practices and perspectives outside their own,” Upneet Kaur, senior education manager for The Sikh Coalition, told the board. “Sikh students know the devastating impact of this all too well.”

But Carole Haynes, one of the nearly 250 reviewers the state hired to examine the proposed materials, wrote in a recent op-ed that countries where other religions are dominant are unlikely to “allow Christianity to be included in their school curriculum.”

“It’s so important that we have children read these biblical stories,” wrote Haynes, who is a curriculum consultant. She mentioned a kindergarten lesson on the Golden Rule that highlights Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. “It wasn’t politicization. It wasn’t teaching them Christianity. It was teaching them moral character. That’s where our kids are deficient.” 

Many also can’t read on grade level. Roughly half of Texas’s elementary school students are proficient, and this year’s test scores show declines in the percentages of third and fifth graders meeting expectations. Fourth graders made a 3 percentage point gain. 

Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath has said Bluebonnet Learning will improve students’ vocabulary and reading comprehension skills. His presentations for lawmakers point to reading gains in districts that have piloted some earlier versions of the lessons. 

But Board Member Tom Maynard, a Republican, said overall, results from those districts have been “spotty.”

While the public’s comments during Tuesday’s hearing overwhelmingly focused on the religious aspects of the program, there was also ample discussion over whether the program follows the research on teaching students to read. Dempsey, the agency official managing the review process, said the “product scored very well” among the reviewers, who examined whether it covers state standards and is considered “suitable” for classrooms.

“I think the big question is,” Maynard said, ‘Does it work?’ ”

Former Uvalde schools police Chief Pete Arredondo asked a state district court on Friday to quash ten felony charges of child endangerment for his response to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting.

Arredondo is one of two law enforcement officers who face criminal charges for their response to Texas’ deadliest school shooting, which left nineteen children and two teachers dead on May 22, 2022. An indictment handed down in June by a Uvalde County grand jury called Arredondo the incident commander and accused him of causing imminent danger to ten children by delaying law enforcement’s response to the active shooter and not responding as trained.

In their motion to toss out the indictment, Arredondo’s lawyers say school districts and their employees don’t have a duty to protect students from third-party threats. The lawyers also point out that the children were already in danger when Arredondo responded.

“The indictment does not allege that Mr. Arredondo engaged in any conduct that placed a child in imminent danger of death, bodily injury, or physical or mental impairment,” the filing states. “To the contrary, the language in the indictment itself makes clear that when Mr. Arredondo responded as part of his official duties, an active shooter incident was already in progress.”

Arredondo said soon after the shooting that he did not think he was the incident commander and that he did not give any orders. Nearly 400 local, state and federal law enforcement officers descended upon the school but failed to act decisively, instead waiting for more than an hour to confront the gunman.

Border Patrol agents ultimately decided to breach the classroom and killed the shooter.

Since the school shooting, families of Uvalde victims have called on local and state elected officials to hold officers accountable for their failures in leadership. Many said they were disappointed that the grand jury indicted only two officers.

In addition to Arredondo, former district officer Adrian Gonzales was indicted on 29 counts of child endangerment. Gonzales has also denied violating school district policy or state law. Both officers were released from Uvalde County Jail on bond.

Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As The Texas Tribune’s signature event of the year, The Texas Tribune Festival brings Texans closer to politics, policy and the day’s news from Texas and beyond. Browse on-demand recordings and catch up on the biggest headlines from Festival events at the Tribune’s Festival news page.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/09/06/uvalde-charges-arredondo-schools-police-chief/. The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

When Texas lawmakers passed legislation in 2015 that created a pathway for public schools to hire more teachers without formal classroom training, one goal was to make the profession more attractive to individuals from different paths who could offer hands-on learning to students.

Some school administrators made it clear they intended to place these so-called uncertified teachers in positions where they could leverage their fields of expertise and keep them away from core areas like math, reading and special education, which would remain under the care of their most seasoned educators.

That was before the COVID-19 pandemic, which left many longtime educators worried about their health and feeling underappreciated, underresourced and burnt out. They walked out of the classroom in droves, accelerating teacher shortages at a time when students were returning to in-person learning and schools needed them the most.

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Now some school districts are hiring uncertified teachers — some to provide instruction in core subjects — at an extraordinary pace.

In almost a decade since the law was passed, the number of uncertified teachers in the state’s public schools ballooned by 29%, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of state data. Uncertified teachers, many of whom are located in rural school districts, accounted for roughly 38% of newly hired instructors last year.

Some academic experts are dubbing the state’s growing reliance on uncertified teachers a crisis. A recent Texas Tech University study highlighted that kids lose three to four months of learning when they have a new teacher who is both uncertified and lacks experience working in a public school.

But with fewer people entering the profession through traditional pipelines, school districts are trying to give uncertified instructors the training and support they need to succeed in the classroom. School officials and education advocates are encouraging them to participate in teacher certification programs — and they hope lawmakers will set aside funds next year to help cover the costs.

The ask comes at a time when schools are already starved for a cash infusion. Many districts entered the school year having to spend more money than they are earning, largely because of the state’s rising cost of living and a half-decade of no increases to their base-level funding. Public school leaders remain upset that last year’s legislative sessions ended with no significant base funding increases despite the state having a record $32 billion surplus.

“When you have a state where their coffers are full and local school districts where their coffers are empty, or in the process of being empty, you’re going to have to have some state help to make sure that we’re funding these types of programs,” said Mark Henry, who served as Cy-Fair ISD’s superintendent for more than a decade until his retirement last year.

A tool to deal with teacher shortages

Prior to the passage of the 2015 law, known as District of Innovation, teachers would normally enter the profession through traditional college or university routes or via alternative certification programs, which are geared toward people who have a bachelor’s degree in a different field and need classroom training. Both pathways have seen enrollment declines in recent years.

The District of Innovation law was meant to give traditional public schools some of the flexibility that charter schools had long enjoyed, granting them exemptions from mandates on class sizes, school start dates and certification requirements. Before, uncertified educators in Texas could teach core classes only after obtaining waivers and permits approved by the state education agency on a case-by-case basis.

With a District of Innovation plan, districts can now create a comprehensive educational program that identifies provisions under Texas law that make it difficult for them to reach their goals and offers ways to address those challenges. The plan must receive public input and gain local school board approval before districts can proceed with any exemptions.

Many districts have sought an exemption from the state’s teacher certification requirements to help combat their teacher shortages.

Texas has no statewide definition for what constitutes a teacher shortage, but one major indicator that points to a significant need for more teachers is the state’s teacher attrition rate, which tracks the percentage of educators who leave the field in any given year.

Since the start of the pandemic, the attrition rate has increased from roughly 9% to 12%, according to the Texas Education Agency. A historic 13.4% of teachers left the profession between fall 2021 and fall 2022.

The state commissioned a task force two years ago to look into the teacher shortage and make policy recommendations for legislators to address the problem, though not much of the group’s advice has been adopted into state law. The panel of educators and school administrators recommended that the state commit to respecting teachers’ time, improving training and increasing salaries. Texas ranks 30th in the nation for average teacher pay, $8,828 less than the national average, according to the National Education Association.

The Texas House of Representatives’ Public Education Committee held a hearing in August to ask questions and gather information on the causes for the rising number of uncertified teachers and the effect on student outcomes. Lawmakers also discussed what many public education advocates see as a growing lack of respect for teachers, which the advocates say is fueling both the teacher shortage and the rise of uncertified teachers.

In recent years, Texas Republican leaders like Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have routinely criticized public schools and instructors, accusing them of teaching children “woke” lessons on America’s history of systemic racism and keeping in their libraries reading materials that make inappropriate references to gender and sexuality. All the while, Abbott has been pushing for a program that would allow parents to use tax dollars to pay for their children’s private education, which public education advocates fear will plummet enrollment in public schools and ultimately result in less funding. School districts receive funding based on their average daily attendance.

“No one wants to go into something where they feel like they’re just going to be beat down day to day,” said David Vroonland, former superintendent of Mesquite ISD who now works as executive director of the educational research organization LEARN. “And I think the political commentary out there right now is doing a lot of harm to bringing more people into the space. Obviously, the other is we need to pay better.”

Getting new teachers ready for the classroom

Educators who testified at last month’s legislative hearing also called on lawmakers to direct more financial resources to help teaching candidates go through high-quality preparation programs.

One such program in Brazosport ISD helped Amanda Garza McIntyre transition from being an administrative assistant at a construction company to becoming an eighth grade science teacher at Freeport Intermediate School.

McIntyre, who has a bachelor’s degree in health care administration, knew what Brazosport ISD does for children: the district helped her first-grade daughter learn how to read at grade level over the course of a semester. But starting a new career while raising her five kids seemed overwhelming, and she needed help.

The Brazosport ISD program allows aspiring teachers to earn a bachelor’s degree, teacher certification or both — at no cost. In return, program participants have to work in the district for at least three years. The program includes a paid residency that pairs candidates with a teacher mentor who works with them in a classroom for a full school year. Brazosport ISD pays for the program using funds from its own budget, grants and local partnerships.

Thanks to the hands-on training and guidance she received over the last year, which included working with some of the same children in her classroom now, McIntyre started as a full-time teacher earlier this month.

“I don’t know that I would have fully committed to going into teaching without knowing that I had that training and that preparedness to walk into a classroom and feel confident,” McIntyre said.

The task force formed to study the root causes of Texas’ teacher shortage included in its recommendations that the state fund certification programs like the one Brazosport ISD is running.

Sam Cofer, chief operating officer of Jubilee Academies, a San Antonio-based charter school district, said it makes sense for the Legislature to help fund programs like Brazosport ISD’s but argued that certification is not the only way to increase the number of capable teachers in Texas classrooms.

Jubilee Academies filled many of its teacher vacancies in the last decade with substitute instructors. The district knew it would be difficult to compete for more experienced teachers with traditional districts that could offer more competitive salaries, Cofer said, so it expanded its pool of applicants to include people with a bachelor’s degree and work experience in other fields but without teaching certification.

Since 2015, Jubilee Academies’ percentage of uncertified teachers has risen from roughly 17% to 66%. During the 2023-24 school year, 60% of new hires at all Texas charter schools were people without formal classroom training.

Cofer said the district relies on instructional coaches to provide their new hires with the support they need to adapt to their new profession. He also said the district encourages certification but doesn’t require it.

Teacher certification does prepare new hires “better in a lot of ways to be a teacher in a public school,” Cofer said. “But I also can’t be dismissive of the skill sets that may come along with people that don’t go through those programs that could also end up being effective teachers with the right amount of coaching and mentoring and guidance.”

Public education advocates are hoping the state and school districts invest in quality teacher preparation, regardless of what avenue they take to get there.

“It’s not serving students to put people in those positions that don’t have the experience they need to be successful,” said Priscilla Aquino-Garza, a former teacher who works as senior director of programs for Educate Texas, an organization focused on increasing academic achievement and educational equity for underserved children.

Shalona McCray, Longview ISD’s assistant superintendent of Human Resources and Community Relations, is grateful for the flexibility the District of Innovation law has granted schools. She said it allowed them to recruit from a more diverse talent pool as veteran educators left the profession in droves at the height of the pandemic. Since the law was passed, the district’s percentage of uncertified hires has skyrocketed from roughly 3% to 67%.

Longview ISD is committed to working with teachers to get them licensed through an alternative certification program or the district’s apprenticeship program, preferably within three years, McCray said. The District of Innovation law is a stepping stone, she said, to getting more people who care about education into the profession.

“I’m gonna have to rely on District of Innovation to go out and find some teachers who are not certified but qualified,” McCray said. “They have a bachelor’s degree, they have a passion, and then we’ll do everything we can to help them.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Disclosure: Educate Texas and Texas Tech University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Students who started school during or after the COVID-19 pandemic have a harder time saying goodbye to their parents when they drop them off, Plains Independent School District Superintendent Robert McClain said.

Third graders are behind in their reading, teacher Heather Harris said, so the district hired a reading specialist to work with their youngest students.

They’re also struggling in math, San Antonio ISD Superintendent Jaime Aquino said.

“When I go into classrooms of students who are currently fourth graders or fifth graders who were either kindergarten or first grade [during the pandemic], you can see that there is a lack of mathematical fluency around basic facts,” he said.

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Texas school administrators, educators and education policy experts say they’re seeing troubling signs that students in the earliest grades are not doing as well academically as children who started school before the pandemic. State and federal officials devoted significant resources to help students affected by the pandemic but they mostly focused on older children whose schooling was disrupted. Experts worry that the state’s youngest students will have a harder time catching up without intervention.

A recent study by Curriculum Associates Research looked at national academic growth trends in the last four years and compared them with pre-pandemic data. It found younger students — like those who were enrolled in kindergarten or first grade in 2021 — were the furthest behind in both reading and math compared to their peers before the pandemic.

According to the report, those students may be struggling because of disruptions in their early childhood experiences, difficulties building up foundational skills like phonics or number recognition, problems engaging with virtual learning during the pandemic or insufficient resources being devoted to help children in the earliest grades.

Aquino, San Antonio ISD’s superintendent, said attendance in early grades is lower than before the pandemic, which is impacting foundational learning.

“We told families to stay home during the pandemic. Now we’re sending the message: You have to be in school,” Aquino said.

Low pre-K enrollment during the pandemic may be another factor. Children who attend pre-K are nearly twice as likely to be ready for kindergarten, said Miguel Solis, president of the education research nonprofit Commit Partnership.

In the school year 2019-2020, there were 249,226 students enrolled in pre-kindergarten in Texas, according to state data. This number dropped by nearly 50,000 in the following year.

Low academic attainment can compound in ways that become increasingly difficult to fix. Harris, the Plains ISD teacher, said it’s hard for third-grade students who fall behind to catch up because their teachers will likely not be able to spend much time helping them develop foundational skills they already should have learned.

“Pre-K through second, you’re learning to read, and then third grade on up, you’re reading to learn. So there’s that huge switch of what you’re teaching,” she said.

Mary Lynn Pruneda, an education analyst at the public policy think tank Texas 2036, said the Curriculum Associates Research study raises concerns about young learners but it’s difficult to pinpoint the impact in Texas because of a lack of data.

“We have very limited data on how younger students are doing that’s consistent across grade levels,” Pruneda said.

Without data to help diagnose the problem, students are being set up for continually low results in the state’s standardized test, she said.

There are some indications of how the problem might be manifesting in Texas. In Dallas County, for example, declines in math and reading scores between 2023 and 2024 were most acute among third graders, who would have been in kindergarten during the pandemic, Solis said.

Solis said the state needs to start collecting literacy data for early grades to identify students who are not on track and intervene. He’s hopeful because some lawmakers in both the Texas House and Senate have already expressed interest in taking a close look at how young students learn foundational skills, he said.

“We can’t wait until the third grade STAAR to see how younger students are progressing,” he said.

Pruneda said one step Texas can take to start reversing the trend is raising spending in public education — something educators are desperate for — to help school districts hire and retain the best teachers possible. The superintendents of both Plains and San Antonio ISDs said it is imperative for the Texas Legislature to approve a significant funding boost next year after lawmakers failed last year to do so amid the fight over school vouchers.

High-impact tutoring, like the one legislators mandated for grades 3-8, may also help early-grade students, she said.

The full program is now LIVE for the 2024 Texas Tribune Festival, happening Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Explore the program featuring more than 100 unforgettable conversations on topics covering education, the economy, Texas and national politics, criminal justice, the border, the 2024 elections and so much more. See the full program.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/08/09/texas-early-childhood-education-pandemic/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

McALLEN — On May 17, with just one week to go until the end of the school year, the superintendent of the South Texas Mission school district received an email with a list of 676 books a group of local pastors believed were “filthy and evil.”

The email came from the personal assistant of Pastor Luis Cabrera, who leads a church in Harlingen, about 30 miles east of the Mission school district.

The email was clear. Cabrera and “the community” wanted them removed.

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The email cited state law, House Bill 900, that requires vendors to rate their books and materials for appropriateness, based on the presence of sex depictions or references, before selling them to school libraries.

Despite that law being blocked by a federal appeals court, then-superintendent of the Mission school district, Carol G. Perez, replied within five minutes that the district would check to see if they had the books to remove them.

Later that evening, Deputy Superintendent Sharon A. Roberts asked the district’s director for instructional technology and library services, Marissa I. Saenz, to look into removing them.

Reference: Read the emails that show the Mission school district in South Texas handled a request to remove more than 600 books from its libraries.

“Can you prioritize researching these books to ensure we remove them from the school libraries? Can your IT coaches help you track the location of the books to expedite this request?” Roberts wrote in an email.

The emails, which The Texas Tribune obtained through an open records request, offer a window into how close the 14,500-student district was to removing a trove of books over the summer break. It also illustrates the continued pressure — public and private — school leaders in every corner of the state face over access to books that discuss race, religion and LGBTQ+ themes.

School district and community libraries have been inundated with requests since 2020, following the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s death. The public backlash started in the suburbs of Dallas. But communities large and small have wrestled with these questions.

Prior to the May 17 email, Cabrera had made similar requests to other school districts in the Rio Grande Valley. He spoke during public comment at several school board meetings last spring. Cabrera was following, in part, the lead of an organization called Citizens Defending Freedom.

Established in 2021, the nonprofit empowers “citizens to defend their freedom and liberty, and place local government back into the hands of the people.” Until recently, most of its work had been in North Texas counties.

Now at the dawn of a new school year, a coalition of Rio Grande Valley faith leaders are denouncing the effort to remove books from South Texas school libraries.

The McAllen Faith Leaders Network, a group of religious leaders in the upper Rio Grande Valley, wrote a letter to local school districts after hearing about the Mission school district’s “knee jerk response” to the Christian conservative group’s request.

The local faith leaders’ open letter had specifically taken issue with the inclusion of “Anne Frank’s Diary” on the book list. A spokesperson for Citizens Defending Freedom, Dan Thomas, clarified that that title referred to the graphic novel, an adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

This month, seven members of the McAllen Faith Leaders Network signed the letter, which called for a separation between religious organizations and public entities.

“We don’t believe that a religious organization should exert decision making power over our public schools or any public body,” the religious leaders said.

Rabbi Nathan Farb of Temple Emanuel in McAllen said in an interview with The Texas Tribune that this coalition does not have a political agenda and members of the group often disagree politically and on other topics.

“We thought it was important as faith leaders to speak up and let our educators know that this individual was not speaking on behalf of all faiths, not speaking on behalf of all Christians, was not representing the religious voice of the entire Valley.”

Rev. Joe Tognetti of St. Mark United Methodist Church in McAllen said limits on what is accessible to schoolchildren can be appropriate. However, the process to determine which books are appropriate should be determined among parents, students and teachers — not a national conservative nonprofit.

Ultimately, the Mission school district did not remove any books, the district told the Tribune late last week.

A few days after the district received the request to remove the books, Saenz, the library director, replied she would review the list against the district’s collection to ensure any books that did meet the standards set in state law were weeded out.

However, Saenz noted that Cabrera appeared to misunderstand the extent of state law and pointed out that some of the books on the list might not be sexually explicit.

For books that do not meet the criteria in state law, Saenz said board policy states only parents, students 18 years or older, an employee or a resident of the school district can challenge the appropriateness of books.

The school district assured that no books had been reconsidered, restricted, or removed at this time.

“Mission CISD understands the concerns that have been raised regarding this situation,” a district spokesperson said in a statement. “We remain committed to meeting the educational needs of our students within the district.”

Mission was not the only school district to receive requests to remove books last spring. At a May 7 meeting, Cabrera threatened to sue the Brownsville school district if it did not remove certain books.

The district, which serves about 38,000 students, removed five books from its shelves, according to a May 24 email from the district’s chief operations officer to the superintendent.

Cabrera had just begun his partnership with Citizens Defending Freedom when he began contacting Rio Grande Valley school districts, according to Thomas, the spokesman for the citizens group. The group did not supply the list of books and Thomas said the manner in which Cabrera had approached the school districts was not their usual process.

Cabrera did not respond to a request for comment.

Thomas said they typically take action when people within school districts reach out to them with their concerns.

Thomas also argued that they were not exerting decision-making power on school districts, as the local faith leaders had accused, by trying to remove “vulgar” books.

“Our position is simple,” Thomas said. “We would like school libraries to contain books that have educational value. We do not think it’s appropriate to have vulgar books with no educational value in public school libraries.”

Reporting in the Rio Grande Valley is supported in part by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

El Paso Independent School District middle schoolers will be automatically enrolled in an advanced math class this school year, with the plan of getting nearly all eighth graders enrolled in Algebra 1 by the 2025-26 school year.

This comes as school districts throughout the state ramp up advanced math class enrollment for middle schoolers to comply with a new law intended to get more eighth graders enrolled in Algebra 1 — a course most Texas students have taken in ninth grade.

Senate Bill 2124, passed during the 2023 legislative session, requires schools to enroll students who performed in the top 40% in their fifth-grade math assessment into advanced math in sixth grade starting the 2024-25 school year, to prepare them for the high school level course.

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The law also requires schools to track performance and enrollment for students in advanced math classes, and allows parents to opt their children out of taking them.

EPISD plans to go beyond the state’s requirements, hoping to give more students the opportunity to take calculus in high school — a class that is usually required to get a college degree in math or science.

“If students don’t take algebra in the eighth grade, it’s very difficult to get to calculus by their senior year. The benefit of having everybody exposed to algebra in eighth grade is that it opens that door to more advanced math classes,” Jason Long, EPISD’s executive director of advanced academics,  told El Paso Matters.

Still, some worry EPISD’s goal may take more than one school year to accomplish successfully.

“They’re not going to be ready for it. It’s going to be setting kids up for failure,” El Paso American Federation of Teachers President Ross Moore told El Paso Matters.

Moore said he was not aware of EPISD’s plan before being approached by El Paso Matters.

Roughly 30% of eighth graders in the district took Algebra 1 during the 2023-24 school year, Long said.

Meanwhile, some El Paso school districts have already reached or surpassed the state’s goal.

About 40% of sixth graders attending the Ysleta Independent School District took advanced math during the 2023-24 school year, and that’s expected to reach 50% this coming school year, YISD Chief Academic Officer Brenda Chacon said.

Roughly 28% of eighth graders in YISD were enrolled in Algebra 1 in 2023-24, according to Texas Education Agency data compiled by the El Paso nonprofit Council on Regional Economic Expansion and Educational Development — or CREEED.

The Socorro Independent School District had 96% of its eighth graders enrolled in Algebra 1, the data shows.

The district aims to have all its students take the class in middle school with exceptions for those who transferred from another district or were opted out by their parents.

For the past two school years, SISD had the top five schools with the highest eighth-grade Algebra 1 STAAR test scores in El Paso County.

These include Hernando, Montwood, Ensor, Antwine and Puentes middle schools for the 2023-24 school year.

SISD’s assistant superintendent of schools, Enrique Herrera, credited the district’s decade-long initiative to get more students into advanced math for this accomplishment.

“A lot of the success has happened because of how we’ve coordinated our curriculum,” Herrera told El Paso Matters. “For the most part, we try to prep sixth graders with honors math, unless parents want to opt out of it, but they start getting that rigor in sixth grade. They’re really doubling up in seventh and eighth grade, which then prepares them for the algebra that they’ll experience as eighth graders.”

Meanwhile, EPISD and the Clint Independent School District had the bottom five performing campuses: Bobby Joe Hill and Tinajero pre-K to eighth-grade schools, and Estrada, Guillen and Horizon middle schools.

How EPISD plans to implement Algebra 1 for eighth graders

EPISD already offered Algebra 1 and advanced math in middle school, which it calls honors courses, to certain students.

“All the pre-K through eighth-grade schools had it, but it was either at a parent’s request or a teacher’s recommendation,” Long said.

Now EPISD plans to reach the state’s 40% goal and will enroll all eighth graders at seven of its schools into Algebra 1 starting in August, as part of a pilot program.

This includes Brown, Canyon Hills, Charles, Guillen and Wiggs middle schools, and the Bobby Joe Hill and Tinajero pre-K to eighth-grade schools.

“These pilot campuses already started working with their seventh-grade students to prep them for the eighth-grade algebra,” Long said.

Long said the district plans to have all its eighth graders take algebra by the 2025-26 school year, with exceptions for students who transferred from another school district and were not enrolled in advanced math the previous year.

To ensure all students are prepared for these classes, Long said students who struggle with algebra may have to take two math courses in what’s called a double block – two periods that provide more instructional time.

SISD implemented a similar schedule that required students to take an intervention class along with their regular math course.

EPISD students also will be able to get help during an intervention and enrichment period known as What I Need, or WIN.

Long said the period works “almost like an elective” that allows students who are struggling with their classes to get extra support.

EPISD’s WIN period gained controversy when it was first started in the 2023-24 school year after the district in order to implement it eliminated a policy requiring elementary school students to take physical education daily.

The debate over eighth-grade algebra

As lawmakers and educators around the country look into ways to close achievement gaps in education, a debate has brewed about when students should take algebra and who has access to advanced math classes.

Some states have drastically different approaches.

In Texas, lawmakers, education advocates and business leaders have pushed for more students to take part in advanced classes to prepare more students to pursue college and enter STEM careers.

“Eighth-grade algebra is the gateway to taking advanced math in high school. Taking college-level math courses in high school is predictive of higher rates of postsecondary success,” said Gabe Grantham, policy advisor for Texas 2036.

The organization is a nonpartisan Dallas-based think tank that uses research to inform public policy changes.

Students who take college-level math courses in high school are six times more likely to complete college compared to their peers. Completing Algebra 1 in eighth grade has also been linked to higher wages.

In California, lawmakers decided students would need to wait until high school to take Algebra 1 in hopes of addressing inequities in education.

“We know that students of color, primarily black and brown students, and students from low-income backgrounds have lower test scores because the opportunities that they have available to them are not as good as their peers. And so because their test scores are lower they’re going to be less likely to be given the opportunity to take algebra in eighth grade, or if they are pushed into algebra early, they might not be as prepared for it as some of their peers,” Andrew McEachin, senior research director for the Educational Testing Service Research Institute, told El Paso Matters.

ETS develops and administers educational assessments, including the California High School Exit Exam.

McEachin agreed that eighth-grade algebra can serve as a gateway course to get students into college, but noted schools need to start early to ensure students are prepared for it.

“The framing should be around a successful opportunity for students, not so much that they just added or took it. What that means is that they’ve been set up for success for that course in eighth grade, and that likely is going to start from kindergarten or the first time they entered the district,” McEachin said when asked about EPISD’s goal.

Research conducted by the E3 Alliance found that the bottom 60% of performers in fifth-grade math were less successful in completing Algebra I in eighth grade.

E3 Alliance is a Central Texas based collaborative non-profit that aims to transform education through data driven initiatives.

Students who do not demonstrate proficiency in assessments should not be placed in advanced math until they receive the proper support, said Jennifer Cavazos Saenz, E3 Alliance senior director of communications and policy.

“Texas school districts that have implemented this approach have seen dramatic drops in student performance and outcomes,” Cavazos Saenz said.

Moore agreed it may take more preparation.

“It’s not ready unless they have good solid backing, they do it in an incremental basis, there is a training plan, personnel aspects have been brought out, and teachers aren’t being told on the first day back, ‘You’re not teaching eighth-grade math anymore, you’re teaching algebra,’” Moore said.

EPISD leaders said they have implemented a comprehensive approach “which includes tutoring for students and additional support for teachers to ensure success for all.”

“The district is fully staffed with highly qualified and certified teachers who are eager to kickstart this new opportunity. EPISD stands firm in its commitment to supporting teachers and students guaranteeing the success of this Algebra for All offering,” EPISD spokesperson Ernie Chacon said in a statement.

Correction: Because of incorrect information provided by the Ysleta Independent School District, an earlier version incorrectly stated the percentage of eighth-grade students enrolled in Algebra 1 in 2023-24.

This article first appeared on El Paso Matters and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

English-learning students’ scores on a state test designed to measure their mastery of the language fell sharply and have stayed low since 2018 — a drop that bilingual educators say might have less to do with students’ skills and more with sweeping design changes and the automated computer scoring system that were introduced that year.

English learners who used to speak to a teacher at their school as part of the Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System now sit in front of a computer and respond to prompts through a microphone. The Texas Education Agency uses software programmed to recognize and evaluate students’ speech.

Students’ scores dropped after the new test was introduced, a Texas Tribune analysis shows. In the previous four years, about half of all students in grades 4-12 who took the test got the highest score on the test’s speaking portion, which was required to be considered fully fluent in English. Since 2018, only about 10% of test takers have gotten the top score in speaking each year.

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Passing TELPAS is not a graduation requirement, but the test scores can impact students. Bilingual educators say students who don’t test out of TELPAS often have to remain longer in remedial English courses, which might limit their elective options and keep their teachers from recommending them for advanced courses that would help make them better candidates when they apply for college.

The way the state education agency currently tests English learners’ skills frustrates some educators who say many of their students are already fully capable of communicating in English but might be getting low marks in the test because of the design changes.

“You’re putting [students] in an artificial environment, which already reduces the ability of students to give you natural language,” said Jennifer Phillips, an educator with two decades of experience teaching bilingual students in Texas. “It’s a flawed system.”

TELPAS scores also account for 3% of the grades the TEA gives school districts and campuses in its A-F accountability rating system. Though they only represent a small portion of their rating, TELPAS scores might be more significant for school districts at a time when they have grown increasingly worried about how the state evaluates their performance. Several districts have sued TEA to block the release of the last two years of ratings, arguing that recent changes to the metrics made it harder to get a good rating and could make them more susceptible to state intervention.

TEA’s use of an automated scoring engine to score portions of TELPAS has also come under scrutiny after the agency used the same tool to evaluate short-answer and essay questions in this year’s State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, the state’s standardized test that all students in grades 4-12 take to measure their understanding of core subjects. Educators are weary of using an automated system to score STAAR and list it as one of their complaints in the districts’ latest lawsuit against the state.

Testing English learners’ skills

When students enter a public school in Texas, they are classified as “emergent bilingual” if they indicate they speak a language other than English at home and fail a preliminary English assessment. About a quarter of Texas students have that designation.

Federal law requires Texas to assess English learners’ progress regularly. Texas is one of only a handful of states that developed its own test instead of using the exam used in other parts of the country.

Each spring, about a million emergent bilingual students in Texas public schools take the TELPAS exam, which consists of four parts: listening, reading, writing and speaking.

Before 2018, teachers with TELPAS training would administer the test at students’ schools. Listening and reading evaluations were, and still remain, multiple-choice sections measuring student comprehension. For writing, teachers would gather and assess a sample of students’ work in the classroom throughout the school year. For speaking, teachers would talk to students in one-on-one evaluations or fill out a rubric based on their observations of students’ English fluency throughout the year.

When the TEA moved the test online, it changed the testing environment and scoring method. The change sought to standardize the test and make the results more reliable, an agency spokesperson said. The automated scoring technology helped deliver speaking assessment results more quickly. Last year, the automated scoring system started evaluating students’ written responses.

In each of the four assessment categories, students get a score of beginner, intermediate, advanced or advanced high. Students have to continue taking the test each year until they score advanced high in at least three categories; they may score advanced in the other one and still pass. Before this year, students had to score advanced high in every domain.

Several bilingual educators the Tribune spoke with for this story said the low test scores students have received since the test was changed do not reflect their actual performance in the classroom, adding that many English learners communicate better than their scores suggest. While English-learning students’ scores have improved on the STAAR test since 2021, the TELPAS scores — particularly in speaking — have remained low since the test was changed.

“It is a little disheartening,” said Ericka Dillon, director of bilingual education and English as a Second Language courses at Northside ISD in the San Antonio area. The district has about 14,500 emergent bilingual students, a significant number of whom are proficient in English but struggle to reach advanced high on the TELPAS assessment, she said.

“They’re doing the best that they can, but they still won’t be able to meet that criteria,” Dillon said.

In response to a Tribune data analysis showing that the average number of passing TELPAS scores in speaking dropped after TEA redesigned the test and introduced the automated scoring system, an agency spokesperson said, “It’s not uncommon to see performance adjustments when student performance is evaluated in a standardized manner across the state.” The spokesperson also noted that speaking and writing are by nature more challenging than listening and reading.

The TEA has vigorously defended its automated scoring engine, rejecting comparisons of the technology to artificial intelligence. The agency has said humans oversee and train the system as well as monitor its results. The TEA said a technical advisory council has approved the technology, and when the program encounters a student response that its training does not know how to handle, it directs it to a human to score.

This year, the TEA said that at least 25% of the TELPAS writing and speaking assessments were re-routed to a human scorer to check the program’s work. That number oscillated between 17% and 23% in the previous six years, according to public records obtained by the Tribune.

Score changes after human reviews

One of the reasons educators are skeptical of TELPAS’ automated system is how scores sometimes change when they ask for a review. Humans rescore speaking and writing assessments.

Last year, 9% of the TELPAS speaking assessments that TEA reviewed got a higher score; that number was 13% the year before. The automated system initially scored more than 95% of the assessments that improved after a second look, public records show.

Spring Branch ISD officials said the percentage of assessments that improved after requesting a rescore was even higher at their district. They sent more than 800 speaking assessments for rescoring in 2022, and more than a third got a better score after they were reviewed. The next year, about half of their submissions improved after rescoring, officials said.

“If the evidence from our rescoring submissions is any indication, the system leaves a lot to be desired for its accuracy,” said Keith Haffey, executive director of assessment and compliance at Spring Branch ISD.

It’s unclear how many assessments would lead to a better grade after a second look since most results go unchallenged. The number of rescored assessments each year is less than 1% of the total TELPAS tests administered. Educators say they have to weigh costs and time constraints when deciding whether to request a rescore. Reviews are free if they result in a better score; if they don’t, schools have to pay $50 per rescoring request.

In addition, educators say it’s not easy to decide which results to challenge because they haven’t had access to students’ audio responses. This contrasts with STAAR results: Written student responses are readily available online to districts.

“If we can’t hear how they did on TELPAS, we can’t say if this is where they really are or not,” Dillon said.

The TEA says district testing coordinators can request listening sessions, but some educators said the agency’s director of student assessments told them only parents can request the files. A TEA spokesperson said that person misspoke.

In response to district feedback, the TEA spokesperson said districts and parents will have easier access to all TELPAS responses starting in the 2024-25 school year.

Not an “accurate reflection”

Edith Treviño, known affectionately as Dr. ET, used to be the ESL specialist for the TEA’s education service center in Edinburg. Now she runs a private consulting practice helping students pass TELPAS.

Treviño said she worries that the automated scoring system penalizes students who are fluent in English but speak with an accent, mix in a few words from their native tongue or stray from using academic language.

“Children are not supposed to answer like regular people, according to TELPAS,” she said.

To score advanced high in the test’s speaking portion, students must respond to each prompt with answers that last 45 to 90 seconds. They have two chances to record a response and they need to use academic language fitting their grade level.

But Treviño said the prompts are often simple and do not require long answers. In a recent TikTok video, she said some questions were like asking students to identify an orange.

Because passing TELPAS is not a graduation requirement and scores only account for a small portion of campus and district accountability ratings, some schools do not prioritize helping students prepare for the test. But the results can affect students’ educational journey.

Many school districts enroll English-learning students in ESL courses, which can prevent them from taking certain electives and advanced courses because of scheduling conflicts. Teachers or staff might also hesitate to recommend a student to advanced courses if they are still taking ESL courses, Phillips said. Those advanced courses, especially at the high school level, are crucial to being competitive in college admissions.

She said any school policies that keep English learners from participating in advanced courses would amount to language-based discrimination. Nevertheless, she said it’s a common practice she’s observed in her career as an educator and while studying for her doctorate in education.

“It’s not in the law, but it’s in practice,” Phillips said.

Not being able to test out of TELPAS can also impact students’ experience in school. Kids failing to pass the test could internalize the failure, which in turn makes them vulnerable to further academic struggles, Phillips said.

“What this does to children’s self-esteem is horrible,” Treviño said, particularly for students who can speak English well but have test results that tell them they are not proficient.

Carlene Thomas, the former ESL coordinator for the TEA who now is the CEO of an education consulting company, said she would like to see the TEA use more sophisticated tools that enable more conversational student responses to ensure TELPAS is “meaningful in how students interact socially and with content material.”

She added that educators should also help students by giving them more opportunities to practice speaking English during class, relying less on direct translation and ensuring they understand the stakes and structure of the test.

But as of now, she said, “TELPAS is not giving us an accurate reflection of where our students are.”

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/08/13/texas-telpas-bilingual-students-test-scores/. The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.