On May 28, voters will choose Republican candidates in 13 of the state’s 150 House districts. Four are currently held by representatives targeted by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott for persistently stymying his attempts to create a statewide system of education savings accounts (ESAs). If the incumbents fall, many believe the plan will be enacted, turning Texas into the country’s biggest school choice marketplace as soon as 2025.

While presumptively on hold until January, when the legislature will next come into session, the proposal could gain irresistible momentum if the elections are decided in Abbott’s favor. Almost immediately, lawmakers and educators alike would begin seriously considering the fallout from what could be to school enrollments and financing.

The election is the culmination of a yearlong campaign by Abbott and his allies that has migrated from committee hearings in Austin to front-porch campaigning in East Texas. In March, knocked off nine Republicans who had blocked a push during last year’s legislative session to allow universal eligibility for ESAs, which provide state funds for families to use for educational expenses like private school tuition. Another handful were denied majorities, triggering runoff elections against opponents who have largely been endorsed by the governor. Abbott has openly predicted that if two more anti-voucher incumbents are defeated, the legislation can be revived and passed.

That victory, if achieved, would result from the interplay of local and national political pressures.

Abbott would immediately gain a critical policy win after multiple previous bids to expand ESAs, all of which have been thwarted by the same coalition of Democrats and rural Republicans. But national donors and advocacy groups have also taken a close interest in the electoral fight, to the tune of millions of dollars in the hopes of extending a generational winning streak for school choice that has unfolded over the past few years. 

Monty Exter is the director of government relations at the , a non-union organization that strongly opposes the governor’s ambitions. He said the success of voucher rollouts in other red states presented something of a “street cred issue” for Abbott, one of the most prominent conservative leaders in the country.

“Texas is the biggest red state in the country, and Abbott is the long-serving governor here,” he said. “He has clearly made it a huge priority where it hasn’t been a huge priority for him in the past. And it’s certainly not a new issue.”

Rural pushback

Indeed, the roots of this month’s extended primary fight extend far into the past, even predating Abbott’s time in office.

In 2007, 2009, and 2013, in response to prior Republican governors’ voucher designs, the Texas House of Representative adopted budgetary rules that explicitly prohibited the transfer of public funding to private schools. In 2017, an ESA bill passed the Senate only to be torpedoed in the lower chamber. And just last spring, Abbott’s renewed effort — sweetened with offers of extra per-pupil funding for traditional public schools — fell short again in the face of familiar bipartisan resistance. 

The overriding obstacle cuts against traditional partisan loyalties: A key faction of Republican legislators are perennially skeptical of the potential disruption of voucher programs to small-town school districts, often their communities’ largest employers. Local officials fear that families will quickly abandon public schools after receiving an ESA, leading to a collapse in both student enrollment and funding.

Those concerns weren’t allayed even after Abbott called last fall to force further consideration of the proposal. In the months following, he turned to the primary ballot, supporting a host of challengers to the House Republicans who defied him. He was joined in his endorsements by high-profile allies , while Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton whose leaders he accused of whipping up opposition to pro-ESA primary candidates. (While of those later resolved the complaints with the attorney general’s office, against administrators accused of using school resources for electioneering purposes.)

According to survey results, the public stir around school choice made little impact on Republicans around the state. In a February poll from , a research institute housed at the University of Texas at Austin, of potential Republican voters listed ESAs as a top issue influencing their primary vote. Asked which politicians’ endorsements might sway them, only 7 percent named Abbott. 

But the governor’s energetic campaigning clearly a healthy proportion of the state GOP’s biggest ESA critics in the March 5 primary. So did the heavy spending of conservative donors — including billionaire TikTok investor and school choice maven Jeff Yass, who in December to spend on the campaigns.

“What made this cycle different was that the governor decided to stake so much of his political capital on the passage of a school voucher program in Texas and — upon failing to achieve that goal — committed to spending significant amounts of money to unseat these incumbent legislators,” argued Joshua Blank, the Texas Politics Project’s research director. 

It remains to be seen whether the same recipe will unseat the four additional incumbents fighting runoff battles this month. Cal Jillson, a professor of government at Southern Methodist University and a longtime observer of Texas politics, said that runoff elections tend to draw a smaller and more ideologically committed electorate. That could be a bad sign for Abbott’s targets.

“We did see a lot of these incumbents go down in the primary,” Jillson noted. “With the low turnout in a runoff race, it’s usually the most motivated people who will end up turning out and casting ballots, and those tend to be people who are deeply committed to the party and social conservative issues.”

‘A clear message’

For now, ESA proponents are using every edge to grab more seats in an already-conservative chamber — particularly money.

In addition to the individual contributions made by Yass and other wealthy activists, the conservative challengers have drawn deeply from the coffers of the , a right-leaning advocacy organization based in Washington. Through an affiliated Super PAC, the School Freedom Fund, in the March primaries; they’ve dropped at least as much in the three months since.  

In a statement, Club for Growth President David McIntosh said the group jumped into the little-publicized legislative primaries not just to shape Texas policy, but also to send a message to all Republicans guilty of “denying parents and kids choice in education.” The organization might look for similar opportunities in places like Georgia and Tennessee, he added. 

“This election will send a clear message to Republicans in every state that you should retire or expect to lose in your next primary,” McIntosh warned. “We are also hopeful that this will push school freedom allies in other states to reform failing public schools, and we are looking at replicating these efforts in other states.”

That nationwide perspective has grown as more red jurisdictions have acted to establish or expand families’ eligibility for private school choice. In all, 11 states now boast , and with each newly adopted law — Alabama became the latest to pass its legislation in March — it has become more noteworthy that Texas still lags behind.

Jillson said he believed that vouchers would be all but inevitable if the embattled incumbents lose their elections next week. Even if a few survive, he said, they will be “sobered” against continuing to stand in the way of ESA expansion.

“I suspect that some of these four will be defeated. That will provide Abbott with a slim majority in the next regular session, which could grow if other members who’ve opposed vouchers in the past say, ‘I can’t do this anymore or he’ll come for me.’ ”

The El Paso Independent School District is planning to close or consolidate schools — which the district calls “sunsetting campuses” — by the 2025-26 school year as it braces for continued declining enrollment.

EPISD Superintendent Diana Sayavedra on Wednesday announced the district is evaluating programs, resources and facilities and will present recommendations to the Board of Trustees in late fall.

The district will hold a series of this month to introduce their restructuring plans and gather public input.

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In an interview with El Paso Matters, said the district still doesn’t know how many or which of its 76 campuses could be affected but noted it does not plan to close any high schools at this point.

“If we don’t begin to have that conversation and make those difficult decisions, we will find ourselves in a crisis,” Sayavedra told El Paso Matters. “So before we get there, we’re giving ourselves a good runway to partner with the community so that our decisions are informed.”

EPISD enrollment declines

The superintendent of El Paso’s largest school district said the change is needed due to declining enrollment that she expects to continue falling in the coming years.

EPISD’s enrollment has declined by 20% since the 2013-14 school year, according to the Texas Education Agency. The district currently has fewer than 50,000 students for the first time since the 1960s.

“Over the next 10 years, we stand to lose additional students. Because our birth rates and the birth rates nationally are showing that we’re graduating more students from school systems than there are children being born,” Sayavedra said.

The number of children born to El Paso County residents declined by 21% between 2013 and 2023, according to state data provided to El Paso Matters. Nationally, the number of births declined by 9% in the same period.

Elementary schools are the first affected by declining birth rates. nine elementary schools between the 2018-19 and 2020-21 school years. The declines then ripple through to middle schools and high schools over the years.

Sayavedra said she expects the district’s enrollment to settle between 36,000 and 42,000 students. That would take the district’s enrollment back to where it was in the 1950s, according to newspaper reports from that period.

El Paso ISD budget, teacher pay

As enrollment declines, Sayavedra said the district will likely have to tighten its budget and possibly forego raises for its teachers and other employees in the coming school year.

“I don’t foresee that we can give a significant compensation increase, if any at all. But what I can share with you is that I’m going to bring a balanced budget to the board,” Sayavedra said. “We’re not at a point where we’re having to make significant staffing cuts because we’ve been very conservative and very fruitful and very strategic about our budget development process.”

She said the district plans to maintain its fund balance at 75 days or higher and keeps its employee’s insurance premiums the same.

Trustees for El Paso’s two other largest school districts, the and Ysleta Independent School Districts, have also said they may not be able to give employees raises in the 2024-25 school year.

During an April board meeting, SISD trustees discussed possibly reducing its employee health plan contributions as it deals with a $33 million deficit.

The future of EPISD high schools

Though Sayavedra said EPISD does not currently plan to close any high schools in the district, many have also seen declines in enrollment.

Since the 2013-14 school year, enrollment dropped by over 43% at Irvin High School, 27% at Austin High School, and 21% at Andress High School.

Among EPISD’s 10 traditional high schools, El Paso and Franklin were the only ones to see their enrollment increase during that time, by 31% and under 9%, respectively.

2025 bond election plans

The district also plans to bring a bond election to voters in November 2025 to upgrade heating and cooling systems throughout the district, improve security and potentially pay for upgrades or the construction of new consolidated school campuses.

Sayavedra said changes would need to be made even without a bond.

“If we were to sunset a campus, and families are going to transition to another campus, with a bond there may be opportunities for us to update that facility so that it’s a healthier learning environment for children. But if we’re not able to pass a bond, at the very least what we will be able to offer is program expansion for the receiving campus,” Sayavedra said.

What’s next in school closure plan?

A series of will be held this month to gather input from the community. Over the summer, the district will develop preliminary criteria for school consolidations and closures.

The criteria will be shared with the community by early fall, and the district will conduct a preliminary analysis of campuses, including which schools require facility improvements or have opportunities to implement or expand programs.

Recommendations will be presented in late fall to the EPISD school board, which will vote on which schools to close or consolidate.

Timeline:

May 2024: 10 feeder pattern community meetings

Summer 2024: EPISD reviews feedback; begins developing preliminary criteria for school consolidations, closures

Early fall 2024: Criteria shared with the community; begins preliminary analysis of campuses, including which schools require facility improvements or have opportunities to implement or expand programs; more community meetings

Late fall 2024: EPISD presents recommendations to the Board of Trustees.

2025-26 school year: School consolidations, closures implemented

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Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District leaders plan to cut their librarian staff in half next year, becoming the latest Houston-area district to reduce librarians amid budget cuts. 

Expecting a $138 million budget deficit for the 2024-25 school year, leaders of the Houston-area’s second largest school district are aiming to slash roughly 670 staff positions, including 50 librarians.

The plan would leave 42 librarians in a district with 117,000 students and 88 schools.

The changes have not yet been voted on by the district’s school board, but a district spokesperson confirmed the plans to the Landing on Monday. The district has until the end of June to adopt a finalized budget.

“Staff reduction is inevitable when almost 90 percent of the budget is allocated to personnel,” district spokesperson Leslie Francis said Monday. 

As Texas school districts reduce costs, librarians have taken blows.

Four of Texas’ largest school districts — Houston, San Antonio and Spring Branch, and now Cy-Fair — have either made plans to or have eliminated dozens of librarians in the last year. 

Texas lawmakers failed to significantly increase public school funding during the 2023 legislative session, spelling financial trouble for districts as they grapple with inflationary costs and the end of pandemic-relief funds. 

Tara Cummings, a parent with students at Cy-Woods High School and Spillane Middle School, feels like the district’s leadership has its hands tied as it tries to save money, but she wishes the changes didn’t have to gut “the heart and soul of a school.”

“I don’t know really what the alternative is. The cuts have to come from somewhere,” Cummings said. “The anger needs to be focused on our Republican-led state government. They have the money to fund public education. They just won’t do it.”

A Cy-Fair spokesperson did not respond to a list of questions about the reduction plan, including how the 42 librarians would be placed across 88 schools.

Cy-Fair Superintendent Douglas Killian assembled a group of community members and stakeholders to form a “budget reduction advisory committee” and make recommendations to the administration. 

However, cutting librarians was not included in a list of committee ideas or listed on the budget reduction plan presented to trustees at an April 22 board meeting. Board president Scott Henry did not respond to calls from the Landing Monday. 

In recent budget workshops, leaders have discussed their plan to offset $70 million of their $138 million deficit with their fund balance, or rainy day funds. The rest will come from cost-saving changes, such as cutting staff positions. 

Librarians in Cy-Fair earned annual salaries ranging from roughly $64,000 to $97,000 in 2022-23, the most recent year with state data.

“I think there’s probably a less worse option than (cutting librarians), but I don’t know what it is,” said Cummings, the Cy-Fair parent. “And regardless of what it is, it’s going to piss off somebody and devastate somebody.”

In an email to a community member obtained by the Landing, Superintendent Killian warned “this is truly the beginning of cuts” and the librarian reductions are “just the tip of the iceberg.”

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But new federal data has given researchers some cause for optimism, suggesting efforts to make teaching more financially viable with strategies such as paying student teachers have helped to move the needle. 

From 2018 through 2022, enrollment in teacher preparation programs grew 12% nationally, or by about 46,231 more candidates, according to a from Pennsylvania State’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy Analysis.

Nine states lead the pack with notably higher bumps in teacher prep programs in recent years: Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Ohio, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina and, with the highest average growth, Maryland. 

The modest upswing, seen both in enrollment and completion rates, during some of the most strained years in American education, has surprised experts.

“It was encouraging to see 
 at the height of the pandemic, it certainly was not what we were expecting,” said Jacqueline King, research and policy consultant with the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. 

Only 11 states saw continued enrollment declines in the prep programs during the last three years, among them Montana and Minnesota. 

“I think that all the work that we’ve been doing around grow your own, apprenticeships and residencies
 to open up more affordable pathways into teaching are starting to bear some fruit, which is amazing and fantastic,” King added.

Contributing factors also include federal pandemic relief funds and new laws in states such as and that pay student teachers. In Maryland, for instance, some during their year long teaching residency. 

“It’s real,” said King. “It’s enough money that you’re not thinking, how am I gonna do student teaching and have a part time job?” 

Still, researchers caution, the growth is not nearly at the pace required to match hiring demand. Teacher shortages are , and in key areas like special education and math. 

Enrollment in teacher preparation programs in just one decade — about fewer teachers are prepared annually. Compounding social, political and economic strains fueled the decline, including a major recession and education reform efforts that negatively impacted public perception of teaching and America’s schools. 

By 2021, only five areas had bucked the overall trend, with more enrollees than a decade prior: Arizona, Mississippi, Texas, Washington and Washington, D.C. Texas’s growth can be attributed to rapid expansion of a particular alternative program, Teachers of Tomorrow, . 

“Over the last seven years, we’re kind of treading water in terms of the number of teachers,” said Ed Fuller, education professor at Pennsylvania State University and author of the most recent analysis. “We don’t need to be where we were in 2010 because we don’t have as many students, but we need to be a lot closer to that than we are now.”

About in K-12 public schools nationwide in 2022 than before the pandemic. The steepest drops are in the younger grades, partially a result of declining birth rates.

On the whole, districts did not pump the brakes on hiring teachers because of the alarming 2% drop in student enrollment. Flush with expiring pandemic relief funds, schools added 15,000 teaching positions last school year. 

Even as full-time school staffing reached an all time high, a quarter of districts had fewer teachers per student than they did in 2016. 

The demand for teachers is far from met, with about 55,000 teaching jobs open nationwide. Since 2008, the decline of teachers in training has impacted schools in every corner of the country. 

Even places like Pennsylvania, whose supply of teachers historically was so abundant that many newly-credentialed teachers were sent out of state, are of a shrinking teacher workforce. Its surplus has gradually disappeared over six years. 

“People weren’t paying attention,” said Fuller, who recommended that public figures talk up the professions’ value and that the legislature take on teacher scholarships to tailor recruitment for local needs. Scholarships could be earmarked for teachers of color, math educators, or those serving high-poverty schools, for example. 

But if districts and states, tasked with building diverse, robust teaching pools, are focused solely on producing new candidates, King cautioned efforts would be in vain, akin to using a hose to fill a leaky bucket with water. 

By the end of the 2021-22 school year, 10% of teachers left the profession nationally, 4% more than before the pandemic, according to . Experts point to job dissatisfaction, political polarization and exhaustion. 

In Florida, one of the nine states that saw a higher enrollment bump than most, more than 5,000 teaching positions are vacant, the . The job has gotten harder, too — remaining educators teach more students per classroom than they did before the pandemic. While the enrollment data suggest a move in the right direction, it will take years for today’s teachers in training to enter its workforce.

“We’ve really got to think more about the job of a teacher and how we make it more sustainable — financially, from the perspective of work-life balance, and giving people opportunities for growth,” King said. “We need to look at teaching and why it’s such a difficult job to sell.”

Talk to some high school and college students about this year’s Free Application for Financial Student Aid, or FAFSA, and they share their concerns as well as their optimism. Few voice anger about the glitches that have made this financial aid season so stressful.

Why? Because they understand that is the key to $150 billion of college grants, work-study funds and federal student loans that will pay for college. They understand that FAFSA is not the enemy.

Regardless, the number of FAFSA submissions are down nationwide, including Texas, because of problems with the form that have delayed some students from completing the application and have discouraged others from attempting it.

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High school and college counselors, advisers and administrators know this and have scheduled a second wave of workshops now through early May to encourage students to fill out the form and submit it.

About 200 students who had questions about their application participated in the bilingual FAFSA Workshop on April 20 at the Education Service Center Region 19 to get answers. Almost all came with family members, a laptop computer and financial information with the hope that they could start, or submit their applications that day.

Among them was Yaxley Bouche, an 18-year-old senior from Austin High School. She and her mother, Diana, wanted to complete the parent portion. Once done, the student could submit her FAFSA.

“I’m a little stressed about how much money I will get,” said the Central resident who wants to study nursing at El Paso Community College or the University of Texas at El Paso. “Will it be less than others because I’m submitting (my application) late?”

With the help of a small army of volunteers, mostly from EPCC and UTEP, students found the guidance they needed.

The two institutions organized this special event and agreed to participate in others during the next two weeks to help other families that have been confused by FAFSA.

One volunteer helped Diana Bouche start an account, which will take three days to be verified. After that, her daughter can submit her application, which should be accepted in 10 business days.

“I’m not comfortable yet,” Yaxley Bouche said as she closed her laptop before leaving. “I’m still concerned with the wait.”

Fewer seniors complete FAFSA

According to the as of April 12, only 29% of high school seniors have completed their FAFSA. More than 1.2 million have submitted their application, but that is 36% less than this time last year.

The network’s numbers show that almost 34% of Texas senior class – approximately 373,000 – has completed the application. Since the Class of 2022, Texas has mandated that high school seniors submit a FAFSA, the Texas Application for State Financial Aid, known as TASFA, or sign an opt-out form.

In an effort to make the FAFSA process easier, Congress passed the . The new application was to be more user-friendly with fewer questions (36 down from 108). It also was supposed to expand the eligibility for federal financial aid.

The U. S. Department of Education released information late last year that the number of Texas students eligible for a Pell Grant under the new FAFSA would increase by almost 51,300, and the ones who would earn the maximum Pell amount would grow to about 132,700. A Pell Grant is federal need-based aid awarded to millions of students annually.

The DOE normally releases the FAFSA on Oct. 1, but this cycle’s forms were not released until the last week of 2023. Since its launch, the application has suffered several setbacks because of technology and human error.

Financial aid offers lag behind

Karla Cid, 18, and her mother, Veronica Cid, traveled from Fabens to participate in last weekend’s FAFSA Workshop. The parent did not have a Social Security number and the pair sought a way to create and verify the mother’s account.

“This is confusing to everyone,” said Veronica Cid, who, like her daughter, spoke through an interpreter. “No one can help. We’re all in the same boat.”

Cid, a first-year psychology student at EPCC, said she filled out last year’s FAFSA form and earned a Pell grant for almost $3,700. The 2023 Fabens High School graduate questioned why the government had to change the process.

“If I don’t fill out the FAFSA, I can’t go to school,” said the younger Cid, who works for a fast-food franchise in Fabens. “I’m stressed. If I have to pay out of pocket, will I need to work more?”

Despite her application ordeal, she was confident things would work out. Her Plan B is to take fewer courses and go part time.

Ian Valdez, a college and career adviser at Socorro High School through Advise Texas, said that he was aware that one of his students had received an aid offer from a four-year institution. Results of a survey done last week by the showed that 16% of public universities had started to send aid offers, while 54% of higher education institutions had not packaged aid offers yet. It also reported that at this point in a typical year, more than 80% of the institutions would have sent their aid offers to students.

Valdez said that among the main issues his students have shared during this FAFSA cycle included mixed-status families, or families with members of varying legal status, and poorly worded questions.

Another problem Valdez noted was the students’ procrastination. He said that about one in six have not even started to fill out their FAFSA despite his nudges and assurance of his help to get it done.

“They don’t know how easy it can be,” said Valdez, who volunteered at the workshop. Under the best circumstances, applications can be completed in 30 minutes or less. “If there is a problem, we can set up a one-on-one with them and their parents.”

‘We’ll fix the problems’

EPCC and UTEP echoed that suggestion. Officials asked students who need help with their FAFSA, especially to address challenges, to contact their institutions’ enrollment or financial aid offices.

“We’ll work with the families with questions, and we’ll fix the problems,” said Ines Lopez, EPCC’s executive director Student Financial Aid.

UTEP and EPCC officials said that their institutions had accepted fewer FAFSA forms than normal for this time of year, but were confident that the numbers would recover before the start of the fall 2024 semester.

“The (high) schools have reached out to us because their (FAFSA) completion numbers are low,” said Carlos Amaya, EPCC vice president of Student & Enrollment Services. “They wanted more FAFSA nights and we’re going to help them to beef up their numbers.”

Additionally, UTEP plans to conduct application workshops for its continuing students the week of April 29.

Amanda Vasquez-Vicario, UTEP vice president for Enrollment Management, said the university had received about 19,000 FAFSA forms so far. At this time last year, they had 25,000.

Vasquez-Vicario said she is “cautiously optimistic” in part because the institution has seen a slow but steady increase in the FAFSA forms from first-time college students.

The UTEP official said that her team tells students that there is no need to panic, but some, especially those from mixed-status families, are the most anxious. They wonder if they will get the necessary financial aid, she said.

Vasquez-Vicario said the enrollment staff assures students of the university’s commitment to help, and suggests alternative sources of financial aid such as UTEP’s Paydirt Promise program where most students from families with incomes of $80,000 or less could be eligible to attend UTEP and not have to pay tuition and mandatory fees.

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

There are many reasons that young adults in El Paso County do not vote, but a program piloted by El Paso Community College will try to improve the situation through peer communication to include having students serve as paid nonpartisan poll workers at sites.

The college launched its Tejano Pollworker Fellows program this spring semester. Its goal is to promote civic engagement and voter education, which includes basic information such as , select a , read a sample ballot, use a voting machine and the general electoral process.

“I know it sounds very simple, but people are afraid of looking silly and embarrassing themselves because they don’t know what to do as a voter,” said Crystal Robert, associate professor of speech communication at EPCC and the fellows program director.

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A few young adults at EPCC shared reasons why their age group does not vote. They include divisive politics, lack of inspiring politicians, and being too busy with work, school and family to study issues and candidates. Some grew up in families that preached voting was a waste of time, while others were discouraged after their cause or candidate lost.

Robert said her plan is to register over the next two years at least 50 students per semester who will train as poll workers and, working with the County Elections Department, place them at polling locations. As part of their duties, they’ll learn how to set up a polling site to include the , hand out ballots and offer any necessary assistance.

Robert said that it is important for young people to see others their age at the polls to give them a sense of belonging.

Several fellows already served as poll workers during the March 5 primary and more will be trained before the May 28 runoff.

El Paso natives Mayeli Robles and Andrea Dominguez are among the initial EPCC poll worker fellows. They agreed that the experience was interesting, fun and lucrative. Election poll workers earn $14.50 per hour, and that wage will go up to $15 an hour in November. Participants also are eligible for a $200 stipend through the program.

During a recent conversation at EPCC’s Valle Verde campus, the two women spoke about their Election Day experiences, as well as how the program enhanced their political awareness and desire to share that knowledge with other young adults.

Robles, 19, is a biology major who graduated from El Dorado High School in 2022. She worked at the Family Youth Services Center polling site, 6314 Delta Drive, and spent much of her shift encouraging center visitors to vote. There were not that many young voters among the 103 people who cast a ballot there.

“I thought I was going to be really drained and overworked, but just seeing people exercise their right to vote, and being happy that a young person’s (helping) at the voting site made me happy,” said Robles, who works in the campus’ Writing Center. “It made me feel like I was doing something good for the community.”

Dominguez, 21, is a multidisciplinary studies major who joined the program to be more involved in the community. She has made several voter awareness presentations to EPCC classes where she encourages students to make the time to study issues and candidates.

“Being able to use my voice in a way that actually matters is really important to me,” said Dominguez, a 2021 Montwood High School graduate.

For the primary, she helped at the EPCC Rio Grande Campus voting site in The Little Temple, 906 El Paso St. Dominguez said she was thrilled to see the occasional young voter, but was just as happy to see any voter because there were times when the place was empty. The Elections Department recorded 156 votes cast at that location.

Dominguez said that the program’s value went beyond learning election law and how to be a poll worker. She said it taught her to be less judgmental of others’ political opinions. Beyond her classwork, and her campus job with Student Technology Services, she supports the League of Women Voters of El Paso. She called voting a way to communicate about important issues.

A civic responsibility

As someone familiar with the decline in young voters, Richard Pineda, chair and associate professor of communication at the University of Texas at El Paso, said that any opportunity to engage college-aged voters is important.

“These efforts remind students what’s at stake and are also a gentle nudge about civic responsibility,” said Pineda, a longtime political commentator.

“Often students are unaware of timelines for voter registration and the rules governing participation in an election. This is a great way to get that information out.”

Ricardo Sanchez, 20, said he grew up in a family that did not value elections.

Although registered to vote, he was unfamiliar with the process and was too intimidated by the unknown to participate.

“I was discouraged before because I believed that (my vote) didn’t mean anything,” said Sanchez, a 2022 Clint High School graduate.

Sanchez, an associate of arts in teaching major at EPCC, said his girlfriend explained the importance of elections, and the ABC’s of voting to him earlier this year.

As a result, he voted for the first time in March. He said it felt good to be involved politically.

Help America Vote

El Paso County has 503,059 registered voters. Of that number, approximately 120,000 are under age 30. According to the county’s Elections Department, only 3,325 of those potential voters cast a ballot on March 5. That’s almost 3%.

Those numbers are among the reasons why the awarded the college a two-year, $49,000 grant to establish the program. EPCC is one of 14 national recipients of the Help America Vote College Program Poll Worker Grants. Awards in this category went to institutions of higher education as well as state and county governments.

EAC leaders said the Help America Vote program, made possible through a Congressional allocation of $1 million, comes at a key time for election offices across the country. It estimates that about 1 million poll workers are needed for a presidential election.

The commission awarded the grants in early February. EPCC started its program at the end of that month.

The reported that approximately 14% of poll workers in the 2022 general election were between the ages of 18 and 40. That is why the organization believes it is important to recruit, train and retain younger poll workers.

Brenda Negrete, who oversees the Elections Department’s poll worker recruitment and placement, said the fellows program will help ensure that her office can provide the necessary services to voters at the polls.

Negrete said she has a list of 500 trained poll workers, and expects to need more than 400 of them for the Nov. 5 general election. She said she would like to have a few more trained workers because additional personnel often are needed at polling sites or the department headquarters for elections.

The training, done at sites throughout the county, takes about four to six hours. Topics include election code, familiarity with election documents and voting systems, as well as how to set up a polling location. Participants also go through various mock scenarios. Negrete said some virtual training is allowed under certain circumstances.

“They need to know the do’s and don’ts,” said Melissa Martin, Elections Department information and resources coordinator, and the lead trainer.

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

These are tough times for parents and caregivers. To raise a child in 2024 is to live with a heightened awareness of school’s social, , and academic value to children’s short- and long-term well-being. As the United States continues to wrestle with the aftermath of pandemic-wrecked school years, as we struggle to respond with something resembling a coherent agenda for , the least we should all be able to agree on is that every child does better when in school. Right? 

Wrong. The conservative Heritage Foundation, which has been mapping out its playbook for a potential second Trump administration, recently released for overturning , the 1982 Supreme Court ruling that prohibited children from being denied access to education based on their families’ immigration status. The think tank’s stance furthers the aims of Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and a growing of right-wing activists eager to  yet another front in American political discourse, this time to block some children from U.S. public schools. 

Why? ±őłÙ’s simple: these hardliners want to bar kids from access to learning simply for the decisions of their parents, who emigrated to the U.S. and have not yet established their immigration status in the country.

This conservative crusade was and the 2024 race has seen the three-time presidential candidate up the ante on around immigrants. Dehumanizing immigrants might make it easier for some to deny education to their children, but doing so would be legally unsound, morally wrong and practically impotent.

The court’s in Plyler was straightforward: 1) the Constitution’s 14th Amendment prohibits states from denying “to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” and 2) undocumented children who live under a U.S. state’s jurisdiction are people who would be unduly harmed if singled out for exclusion from public education. This principle — laws apply equally to all — is an American value equal parts foundational and aspirational. By literally disregarding these children’s personhood and denying their equal access to schools, conservatives are mounting an assault on American legal traditions and the core of our democracy.

±őłÙ’s no surprise, then, that their is a trainwreck of moral reasoning. In essence, it frames access to public schools as a conditional good — as something that must be earned through right conduct. That is, kids whose families may not have documentation to be in the U.S. have not “earned” access to U.S. public goods, including schools. For instance, Abbott has that it is too expensive to treat these young children as people deserving of an education, that the condition for their participation must somehow be related to their families’ abilities to pay taxes into Texas’s state coffers. 

Similarly, the Heritage Foundation is urging states to require public schools and children with undocumented parents tuition to enroll as a way to draw a lawsuit that would bring Plyler back before the high court.

Conservatives at the national level have made closely related arguments amid recent increases in immigrants arriving at the southern border. Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and conservative colleagues costs associated with welcoming immigrants to New York with cuts to the state’s education budget.

But this framing misrepresents immigration’s actual relationship to the economy — and tax revenue. In February, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study that, from 2005 to 2019, refugees and asylum seekers contributed nearly $124 billion more to public revenues than they used in public services. The future is also sunny. that recent boosts in immigration are likely to raise U.S. GDP by $7 trillion — and public revenues by $1 trillion over the next decade. 

This conservative framing could also have some discomforting implications for native-born Americans. The moment we begin () metering access to public education according to tax contributions or parental wealth, we’ll soon have to face some uncomfortable questions. Do we exclude U.S.-born children from classrooms if their caregivers are renters who don’t directly pay ? Can they be blocked from attending school if their caregiver gets busted for ? 

Remember: this isn’t about consequences for adults. Perhaps you think we should require adults to have a job before we provide them with public subsidies to reduce their child care costs. Maybe you think that we should require adults to submit to drug tests before we let them access public food and nutrition programs. In these cases, there’s a vaguely coherent, though hard-hearted, moral case to be debated. 

But children are fundamentally blameless when it comes to questions of their families’ legal documentation for U.S. residency. To treat them otherwise is simply heinous and inhumane  — contradictory to almost any serious or tradition. Kids shouldn’t need to earn access to food, shelter, opportunities to learn, health care and the like. They’re children; they don’t need to earn the basic pieces of human dignity. 

Indeed, this was evident when Plyler was decided — 40 years ago. Writing for the majority, Justice William J. Brennan put it this way: banning these children from school would “[impose] a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status. These children can neither affect their parents’ conduct nor their own undocumented status.” 

On a practical level, conservatives’ attacks on children of immigrants are equal parts ineffective and myopic. What, precisely, do they hope to achieve by banning undocumented children from public schools? That this castigation will deter immigrant parents and caregivers from coming to the United States? 

The path to living and working without established immigration status in the U.S. is already perilous. New arrivals already run massive risks; at the April 2 Baltimore bridge collapse being a heartbreaking example. The country has designed a raft of cruel to make their lives . There’s no serious reason to assume that banning their children from school would raise the punitive threshold to a level that would change these adults’ behavior. Immigrants to the U.S. often come fleeing violence and/or persecution far worse than these artificial deterrents.

What’s more, it’s profoundly shortsighted for any country to treat children’s development and potential as disposable resources. U.S. birth rates have been falling for some time. Demographers like Dowell Myers, of the University of Southern California, have long warned that this presents for our economic future. to fill available jobs also means to support Medicare and the Social Security system (along with other public programs). 

Moreover, new research shows that the presence of immigrant students can benefit U.S.-born peers in the classroom. A found that, in most cases, greater exposure to immigrant peers correlated with better math and reading scores among U.S.-born students. In 2021, researchers , affirming that increasing a student’s immigrant exposure was correlated with bumps in reading and math scores. It also revealed that, on average, immigrant students have fewer serious disciplinary incidents than their U.S.-born peers, which might have a beneficial effect on their classmates’ behavior and academic outcomes.

The United States’s ability to immigrant families has long been a strength . Policies that make it harder for us to support and develop the skills of young immigrant children undermine that core competitive advantage. 

Plyler has advanced progress and equity, changing our schools — and our communities — for the better. Surely the American legal system will make quick work of such a monumentally immoral and substantively ineffective idea, particularly since it runs counter to demonstrated community benefits and long-standing legal precedent. 

And yet, conservatives spent years engineering an activist Supreme Court majority willing to put such considerations to the side when there are right-wing cultural and political victories to be had on , , and more. We must not let them invent an inhumane rationale for disregarding a child’s right to education.

Students sitting for their STAAR exams this week will be part of a new method of evaluating Texas schools: Their written answers on the state’s standardized tests will be graded automatically by computers.

The Texas Education Agency is rolling out an “automated scoring engine” for open-ended questions on the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness for reading, writing, science and social studies. The technology, which uses natural language processing technology like artificial intelligence chatbots such as GPT-4, will save the state agency about $15-20 million per year that it would otherwise have spent on hiring human scorers through a third-party contractor.

The change comes after the STAAR test, which measures students’ understanding of state-mandated core curriculum, was redesigned in 2023. The test now includes fewer multiple choice questions and more open-ended questions — known as constructed response items. After the redesign, there are six to seven times more constructed response items.

“We wanted to keep as many constructed open ended responses as we can, but they take an incredible amount of time to score,” said Jose Rios, director of student assessment at the Texas Education Agency.

In 2023, Rios said TEA hired about 6,000 temporary scorers, but this year, it will need under 2,000.

To develop the scoring system, the TEA gathered 3,000 responses that went through two rounds of human scoring. From this field sample, the automated scoring engine learns the characteristics of responses, and it is programmed to assign the same scores a human would have given.

This spring, as students complete their tests, the computer will first grade all the constructed responses. Then, a quarter of the responses will be rescored by humans.

When the computer has “low confidence” in the score it assigned, those responses will be automatically reassigned to a human. The same thing will happen when the computer encounters a type of response that its programming does not recognize, such as one using lots of slang or words in a language other than English.

“We have always had very robust quality control processes with humans,” said Chris Rozunick, division director for assessment development at the Texas Education Agency. With a computer system, the quality control looks similar.

Every day, Rozunick and other testing administrators will review a summary of results to check that they match what is expected. In addition to “low confidence” scores and responses that do not fit in the computer’s programming, a random sample of responses will also be automatically handed off to humans to check the computer’s work.

TEA officials have been resistant to the suggestion that the scoring engine is artificial intelligence. It may use similar technology to chatbots such as GPT-4 or Google’s Gemini, but the agency has stressed that the process will have systematic oversight from humans. It won’t “learn” from one response to the next, but always defer to its original programming set up by the state.

“We are way far away from anything that’s autonomous or can think on its own,” Rozunick said.

But the plan has still generated worry among educators and parents in a world still weary of the influence of machine learning, automation and AI.

Some educators across the state said they were caught by surprise at TEA’s decision to use automated technology — also known as hybrid scoring — to score responses.

“There ought to be some consensus about, hey, this is a good thing, or not a good thing, a fair thing or not a fair thing,” said Kevin Brown, the executive director for the Texas Association of School Administrators and a former superintendent at Alamo Heights ISD.

Representatives from TEA first mentioned interest in automated scoring in testimony to the Texas House Public Education Committee in August 2022. In the fall of 2023, the agency announced the move to hybrid scoring at a conference and during test coordinator training before releasing details of the process in December.

The STAAR test results are a key part of the accountability system TEA uses to grade school districts and individual campuses on an A-F scale. Students take the test every year from third grade through high school. When campuses within a district are underperforming on the test, state law allows the Texas education commissioner to intervene.

The commissioner can appoint a conservator to oversee campuses and school districts. State law also allows the commissioner to suspend and replace elected school boards with an appointed board of managers. If a campus receives failing grades for five years in a row, the commissioner is required to appoint a board of managers or close that school.

With the stakes so high for campuses and districts, there is a sense of uneasiness about a computer’s ability to score responses as well as a human can.

“There’s always this sort of feeling that everything happens to students and to schools and to teachers and not for them or with them,” said Carrie Griffith, policy specialist for the Texas State Teachers Association.

A former teacher in the Austin Independent School District, Griffith added that even if the automated scoring engine works as intended, “it’s not something parents or teachers are going to trust.”

Superintendents are also uncertain.

“The automation is only as good as what is programmed,” said Lori Rapp, superintendent at Lewisville ISD. School districts have not been given a detailed enough look at how the programming works, Rapp said.

The hybrid scoring system was already used on a limited basis in December 2023. Most students who take the STAAR test in December are retaking it after a low score. That’s not the case for Lewisville ISD, where high school students on an altered schedule test for the first time in December, and Rapp said her district saw a “drastic increase” in zeroes on constructed responses.

“At this time, we are unable to determine if there is something wrong with the test question or if it is the new automated scoring system,” Rapp said.

The state overall saw an increase in zeroes on constructed responses in December 2023, but the TEA said there are other factors at play. In December 2022, the only way to score a zero was by not providing an answer at all. With the STAAR redesign in 2023, students can receive a zero for responses that may answer the question but lack any coherent structure or evidence.

The TEA also said that students who are retesting will perform at a different level than students taking the test for the first time. “Population difference is driving the difference in scores rather than the introduction of hybrid scoring,” a TEA spokesperson said in an email.

For $50, students and their parents can request a rescore if they think the computer or the human got it wrong. The fee is waived if the new score is higher than the initial score. For grades 3-8, there are no consequences on a student’s grades or academic progress if they receive a low score. For high school students, receiving a minimum STAAR test score is a common way to fulfill one of the state graduation requirements, but it is not the only way.

Even with layers of quality control, Round Rock ISD Superintendent Hafedh Azaiez said he worries a computer could “miss certain things that a human being may not be able to miss,” and that room for error will impact students who Azaiez said are “trying to do his or her best.”

Test results will impact “how they see themselves as a student,” Brown said, and it can be “humiliating” for students who receive low scores. With human graders, Brown said, “students were rewarded for having their own voice and originality in their writing,” and he is concerned that computers may not be as good at rewarding originality.

Julie Salinas, director of assessment, research and evaluation at Brownsville ISD said she has concerns about whether hybrid scoring is “allowing the students the flexibility to respond” in a way that they can demonstrate their “full capability and thought process through expressive writing.”

Brownsville ISD is overwhelmingly Hispanic. Students taking an assessment entirely in Spanish will have their tests graded by a human. If the automated scoring engine works as intended, responses that include some Spanish words or colloquial, informal terms will be flagged by the computer and assigned to a human so that more creative writing can be assessed fairly.

The system is designed so that it “does not penalize students who answer differently, who are really giving unique answers,” Rozuick said.

With the computer scoring now a part of STAAR, Salinas is focused on adapting. The district is incorporating tools with automated scoring into how teachers prepare students for the STAAR test to make sure they are comfortable.

“Our district is on board and on top of the things that we need to do to ensure that our students are successful,” she said.

Disclosure: Google, the Texas Association of School Administrators and Texas State Teachers Association 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 .

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In short, America is doing a lot of math — at a time when math achievement is experiencing . 

Enter the March Mathness tournament, an NCAA-style competition hosted by the Collaborative for Student Success to spotlight state and district initiatives that are helping kids catch up and accelerating learning in math.

With the goal of bringing attention to innovative efforts transforming how math education is delivered in schools, we’ve convened a plucky panel of three expert judges, each with their own critical lens on K-12 education policy.

Chad Aldeman writes for and The 74 and formed his March Mathness bracket by evaluating each program for strong implementation, scalability and evidence. Jocelyn Pickford, writing for , weighs the contenders with eyes focused on the use of high-quality instructional materials and meaningful teacher and family engagement. Dale Chu rounds out the judges’ table with a focus on responsible use of data and strong student outcomes.

The tournament began with a Sweet Sixteen lineup representing a diverse range of approaches to improving math achievement. From statewide comprehensive reforms in states like Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas and Colorado to the widespread use of innovative learning platforms like Zearn and the AI-powered Khanmigo, the tournament narrowed to an Elite Eight. Three state bills and the use of Zearn across four states advanced alongside novel tutoring approaches from Texas and New Jersey, a policy of automatic enrollment in advanced math courses out of North Carolina and Texas, and a statewide math fund in Kentucky focused on professional learning and coaching.

The competition heated up in the Final Four. Alabama’s Numeracy Act — a comprehensive set of reforms that provide elementary math tutors, set up a process for vetting and approving math curriculum, and transform teacher training and preparation — challenged the statewide use of Zearn in Nebraska, Louisiana, Colorado and Ohio. Zearn proved its worth throughout the bumpy road of pandemic-era schooling, when multiple states provided free, universal access to its digital learning platform to supplement instruction and enable kids to access instruction both in school and remotely.

Despite impressive evidence that shows gains on state math assessments for students who use Zearn consistently, the multi-faceted approach of Alabama’s Numeracy Act, and its standing as a nationwide exemplar of proactive math legislation, fueled its advance to the finals. 

The second matchup of the Final Four saw go toe-to-toe with a novel automatic enrollment policy out of North Carolina and Texas. Kentucky’s Fund is one of the longest-standing initiatives in the competition, dating from 2005. It provides grants to schools and districts for math coaches, high-quality materials and extra professional development. With nearly 20 years of outcomes data, the fund has strong evidence of having moved the needle for Kentucky students in grades K-3. 

Meanwhile, North Carolina and Texas have been garnering nationwide attention for new statewide policies meant to increase enrollment in advanced math courses. Students who score at the highest levels on the state math test are automatically enrolled in advanced classes for their next school year, turning on its head the long-held practice of having them opt in. Now, high-achievers must opt out, a move many advocates describe as game-changing.

Begun in Dallas Independent School District before being taken statewide in , the policy saw a doubling in the percentage of students of color enrolled in advanced math. In , the new process has resulted in a steadily increasing number of high-achieving students enrolling in advanced courses — and sticking with them — as they work toward additional college and career opportunities. While Kentucky’s Math Achievement has been moving the needle for two decades, automatic enrollment policies are making a big wave — enough to cinch the W in this round.

As for the championship match, the battle for the March Mathness title could not have been fiercer.

The judges fought passionately to decide between the heavyweight Alabama Numeracy Act and the newcomer automatic enrollment policies in Texas and North Carolina.

Pickford was a stalwart defender of Alabama, applauding the Numeracy Act as a national standout for state leadership in promoting instruction rooted in and wraparound supports for students, families and teachers. â€œAny state effort to advance learning should be rooted in access to and use of that are aligned to a state’s academic standards, have been endorsed by educators and empower teachers to reach all students. As leaders consider the March Mathness practices for their states or districts, I urge them to place evidence-based instruction and educator and family engagement at the center.”

Chu and Aldeman, while agreeing with Pickford about the merits of Alabama’s legislation, underscored the ripple effects of a move like Texas and North Carolina’s new process. “Automatic enrollment policies in advanced math courses represent a sea change in the way we think about math opportunities for students. After decades of requiring students to opt themselves into higher-level courses, widespread adoption of this kind of policy would represent a raising of expectations for students, rather than treating advanced math as a ‘nice-to-have’ for only some kids,” the pair said.

Ultimately, the judges decided, the relative simplicity of automatic enrollment — and the ease with which other states could adopt this for their K-12 systems — catapulted Texas and North Carolina to a winning slam-dunk.

Though automatic enrollment ultimately took home the championship, the full March Mathness bracket showcased a wealth of strategies that states and districts are employing to advance math education. From digital platforms and summer learning to professional development and comprehensive legislative reforms, the variety of initiatives reflects a nationwide commitment to improving math outcomes for all students.

The success of the March Mathness tournament lies not just in crowning a champion, but in highlighting the innovative and varied efforts underway to tackle the challenges in math education in the United States. 

Looking ahead, the Collaborative for Student Success will continue to shine a light on the most promising efforts to advance math learning, and will urge states and districts to learn from the past four years of academic recovery as they weather challenges posed by the expiration of federal relief dollars, record chronic absenteeism and the continuously changing needs of students and families. 

We hope you enjoyed March Mathness — but the math fun doesn’t end there. Stay connected with our math efforts and learn more about how you can help advance a renewed focus on math education on our platform. We’ll see you next year for the Big (Math) Dance!  

Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles will require roughly two dozen schools to cut 12 percent of their budgets next year, initiating a painful but expected process meant to bring campus-level spending in line with declining enrollments.

The cuts will target schools not participating in Miles’ “New Education System” next year, whose budgets are managed by campus principals. HISD manages the budgets of schools in the NES program and funds them at a significantly higher level than other schools.

On Tuesday, HISD provided half of the district’s principals with preliminary information about their campus budgets for next year and plans to provide information to the other half Wednesday. Most of HISD’s roughly 140 non-NES principals will have to make cuts in their spending, capped at a 12 percent reduction, due to decreases in the number of students attending their schools.

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Roughly 25 schools will have to slash the maximum 12 percent, while about 35 schools will see increases to their budgets, Miles estimated in a Monday interview with the Houston Landing. That leaves dozens more schools to reduce spending between 1 and 12 percent. HISD declined to say which schools will be subject to the steepest cuts.

The tough financial pill stems from a decision by Miles to end HISD’s pandemic-era policy to insulate schools from budget cuts, even when their enrollment and attendance decline. With pandemic relief money set to soon run out and with HISD expected to run a this year, Miles said it is time to bring spending in line with student counts.

“People have known this is coming,” Miles said. “If they’ve lost 100 kids, they are going to have to cut some staff. At some point, we do have to stop paying for kids who actually aren’t there.”

In recent years, HISD has lost about 32,000 students, . Since the policy of not reducing schools’ budgets based on attendance went into effect, more than 150 schools have lost 12 percent or more of their student enrollments, including more than 60 non-NES schools.

In total, the cuts will save about $15 million across the district, Miles said. The savings represent a of Miles has said he plans to make next year. However, they represent the first time Miles has outlined plans likely to result in widespread staffing reductions at the campus level.

Due to a in 2024-25 and a dramatic increase in the number of overhauled schools paying teachers salaries $10,000 to $20,000 above their typical rates, HISD plans to spend an additional $114 million on staff next year, including $74 million at NES schools, according to Chief of Human Resources Jessica Neyman. Miles has said he plans to present a draft budget proposal for next year’s spending to HISD’s board of managers in May.

Schools undergoing Miles’ transformation, which typically have a quarter to a third more employees than other HISD schools, also will be subject to limited staffing cuts if they have lost students, Miles said. He estimated  NES schools could lose one to two non-teaching roles.

Former Love Elementary Principal Sean Tellez, who resigned in early March, said he thinks the cuts fall unfairly on schools not participating in Miles’ overhaul program. The end of the policy insulating campuses from attendance-related budget cuts did not surprise him, because former HISD Superintendent Millard House’s administration had warned it was coming. However, he thought the whole district would be subject to the painful spending decisions, rather than just the half not participating in Miles’ NES program.

As a principal, Tellez had to make budget cuts, including last year reducing the work hours of the Love Elementary nurse and librarian, eliminating a technology role and cutting a front office worker. If he were forced to eliminate 12 percent of his spending, he would have to cut at least one teacher and it would be “virtually impossible” to keep students from feeling the losses, he said.

“The overwhelming vibe, or feeling, amongst the non-NES principals has been, because we’re not NES, we’re going to have to bear the burden of this increased budget for NES schools and we’re going to be on our own,” Tellez said.

Researcher Chad Aldeman, who previously served as policy director at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab and now runs the organization , studies school enrollment and staffing trends nationwide. Across the country, most school districts have seen increasing numbers of staff-per-student ratios since the pandemic, mostly due to student headcounts falling faster than staffing levels, he said, creating looming budgetary difficulties.

However, while making cuts to balance staffing levels may be necessary in many instances, it rarely is straightforward, Aldeman explained.

“Let’s say you lose 20 students across an elementary, they’re not going to be all in one grade. 
 So, you might lose two students or two-and-a-half students from every grade, and you can’t just reduce your staff by one fourth-grade teacher,” Aldeman said. “None of these things are fun. They’re not good for kids.”

Miles said he empathizes with principals now facing dreaded decisions, but said he had no other choice. HISD is easing the process for principals by covering certain expenses, such as approved curricular materials, he said.

“I’ve been a principal, I’ve been a charter school principal, and I know what it is to have to do a budget and I know what a cut looks like, even a 10 percent cut,” Miles said. “​​If I can protect the classroom from any cut, that’s what we’re going to do. But we do have to live within our means now.”

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

Pint-sized hall monitors in yellow neon vests greet their fellow students first thing in the morning at the Tornillo PreK-8 School as part of a program meant to encourage them to come to class every day.

As children shuffle into their classrooms, teachers begin taking counts of who’s absent the moment the school day starts at 7:30 a.m., even though attendance isn’t due until 10 a.m.

From there, it’s a sprint for staff to reach parents and find those missing students.

“Staff start making calls to parents to find out if a kid is going to be making it to school,” said Tornillo Independent School District Superintendent Rosy Vega-Barrio. “If we don’t get an answer right then and there, we send an officer to the house to find out what’s going on.”

Once a student starts accumulating absences, school leaders like Tornillo PreK-8 Principal Myrna Lopez-Patty set up meetings with parents to talk to them about Texas attendance laws, which require school districts to begin court proceedings if a student has three unexcused absences.

“You’re meeting with me as a preventive measure because we don’t want to file for court,” Lopez-Patty told parent Brenda Guillen and her son Nathan during one of those meetings in March.

Guillen said that she did not know her son could be in danger of losing credit if he missed more than 10% of his classes for the year. In the end, she said she was glad she went to the meeting before Nathan’s attendance became a bigger problem.

“I was confident with his grades. I thought he was doing great, but I completely disregarded the fact that he needed to be on time more and in school more,” Guillen told El Paso Matters.

Vega-Barrio said that these efforts helped it become the only district in El Paso County to lower its chronic absenteeism rate since students returned to school from the pandemic, although it still remained higher than pre-pandemic levels.

The 2018-19 school year was the last before the pandemic disruption. Schools across the country shut down in March 2020 and most remained closed the rest of the 2019-20 school year. In El Paso, most classes remained closed in the fall of 2020 and reopened in early 2021.

Throughout Texas, the number of chronically absent students — characterized as students who miss at least 10% of class, or about 18 days a year — rose from 11% during the 2018-19 school year to 15% in 2019-20. That increased to 26% during the 2021-22 school year, according to the most recent Federal Report Cards data released by the Texas Education Agency.

Nationally, chronic absenteeism nearly doubled from 15% in 2018-19 to 28% in 2021-22, according to a compiled by Stanford University education professor Thomas Dee in partnership with the Associated Press.

El Paso County saw a similar trend, as chronic absenteeism rates in school districts countywide grew between 11% to 26% on average over those three years.

Tornillo ISD, a rural school district on the eastern outskirts of the county with less than 900 students, was an outlier. The district saw its chronic absenteeism rate drop from 10% in 2018-19 to 2% during the 2019-20 school year but then shot up to 22% in the 2020-21 school year. The rate dropped to 14% during the 2021-22 school year – the lowest in the county that year but still above the pre-pandemic rates

That year, the El Paso Independent School District had a 36% chronic absenteeism rate — the highest in the county. The Socorro Independent School District had a 28% rate and the Ysleta Independent School District reported a 25% rate.

Outside the city limits, 35% of students in the San Elizario Independent School District were chronically absent, with 32% in the Fabens Independent School District, 28% in the Clint Independent School District and 20% in the Canutillo Independent School District. The Anthony Independent School District kept its chronic absenteeism rate the same — at 25% — between the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years.

Texas schools are required to keep track of which students are chronically absent, but most do not monitor the data at the district level and rely on the TEA’s annual reports.

While most El Paso schools don’t track their overall chronic absenteeism rates, some school leaders said average daily attendance has improved since the 2021-22 school year but has not returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Now some experts are concerned that this rise in absenteeism could have negative effects on students who missed out on some of the benefits of attending school every day, like getting counseling, socializing, and participating in extracurricular activities.

“The earlier students attend school consistently, in terms of their age, the more likely they’re going to graduate and go on to whatever postsecondary success looks for them,” University of Texas at Austin education professor Joshua Childs told El Paso Matters. “It can provide some structure and some organization. 
 It’s a place where they can get a couple of meals a day, and be around adults that care about them and engage with them. For many kids, it’s a critical component of their daily life.”

Research shows chronically absent students tend to perform worse academically and are more likely to drop out of school.

One Chicago found that students who are chronically absent in pre-kinder, kindergarten and first grade are less likely to read at grade level by the end of the second grade. 

Chronic absenteeism during the sixth grade is an indicator that a student will drop out of high school, and students who were chronically absent between eighth and 12th grade were seven times more likely to drop out, according to a 2017

What is chronic absenteeism and what causes it?

In Texas, students are considered chronically absent if they miss at least 10% — or 18 days — of a school year, even if an absence is excused. 

States have been required to report and track chronic absenteeism to receive Title I funding since 2015 when the Every Student Succeeds Act — or ESSA — was signed into law to replace the No Child Left Behind Act. Before 2015, Texas only tracked average daily attendance, which made it hard to tell if absences were concentrated among specific students.

“What ESSA has allowed us to do is get at the frequency of students missing school and how much they’re missing,” Childs said.

Experts and educators say that in many cases, students who are absent for long periods often face obstacles that make it hard for them to get to class every day. This can include a lack of transportation, illness and personal issues that disrupt a family’s normal day-to-day lives.

San Elizario ISD Superintendent Jeannie Meza-Chavez said she has seen cases where students have lost a parent or family member and missed several days of school afterward. In another case, a family’s home burned down, leaving their children at risk of becoming chronically absent as they face potential homelessness.

The data suggests students living in poverty and those with disabilities face even more of these obstacles than their peers, keeping them from attending school regularly. In Texas, a third of economically disadvantaged students and students with disabilities were chronically absent during the 2021-22 school year.

“There’s just so many different factors,” Meza-Chavez said when asked about the causes of chronic absenteeism.”Sometimes our families just will not send kids to school.”

Because the reasons students miss school vary, Childs said educators and researchers need to dig into why students are missing school and find ways to support them.

School leaders say most districts already make efforts to address the obstacles that keep students from getting to school. Most have social workers who connect parents with outside resources. Some take matters into their own hands finding ways to help families.

At Tornillo ISD school administrators have helped students get transportation to and from school when they are unable to take the bus.

In San Elizario, counselors worked with the family that lost its home to make sure they had a place to go and the children had clothes and shoes to wear to school, Meza-Chavez said.

Why did chronic absenteeism increase?

While changes in chronic absenteeism rates varied by school district, most followed a similar pattern. Chronic absenteeism dropped slightly when the school first closed during the 2019-20 school year, likely because districts did not need to report attendance for the last few weeks of the year, said Ysleta ISD Director of Student Services Diana Mooy.

Chronic absenteeism began to rise slightly during the 2020-21 school year. At this time Texas schools worked under a hybrid model where some students could attend class online while others went in person. Mooy said chronic absenteeism didn’t rise too much in Ysleta ISD because the state gave school districts more flexibility when taking attendance to accommodate for virtual classes.

“We usually take attendance in second period, and if you’re in your seat, you’re counted present and if you’re not you’re absent. In (2021-22) we were able to take attendance later in the day so we were given more time and more opportunities to count kids present,” Mooy said. 

Then chronic absenteeism skyrocketed during the 2021-22 school year when all students were required to return to school in person.

Some school leaders El Paso Matters spoke to said they saw parents keep their kids from school more often because of illness and concerns over masking and vaccination policies.

EPISD’s former truancy prevention director Mark Mendoza said he noticed a shift in families’ attitudes around school attendance.

“Before the quarantine, we had students that were chronically absent for a variety of reasons, but the general culture was that it’s important to go to school every single day,” Medoza told El Paso Matters. “Then when the pandemic happened, and the entirety of in-person schools shut down, both students and their families lost that.”

Mendoza suggested that one of the reasons EPISD has the highest chronic absenteeism rate in the county is because as a District of Innovation, it is exempt from the state law that requires students to attend 90% of their classes to get credit.

The District of Innovation concept, adopted under House Bill 1842 during the 2015 legislative session, allows school districts to excuse themselves from certain state requirements. The initiative was intended to give school districts some of the same flexibility as charter schools as long as they adopt an innovation plan.

Mendoza said that since students were allowed to miss more than 10% of their classes and still get credit as long as they got passing grades, attendance suffered.

“Many people began to have the idea that I can learn and get good grades without going to school every single day,” Mendoza said.

EPISD did not respond to a request for comment.

What did Tornillo ISD do differently?

Tornillo ISD is encompassed by expansive desert and farmland along the Rio Grande, with some families living miles from their closest neighbor.

While most schools in Texas saw their chronic absenteeism rates go up when students returned to in-person learning, the rural district saw an increase when students were learning from home. With limited broadband service in the area, district leaders said many students who could not connect to their virtual classes were counted absent.

“The majority of our kids didn’t have access to Wi-Fi,” Vega-Barrio said. “Even though we provided hotspots to every single household, you had multiple kids online at the same time and it just created a lot of issues. I think that’s what hurt us in (2020-2021).”

Additionally, the district has several students who live in Mexico and cross the Tornillo-Guadalupe International Bridge every day to get to school. 

After schools closed and international travel was restricted during the pandemic, “it was really hard to get those students to partake in online learning,” Vega-Barrio said.

In many cases parents and guardians also struggled to help their kids with school work or troubleshoot technology issues, leaving them feeling like their children needed to be back in school, Vega-Barrio said.

Tornillo ISD also implemented several programs and measures in 2021 to try to reduce absenteeism including hiring an attendance officer and educating parents on the importance of not missing school.

Texas truancy courts may require parents to participate in counseling, take special classes or do community service. Parents could also face fines and up to three days in jail if they do not comply. They can also face misdemeanor charges if they are found criminally negligent for not forcing their children to go to school, according to the Texas Education Code.

Students with five or more unexcused absences in a semester can also have their enrollment revoked, which could prevent a student from graduating or progressing to the next grade.

Tornillo PreK-8 also started a morning hall patrol program to encourage students to show up to school on time every day.

“The goal was for us to get students on time but also to build leadership skills and make them feel like they had a role here in the district,” the school’s secretary, Cassandra Soto, told El Paso Matters. 

Soto, who came up with the idea for the program, said she focused on students who were missing class or showing up late excessively, and those with behavioral issues. Now many of those students have improved their attendance and are eager to go to school every day.

“We’ve seen a difference in attendance and in their behavior. They actually even told me, ‘It’s our job,’ so they get here very early,” Soto said.

Tornillo ISD school leaders say these efforts have allowed them to get students back in the classroom and rebound its attendance rates. 

Soto said she thinks that success can be replicated by other schools.

“We are a small district and we don’t have a lot of resources or the amount of staff other districts have. So I think that if we’re able to do it, they’re able to do it as well,” Soto said.

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

Such is the region’s struggle to staff classrooms that half of Jackson’s teachers are unlicensed. Yet, in spring 2023, as schools nationwide struggled to stem a persistent decline in test scores in the wake of the pandemic, 81% of Jackson students participating in an ambitious new online tutoring program showed significant growth on their early literacy assessment after just 10 weeks. 

I spent the past year visiting Jackson and eight other schools across three states and the District of Columbia to understand how and why their successful tutoring programs work and the challenges they’ve had to navigate. Our also included dozens of conversations with educators, school district leaders, providers, researchers and others who have turned to tutoring to combat learning loss after COVID.

Here are lessons I learned:

Not all tutoring is equal. While some less-intensive programs, such as on-demand tutoring that students use at their discretion, may be easier to implement, they typically don’t yield strong results. On the other hand, high-dosage tutoring — four or fewer students working on material linked to classroom instruction with the same tutor for at least 30 minutes during the school day, three times a week for at least several months — makes a meaningful difference. The successful programs we studied shared these features, even as they achieved strong results using different types of tutors — including virtual professionals and college students and AmeriCorps volunteers working in person — in urban, rural, elementary and secondary schools.

Done right, tutoring has many allies. Tutoring represents a rare point of convergence spanning national policy priorities, research evidence and what educators on the ground need and want. Unlike the education reforms embedded in other federal education directives or policymakers’ pet priorities, high-quality, high-dosage tutoring has been warmly embraced by most school staff in the programs we studied. One reason is that teachers are able to measure tutoring’s impact on their students’ performance. Another is that they feel supported rather than burdened by tutors, in part because tutoring content tracks closely to their classroom instruction. 

Leadership is key. The successful tutoring initiatives we studied all had leaders with dedicated roles. Whether it was Carina Escajeda, the high-impact tutoring manager in the Ector County Independent School District in Odessa, Texas; Kate Boyle, the fellowship director at Great Oaks Charter School in New York City; or Lauren May and Shauna Walters, the teacher-trainers for Teach for America’s Ignite tutoring model in Jackson Elementary School, there were staffers who made the tutoring trains run on time. Tutoring leads who also performed another role in school were paid extra.

Autonomy for principals and teachers matters. While the tutoring leads kept things running, the school leaders and educators we studied had some degree of autonomy in implementing the programs in their buildings — whether that meant choosing among district-approved vendors, selecting curricular materials for tutors to use, or adjusting the school day to incorporate tutoring in ways they thought best. Providing local educators with ownership increases their buy-in and often results in tutoring programs tailored to precisely what a given district or school needs to boost student achievement.

Relationships with tutors motivate students. I found that many kinds of tutors — college students, recent college graduates or professionals hired through an external vendor — built strong relationships with students, even when they worked with them virtually. Those relationships, students told us, were often as valuable as the academic support tutors provided — an important insight at a time when many young people are struggling emotionally. 

Federal funding sources like AmeriCorps are a path to sustainability. Since the beginning of the pandemic, as many as 80% of U.S. school districts have implemented tutoring programs, according to the federal . The challenge now is to fine-tune implementation, bring the benefits of high-impact tutoring to even more students in each district and find ways to sustain it after schools’ federal COVID relief funding expires later this year.

Funding for states and school districts in Titles I, II, III and IV of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act could be tapped for tutoring once the pandemic-recovery money ends. If districts can connect tutoring with Response to Intervention, a program designed for early identification of struggling students or those with disabilities, districts could fund tutoring through Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

But two other federal resources — the work-study program for college students and AmeriCorps — could bring thousands of undergraduates and young adults into the nation’s schools as tutors. In just one existing program, TFA Ignite, more than 1,500 undergraduates from more than 300 colleges and universities are tutoring over 3,500 students; in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., the Go Foundation is placing several hundred recent college graduates as AmeriCorps fellows in full-time tutoring positions in charter and traditional public schools.

Congressional Republicans are threatening to defund the work-study and AmeriCorps programs, but expanding them instead and reducing red tape would bring many service-oriented young people into schools as tutors and introduce them to teaching at a moment when the nation is facing sustained shortages in the classroom — a scenario I saw play out in schools I studied. 

Local education leaders wondering whether to stick with their tutoring investments as funding becomes more uncertain should ask whether other initiatives on behalf of students enjoy the same widespread support, yield the same academic results and allow for equally valuable student-adult relationships. ±őłÙ’s a high bar.

Gov. on Wednesday urged school voucher supporters to make the final push in the May primary runoff elections to bring a pro-school voucher majority to the Texas House.

Delivering the opening speech at an annual conservative policy conference in Austin, Abbott declared that the school voucher movement was “on the threshold of success” after the March 5 primary. The election saw several anti-voucher Republican incumbents lose to pro-voucher challengers, putting pro-voucher members on the verge of a majority in the Texas House, the last legislative roadblock to the policy.

“We are now at 74 votes in favor of school choice in the state of Texas. Which is good, but 74 does not equal 76,” Abbott said, referring to the number of votes he needs to pass the bill into law. “We need two more votes.”

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The Texas Public Policy Foundation, which hosts the annual Texas Policy Summit where Abbott spoke, embarked with Abbott more than a year ago on a “parent empowerment” campaign to bring school vouchers to Texas, holding events across the state to rally voters behind their effort. However, the pro-voucher campaign is running out of time to chip away at the anti-voucher side, as Abbott says the final vote count on school vouchers in next year’s legislative session will be decided in this year’s primary runoffs.

“This is not a time for you to sit on the sidelines and applaud the success that we’ve achieved,” Abbott said. “This is a time when all of us must come together, redouble our efforts knowing that the final vote count is going to be determined by what happens in just two months from now.”

The May 28 Republican primary runoffs carry more opportunities for the “school choice” movement to pick up more voucher-supporting members, and Abbott said “we should be able to win that.” However, those votes aren’t guaranteed, and that tally assumes no surprises in the general election in November.

Abbott likened the effort to get a majority to a football game in which the outcome could be decided by a single kick.

“We don’t want to rely upon a field-goal kicker,” Abbott said. “We want to make sure that, when these runoffs are over at the end of May, that we are ahead by more than two points, or three points or four points.”

Abbott’s campaign began as an effort to motivate voters and win legislative support among members. But after the House voted to kill his voucher proposal, he shifted to an election campaign against anti-voucher Republicans. The governor endorsed 11 challengers to anti-voucher incumbents. Abbott backed his most recent endorsee, Katrina Pierson, after she earned a plurality against state Rep. Justin Holland, R-Rockwall, and kicked off his runoff campaign tour on Tuesday at an event supporting Pierson.

House leadership, including Speaker Dade Phelan and the Republican caucus campaign apparatus, are financially backing Holland and his fellow anti-voucher incumbents. However, not everyone in leadership is supporting the anti-voucher members.

At a Texas Policy Summit panel that immediately followed Abbott’s speech, state Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park, said he’s tired of “playing nice” on negotiating for anything other than “full universal” vouchers.

“I hope every one of the people that win that runoff are pro-school choice, and if you’re supported by a teacher union, I don’t want you back,” Cain said. “±őłÙ’s that easy.”

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

When Taylor Eighmy talks to people about the growth of artificial intelligence in society, he doesn’t just see an opportunity — he feels a jolt of responsibility.

The president of The University of Texas at San Antonio said the Hispanic-serving institution on the northwest side of the Alamo City needs to make sure its students are ready for what their future employers expect them to know about this rapidly changing technology.

“It doesn’t matter if you enter the health industry, banking, oil and gas, or national security enterprises like we have here in San Antonio,” Eighmy told The Texas Tribune. “Everybody’s asking for competency around AI.”

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±őłÙ’s one of the reasons the public university, which serves 34,000 students, announced earlier this year that it is creating a new college dedicated to AI, cyber security, computing and data science. The new college, which is still in the planning phase, would be one of the first of its kind in the country. UTSA wants to launch the new college by fall 2025.

According to UTSA, Texas will see a nearly 27% increase in AI and data science jobs over the next decade. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects data science jobs nationally will increase by 35% over that time period. Leaders at UTSA say they don’t just want students to be competent in the field, but also prepare them to be a part of the conversation as it grows and evolves.

“We don’t want [students] to spend time early in their careers just trying to figure out AI,” said Jonathon Halbesleben, dean of UTSA’s business school who is co-chairing a task force to establish the new college. “We’d love to have them be career-ready to jump right into the ability to sort of shape AI and how it’s used in their organizations.”

Over the past year, much of the conversation around AI in higher education has centered around generative AI, applications and search engines that can create texts, images or data based on prompts. The arrival of ChatGPT, a free chatbot that provides conversational answers to users’ questions, sent universities and faculty scrambling to understand how this new technology will affect teaching and learning. It also raised concerns that students might be using the new technology as a shortcut to write papers or complete other assignments.

But many state higher education leaders are thinking beyond that. As AI becomes a part of everyday life in new, unpredictable ways, universities across Texas and the country are also starting to consider how to ensure faculty are keeping up with the new technology and students are ready to use it when they enter the workforce.

“This is a technology that’s clearly here to stay and advancing rapidly,” said Harrison Keller, commissioner of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, the state agency that oversees colleges and universities in Texas. “Having institutions collaborate, share content [and] work with [the] industry so that the content really reflects the state of the art is really critical. ±őłÙ’s moving much faster than anyone anticipated.”

Next month, the state agency plans to start an assessment of AI activity at all community colleges and four-year universities in the state and use it to build a collaborative system that can help all schools get up to speed with AI.

“A majority of institutions are trying to identify what are the skills that are necessary for our faculty to be able to engage with this new evolving technology [and] to provide experiences for our students to get acclimated with skills that are going to be required in the global workforce,” said Michelle Singh, assistant commissioner for digital learning with the coordinating board.

UTSA isn’t the only school coming up with completely new programs. Other schools, including and the and short-term certificate programs. Houston Community College the first community college in Texas to offer a bachelor’s degree program in AI and robotics.

“As a community college, we’re forging new paths to ensure AI education is accessible and inclusive,” said , interim chancellor of HCC, in a press release last fall. “The goal is to cultivate talent that will shape our future in this burgeoning field that has so much promise for good.”

UT-Austin recently declared 2024 the “Year of AI,” highlighting an increased focus on researching the technology and the creation of a new online master’s degree program in AI that launched this year. The program has a price tag close to $10,000, making it one of the most affordable AI graduate programs in the country.

Elsewhere around the state, colleges and universities have to see how AI can be used to improve university operations, including identifying at-risk students, increasing retention and boosting student learning. Others are creating resource guides for faculty to help them adapt to how AI is impacting the classroom.

“We just need to jump in and start wrestling with it, and we need to be able to adapt and evolve it and build our understanding of it,” said Marty Alvarado, vice president of postsecondary education and training at Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit that focuses on improving education, the workforce and economic opportunities for students.

While other experts agree that university leaders need to be having these conversations among themselves and with students, they’re concerned adapting to AI might become another burden placed on already exhausted faculty.

“Where does that time and money come from?” said Lance Eaton, director of faculty development and innovation at College Unbound, a national nonprofit, accredited four-year college focused on adult learners. He also. “Because they were already overtaxed well before this happened.”

Keller acknowledged that many of the conversations about AI have “glossed over” the need to appropriately support faculty.

This spring, the coordinating board is launching a series of webinars to educate faculty across the state on general AI concepts. Meanwhile, four Texas institutions — UT-Austin, UNT, Austin Community College and San Jacinto Community College — are creating an AI essentials course for Texas faculty that goes beyond the theoretical and provides faculty with direct ways to apply AI in their classrooms, curriculums, lesson plans and assignments. Possible topics include how to use chatbots in the classroom and how to build out class assignments and research topics with AI.

“We have to support faculty at scale across different contexts, small community colleges and large research universities,” Keller said. “The idea is you don’t want every institution to have to reinvent the wheel.”

Keller said any future conversations about AI need to also involve employers and students. Employers need to share with schools how their needs are changing and schools need to acknowledge that students are often more skilled in using AI than faculty and administrators.

“We will all be better off if we are working on this together,” he said.

Eaton said while it’s important for higher education to be having conversations about the future of AI, it’s equally important for universities to make sure they’re not rushing to embrace the new technology too quickly, especially since there are still clear limitations in terms of how it can be used and how it interprets and processes information that is put into it.

“AI has become ubiquitous in a lot of places in a very short amount of time,” he said. “There are ways it’s helpful in a simple way, but there are lots of ways it fails at sophistication 
 it’s still not something we can really trust people’s lives with.”

For instance, Eaton expressed some skepticism with schools that are creating completely new AI programs.

“Right now, it feels like it’s a money grab,” he said. “If you want to see an institution that’s taking this seriously, it’ll be the ones that are actually looking at the curriculum, looking at their programs and say, ‘what does this curriculum look like if AI is a more ubiquitous tool?’”

As AI develops and spreads, Eaton said critical thinking, analytics, communication and strong reading and writing skills that students learn through traditional liberal arts degrees will be key to navigating the technology and recognizing where it can be useful.

Keller agreed. He said employers have emphasized to him that students will need those skills to learn and adapt to emerging AI technologies.

AT UTSA, leaders like Halbesleben say they are trying to both place themselves at the forefront of AI and figure out how to prepare all students for the ripple effects this technology will have on the rest of the workforce.

“It’ll be an important challenge for us to make sure that though we are concentrating our capacity in one college, we still need to maintain our ability to ensure all of our students have that sort of understanding,” he said.

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

Disclosure: Houston Community College, Institute for Economic Development – UTSA, University of Texas at Austin, University of Texas at San Antonio and University of North Texas 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 .

This article originally appeared in at .

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

A University of Texas at El Paso team plans to conduct a survey this spring and act on the data to offer UTEP instructors the necessary help to address the growing capabilities and complexities of artificial intelligence, including ChatGPT.

Jeff Olimpo, director of the campus’ Institute for Scholarship, Pedagogy, Innovation and Research Excellence, said the goal of this study will be to determine how much instructors know about AI and how comfortable they would be to incorporate the technology into their courses.

Armed with that knowledge, the InSPIRE team will develop a multi-pronged, hybrid effort to build on every level of understanding from basic tutorials to in-depth ideas to enhance instruction to include ways students can use AI in their fields of study.

This effort is the follow-up step to InSPIRE’s spring 2023 workshops that led to the university’s initial ChatGPT guidelines. Since then, the team has incorporated other concepts used at institutions within and beyond the University of Texas System.

“We essentially created a Frankenstein of sorts,” Olimpo said.

The latest incarnation included recommendations of what might be appropriate to include in a syllabus such as if AI is prohibited, allowed or allowed with restrictions. The team also created a guide that included a Frequently Asked Questions section that included AI restrictions, and procedures if the instructor suspected a student used AI in an assignment and did not credit the technology. The information was shared with faculty in January after it was approved by John Wiebe, provost and vice president for Academic Affairs.

Olimpo called the guidelines “brief, digestible and accessible,” and he stressed that instructors ultimately would decide what was best for their classes.

Gabriel Ibarra-Mejia, associate professor of public health sciences, was among the UTEP faculty who responded to the university’s recommendations. He said like it or not, ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is part of the education equation now and he planned to embrace it to a point.

The professor said he allows students to use it in assignments as long as they cite its use and the reasons behind it such as to develop an outline or to polish the grammar or the report’s flow. What he does not want is for AI to replace thoughts and knowledge, especially from his students who may be health care professionals someday.

“I’m more concerned about how it might replace critical thinking,” said Ibarra-Mejia, who mentioned how he had received student papers where he suspected AI use because the responses had nothing to do with the question. “I’m concerned that the answers I get from a student might be from ChatGPT.”

Melissa Vito, vice provost for Academic Innovation at UT San Antonio, said AI has been around for decades and that ChatGPT is part of the evolution.  She is the lead organizer of an AI conference for UT System institutions this week at her campus.

“The consensus in higher ed is that instructors need to use it, and students need to understand it and be able to use it,” Vito said.

In 2021, members of agreed that AI would influence all industries, but those tech leaders suggested that it would have the most effect on industries such as logistics, cybersecurity, health care, research and development, financial services, advertising, e-commerce, manufacturing, public transportation, and media and entertainment.

A research study released in March 2023 by the creator of ChatGPT, showed that approximately 80% of the U.S. workers could have at least 10% of their work affected by GPT, and that 19% of employees could see at least 50% of their jobs affected by it. The projected effects span all wage levels.

While unaware of any UT System mandates to use ChatGPT, she said institutions are creating opportunities for faculty to learn about it so they can explain its uses better to their students. She said the best path for higher education is to work with the AI industry to address concerns such as data privacy that could restrict access to what is produced and how it is used.

Vito referenced the January announcement of the collaboration between Among the goals of that relationship is to introduce advanced capabilities to the institution, which will help faculty and staff to investigate the possibilities of generative AI, which can create text, images and more in response to prompts.

The UTSA official said the purpose of the AI conference is to bring together administrators, faculty, staff and students with the broadest AI competencies to share their experiences and create a strong framework for how the UT System can benefit from the transformative effects of generative AI academically and socially.

Marcela Ramirez, associate vice provost for Teaching, Learning & Digital Transformation at UTSA, helped develop the conference’s workshops and panel discussions with representatives from sister institutions. They will cover ethical use, practical applications and how AI can be used to help students with critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

Ramirez, a two-time UTEP graduate who earned her BBA in 2008 and her MBA five years later, said the content will support faculty who want to update their courses with AI, and help them to be able to explain to students AI’s current limitations and future opportunities.

“What are the lessons learned,” asked Ramirez, who worked at UTEP for more than 10 years. “And what’s next?”

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

Texas’ largest charter school network has been placed under conservatorship by the Texas Education Agency after a years-long investigation into improper spending within the system of 143 schools.

The arrangement, announced Wednesday, is part of a settlement agreement between IDEA Public Schools and the TEA. IDEA had been under investigation since 2021 following numerous allegations of financial and operational misconduct.

It was revealed that IDEA officials used public dollars to purchase luxury driver services as well as $15 million to lease a private jet, just two weeks after promising TEA it would be “strictly enforcing” new fiscal responsibility policies put in place in response to ongoing investigations, as reported by .

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The revelations led the district to conduct an internal investigation, resulting in the firing of JoAnn Gama, former superintendent and co-founder of IDEA. Gama later filed a lawsuit against IDEA claiming wrongful termination. IDEA came to a $475,000 settlement with Gama in January. This followed co-founder and CEO Tom Torkelson’s departure in 2020; he was given a $900,000 severance package.

The charter school district serves about 80,000 students in K-12. The schools are independently run but publicly funded with state dollars, having received about $821 million in state funding in 2023-2024 school year.

Under conservatorship, the conservators will have the authority to oversee and direct any action of the district, facilitate a needs assessment, conduct onsite inspections and support the creation of a plan to address corrective action concerns. They will also report back to the agency regarding the district’s progress in completing necessary corrective activities.

The conservators will not fully take over the governance of the district. But if the district doesn’t make the necessary corrective measures that the conservators outline for them, a takeover could be possible in the future.

In a statement, IDEA said that it’s “pleased to have reached a settlement agreement 
 to resolve compliance issues our organization self-reported to regulators after an internal investigation in 2021.”

The district also stated that it would be returning $28.7 million in grant and formula funding to the U.S. Department of Education, stating that “these funds were reserved in a prior fiscal year to ensure repayment has a negligible impact on IDEA’s students and staff.”

The news follows the in June following years of poor academic performance at a single campus within the district, among other factors.

Marlin Independent School District recently after seven years of state oversight due to five consecutive years of failing accountability ratings.

Austin Independent School District avoided being placed under conservatorship last year after the TEA and the district agreed on an alternative plan to respond to a report that found the district had repeatedly failed to serve the needs of students receiving special education.

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 .

This article originally appeared in at .

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

El Paso Community College has entered into a contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons to teach incarcerated students the necessary welding skills to make them legitimate candidates for in-demand, good-paying jobs upon their release. 

The program should launch this spring.

The EPCC Board of Trustees approved the five-year, $520,000 agreement last month. To prepare, EPCC must hire a full-time instructor, while the leaders at the Federal Correctional Institution, La Tuna, need to upgrade its camp facilities in Anthony, Texas.

La Tuna is a low-security prison for incarcerated males located about 20 miles northwest of El Paso. According to its website, it has about 690 inmates and offers vocational training in welding, automotive and office technology. The prison’s satellite camp will house the inmates picked for the welding program.

This is the latest effort between the two entities to prepare people who are incarcerated to transition back into society. Blayne J. Primozich, associate vice president for Workforce & Continuing Education at EPCC, said it was part of the college’s mission to assist underserved populations.

“(Incarcerated students) earn time off their sentences for every course they complete, but the idea is also to make them workforce ready,” Primozich said. “That’s key to reducing recidivism.”

According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, approximately 600,000 Americans are released from state and federal prisons annually, and they add to the almost who have been arrested or convicted for a crime. That connection to a criminal past can make it difficult to get a job, let alone one that pays well.

According to a 2022 report published by the Prison Policy Initiative, approximately 60% of people who were incarcerated in a federal prison do not have a job up to four years after their release. To put it in perspective, the U.S. had an unemployment rate of in 2020 during the pandemic. The current unemployment rate is 3.7%.

A Corp. analysis showed that incarcerated people who participate in education programs are 43% less likely than others to be incarcerated again, and the government saves $4 to $5 in reimprisonment costs for every dollar spent on prison education.

While the college and the prison have collaborated for more than 20 years, this is the college’s first big effort to teach at the prison since the pandemic. Olga L. Valerio, dean of EPCC’s Advanced Technology Center on the Valle Verde campus, said prison officials will select the participants for the certification program, which should last from six to eight months. Each cohort could have as many as 14 students.  

EPCC officials said that the college has collaborated with La Tuna on other similar training programs that teach interior and exterior vehicle renovations, and Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning. Valerio said participants with those skills have become successful workers and, in some cases, business owners, upon their release.

“This has opened doors for them,” Valerio said.

Primozich said that the college’s goal is for the La Tuna students to earn their American Welding Society certifications in Shielded Metal Arc Welding and Gas Metal Arc Welding. The courses would include theory, safety training and hands-on experience with industrial welding equipment.

Once certified in those welding processes, those participants will be ready to work in maintenance and manufacturing shops, steel construction sites and oil field operations, according to the abstract presented to the trustees. The size of employers range from big companies to small businesses.

According to Salary.com, the average salary for an entry-level welder in El Paso County is $40,843 as of January, but salaries could range from about $36,300 to $46,800. Those who move out of the area could earn more.

The welding courses, which are free to the students, are funded in part through the government’s First Step Act. Congress passed the legislation in 2018 to promote rehabilitation services such as job training, lower recidivism, and to reduce sentence times.

An August 2023 brief in included an announcement from the Department of Justice that the recidivism rate of those people who used the First Step Act was lower than those who did not. The report stated that of the nearly 30,000 people who gained an early release because of the program, almost 90% had not been rearrested or reincarcerated. In contrast, a 2021 article in the stated that within three years, about 66% of formerly incarcerated people are rearrested, and more than 50% are reincarcerated.   

College and prison officials said that they will do what they can to help the certified welding students to find a job after they are released.

Louis Castillo, industry project manager with Workforce Solutions Borderplex or WSB, said having an up-to-date certification in an in-demand field helps, but people who were incarcerated also need to find a company that will give former felons a chance.

People who recently were released from prison often deal with barriers to employment. Among those Castillo listed were homelessness, substance abuse, mental health issues, the stigma of a criminal record, and a lack of reliable transportation.

“When an employer is looking at two candidates, a lot of times those kinds of biases will have them choose the one who doesn’t have the record,” Castillo said.

The WSB manager said that there are openings for skilled laborers such as welders. However, he said that jobs outside the region could pose a logistical problem for people who must stay in a certain area as a condition of their parole. While La Tuna prisoners come from throughout the country, most are from the southwest.

Sandra Quiñonez, La Tuna’s supervisor of education, said the prison is in early discussions with EPCC and the University of Texas at El Paso to offer college courses inside the institution using Pell Grant funds. As of July 1, 2023, the U.S. government made Pell Grants available to qualified people who are incarcerated so they can pursue a college education.

Quiñonez said that the effort will proceed after the institutions submit the required documentation to the U.S. Department of Education.

A UTEP official said the university is in talks to offer some courses at La Tuna, but there is nothing official to report yet. EPCC did not respond to a request to comment.

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

In 2020, the Aldine Independent School District became the first district in Texas to adopt a high-quality, knowledge-based reading curriculum. It was a seismic change for teachers, who had been using a familiar balanced literacy program with skills-focused lessons and leveled readers for several years. But it was a necessary change for students — in 2018-19, just 30 percent of Aldine third graders were reading at or above grade level.  

Despite the challenges of COVID-19 and its effect on academic achievement, we have made strides by implementing the Amplify CKLA curriculum. Today, teachers lead highly structured, thematic units that focus on the same content over a period of weeks. All students work with the same knowledge-rich, grade-level texts, whether they read them independently or with support. That gives every student the opportunity to build vocabulary and a base of common knowledge, which boosts reading comprehension and fosters inclusive communities of learning. 

Our students have made rapid progress — within the first two years, 50 percent of third graders were reading at or above grade level. The percentage of third graders scoring “well below” benchmark dropped from 48 percent to 36 percent. These are heavy lifts in Aldine, where about 90 percent of students are economically disadvantaged and more than half are English language learners. 

Students’ academic achievement and development rely on their teachers’ understanding and execution of the Amplify CKLA curriculum. As instructional specialists, we have implemented robust curriculum-based professional learning to ensure Aldine teachers are prepared to deliver strong instruction that meets the needs of all students.  

Curriculum-based professional learning brings teachers and instructional leaders together to probe and practice individual lessons, which has helped our teachers implement new curriculum with fidelity. During these sessions, teachers internalize, annotate, collaborate, and rehearse lessons within units of study. They identify the most critical ideas and skills students should encounter, the most likely misconceptions students may experience, and the scaffolds or learning supports needed to grant access to the content to all learners.  

This sort of study doesn’t happen overnight. Here are three key aspects of this work that have shaped our progress: 

Closing the Research-Practice Gap 

Too often, research stands a world apart from the educators who work directly with students. 

Aldine provided resources and time to close that gap. Even before the new curriculum was announced, both teachers and instructional specialists like us read Natalie Wexler’s and participated in related staff development sessions. Meanwhile, a literacy task force was studying curriculums and visiting out-of-state classrooms to make their recommendation. 

This shared reading assignment and attendant discussions helped teachers and specialists learn the science behind best practices and understand the role that building knowledge plays in literacy development. Both were critical when it came time for our teachers to trust that an unfamiliar and seemingly out-of-reach reading curriculum could be effective in Aldine classrooms. 

Revamping PLCs for Curriculum Study

In the past, meeting time for professional learning communities (PLCs) was spent on grade-level “business,” like planning field trips or sharing concerns from individual classroom observations. These are key issues, but they don’t necessarily translate into instructional innovation or academic progress. 

Even when meetings were focused on instruction, master teachers and teachers with outsized experience or confidence spoke up most often. As a result, meetings did not include the voices of all teachers, especially novices or those serving the most disadvantaged student groups. 

Our district revamped grade-level meetings to focus on in-depth curriculum study. Today, during Curriculum-based Professional Learning (CPLs), instructional specialists facilitate in-depth curriculum study sessions, which follow detailed discussion protocols. These one- and two-page discussion guides help teachers unpack and internalize the logic of each unit and lesson, identify opportunities to make cultural connections with and among students, and focus attention on the essential questions and tasks each lesson needs to ensure students master the learning goal.

This structure and guidance help ensure teachers’ time together is purposeful and driven by our common curriculum. In addition, by focusing attention on a shared resource, we’ve seen that more teachers speak up in CPLs, which gives a grade-level group a wider view of classroom practice and learning. 

Building Teachers’ Trust 

Changing curriculum means changing instructional practice and underlying beliefs. Teachers need to trust that a new curriculum will work with their students before they will teach it as intended.  

Often, teachers who work with struggling students are initially wary of high-quality, knowledge-based curriculum. In our district, second-grade teachers were concerned that students would not successfully engage with a unit based on grade-level texts about The War of 1812, for example.  

Ongoing curriculum-based professional learning with grade-level colleagues helped address these concerns. As teachers studied and practiced units and lessons together, they could see the logic and variety of ways students at all levels could access, understand, and make connections with rigorous content. And, as they experienced this new teaching in their classrooms, they could share challenges and evidence of growth. No one teacher was going it alone.  

Any change in curriculum requires strong leadership from the Central Office. But when it comes to changing what actually happens in classrooms and schools, teachers are the real decision-makers. By intentionally equipping teachers with curriculum-based professional learning, we are setting our schools up for long-lasting success. 

Edna Cruz is a bilingual skills specialist at Reed Academy in the Aldine Independent School District, which includes parts of Houston and Harris County, Tx. She is a member of the Curriculum Matters Professional Learning Network, which supports district leaders from around the country implementing high-quality instructional materials. Alaura Mack is an instructional skills specialist for English Language Arts at Reed Academy and is also a member of the Curriculum Matters Professional Learning Network.

This year 35 states will participate in a that will help low-income parents buy groceries for their children when free school meals are unavailable during the summer months.

But Texas, which , according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has opted not to join this national effort. If it had, qualifying families would have received $120 per child through a pre-loaded card for the three summer months. The USDA calculated that Texas is passing on a total of $450 million in federal tax dollars that would have gone to eligible families here.

The reason for the pass is simple, according to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. When the USDA notified HHSC officials of their new Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer, or EBT program on Dec. 29, that gave the nation’s second largest state only six months to get it up and running and that’s not enough time, said Tiffany Young, a spokesperson for the state agency.

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Although the summer program would involve two other agencies as well – the Texas Education Agency and the Texas Department of Agriculture – HHSC would have to bear the brunt of the work because they would have to coordinate and direct the distribution of the preloaded cards to qualifying families.

Already on their plate is the cumbersome of Medicaid coverage. Since last April, the agency has removed more than 2 million Texans from the program since the federal government lifted continuous coverage rules during the pandemic, forcing those who still qualify for coverage to reapply. From HHSC’s perspective, launching an entirely new program wouldn’t be possible at this time.

Additionally, the USDA would only cover 50% of the administrative expenses for Summer EBT. It would be up to the state to cover the residual cost.

Young wrote that the HHSC, TDA and TEA have been in “active discussions” about each agencies’ responsibilities in accordance with Summer EBT.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture first piloted the summer program with Pandemic EBT, or P-EBT, during the 2019-2020 school year in all 50 states. P-EBT was created in response to children from low-income families who qualified for free and reduced-price school meals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Federal officials estimate 21 million children in 35 states, five U.S. territories and four tribes participating in the program would receive the extra money during the summer months.

Texas is one of 15 states that will not participate. Among the 15 is Alabama — opting out with similar rationale to Texas — attributing their reasoning to an insufficient amount of time to appropriate the funds necessary for the program.

, school lunch may be the only full meal they get each day. According to Feeding Texas, a nonprofit organization that supplies food banks across the state, one in five children are affected by food insecurity — defined as an insufficient amount or unreliable sources of food to sustain oneself.

The Texas Department of Agriculture administers the free and reduced meal program for students during the school year. Agriculture Commissioner said he understands the disappointment some families have about Texas’ decision not to participate this year. He said his agency would have assisted if the decision was made to participate.

“The problem we’re facing — and we face this at the TDA in our school meals program and our summer feeding programs — everything is so much more expensive,” Miller said. “An extra 40 dollars could have gone a long way to offset that.”

Every Texan petitioned alongside statewide and regional organizations for the program last November, to Cecile Young, executive commissioner of HHSC.

“Summer EBT is something that we have been advocating for for years, because we know how hard it is in a state as spread out as Texas to access enough food, to be able to afford enough food for their kids when school is closed,” Rachel Cooper told The Texas Tribune.

Though not as comprehensive as Summer EBT, food insecure children still have options for food assistance during the summer. Miller told the Tribune that “kids aren’t going to get fed any less” on account of the TDA’s expansion of their . Children 18 and under are eligible to receive a free meal at their meal sites across the state.

Parents can also find out if their child’s school district is one of many that provide free meals during the summer. National organizations, such as the YMCA and Boys & Girls Club, provide summer meal assistance at select locations.

Though it remains possible to secure a balanced meal without Summer EBT, Cooper believes it is still possible and necessary for Texas to join the program in 2025.

“Our kids need it,” Cooper said. “They deserve it, and we just need to do our part.”

Disclosure: Every Texan and Feeding Texas 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 .

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

Several national organizations tied to higher education have asked colleges and universities to delay their usual May enrollment deadlines to accommodate students who will not begin to receive their financial aid packages until March as a result of FAFSA delays.

The nine organizations, which include the National College Attainment Network and the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, or NASFAA, sent their  Wednesday to give students and their families more time to consider financial aid offers and decide where – or if – to attend college.

The news that application information, the data institutions use to determine the amount of financial aid a student will receive, would not be available for another four weeks – at least – concerned these groups. During a normal cycle, colleges and universities would begin to receive that information in October. This year, the information initially was expected in January.

In their joint statement, the groups encouraged schools to give some latitude to students and families as they consider their offers of admission and financial aid due to the continued delays with the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, applicant data.

“During the pandemic, many institutions extended their enrollment, scholarship, and financial aid deadlines beyond the traditional May 1 date, and we urge institutions to make similar accommodations this year,” the statement read. “We all want students and families to have the time they need to consider their financial options before making enrollment decisions.”

El Paso Community College, like all higher education institutions around the country, awaits guidance and information from the Department of Education, said Keri Moe, EPCC’s associate vice president of External Relations Communications & Development.

“While these delays are beyond the institution’s control, EPCC is committed to working with students and will revise deadlines, if possible and as allowed, to ensure as many students who are eligible for financial aid can receive it,” Moe said.  

Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso has a series of “priority dates” because its programs in nursing, medicine, dental science and biomedical science start throughout the year.

“Students who submit their FAFSA to us on or before these priority dates are considered for all grants, scholarships and available aid until funds are exhausted,” a center spokesman said. “The university’s Office of Financial Aid will adjust its priority awarding dates based on dates provided by the Department of Education.”

A University of Texas at El Paso spokesman said UTEP does not have a decision deadline.

Justin Draeger, president of the NASFAA, said the current timeline will severely delay award letters and limit the choices of college-going students.

“Our nation’s colleges are once again left scrambling as they determine how best to work within these new timelines to issue aid offers as soon as possible — so the students who can least afford higher education aren’t the ones who ultimately pay the price for these missteps,” Draeger said in a prepared statement.

Andres Orozco, an accounting, business and economics major at EPCC, said he had submitted his FAFSA for the 2024-25 academic year and hoped to receive the same $1,900 the college awarded him last year.

Orozco, a 2023 Irvin High School graduate, sighed when he learned about the latest delay, but was adamant that nothing would keep him from his academic journey. He said that he would divert more of the money he earns working at the Northeast Albertsons supermarket to his college fund if necessary.  

“This is not the best news,” Orozco said. “This will affect a lot of students who need that money to go to school. I will go to school no matter what. I want to finish. I will find a way.”

Angel Waters, a senior at Transmountain Early College High School, said he plans to complete his FAFSA soon. He said he wants to study computer science at UTEP or New Mexico State University, and be part of NMSU’s Air Force ROTC program.

Waters, a first-generation college student, said that while he is not concerned about the delays now, he will be if it takes longer than early March to receive his financial aid letters.

Kayla Carter, a 17-year-old senior who is homeschooled, said that she has yet to fill out her FAFSA, but hopes that she will get enough financial aid to enroll in Heartland Baptist Bible College in Oklahoma City, Okla., to study ministry. If that does not work out, she wants to enroll at EPCC or UTEP as a nursing major.

“Being away from home will be an issue if my (financial aid) is delayed,” said Carter, who lives on the East Side.

The expected delays in the financial aid packages is the latest setback for the new FAFSA, dubbed the “Better” FAFSA because it was designed to be simpler and faster for students and their families to fill out. It also will give students more opportunities for more financial aid. The application overhaul was ordered by Congress as part of the .

The form usually is available Oct. 1 and institutions receive the application information within days. This cycle, the Department of Education did not launch the FAFSA until Dec. 30 on a limited basis. It became available around the clock in early January. Initially, the government told colleges and universities to expect the applicant information by late January.

The submitted forms have their own , but eventually an ISIR (Institutional Student Information Record) is routed to the higher education institutions or career schools requested by the students. In the past, this process took a few days, but some experts estimate that this cycle could take a few weeks or longer. Once a school receives the applicant information, it usually takes that institution several weeks to evaluate, process, package and send award letters to students. The speed of that process depends on the institution’s resources.

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

Keynote speakers this year include of Harlem Children’s Zone, of Stanford University, who popularized the idea of “growth mindset,” and actor , who starred on Broadway as George Washington in Hamilton. Jackson, who has a child on the autism spectrum, will discuss how doctors, parents and advocates are working together to change the ways neurodivergent kids communicate and learn.

But one issue that looms larger than most in the imaginations of educators is artificial intelligence. This year, South by Southwest EDU is offering dozens of sessions exploring AI’s potential and pitfalls. To help guide the way, we’ve scoured the schedule to highlight 18 of the most significant presenters, topics and panels: 

Monday, March 4:

: The New School’s Maya Georgieva looks at how AI is ushering in a new era of immersive experiences. Her talk explores worlds that blur the lines between the virtual and real, where human ingenuity converges with intelligent machines. Georgieva will spotlight the next generation of creators shaping immersive realities, sharing emerging practices and projects from her students as well as her innovation labs and design jams. .

: Educators have long sought a better way to demonstrate learning, adapt instruction and build student confidence. Now, advancements in machine learning, natural language processing and data analytics are creating new possibilities for finding out what students know. This session will explore the ways in which AI is rendering assessments invisible, reducing stress and anxiety for students while improving objectivity and generating actionable insights for educators. .

: Many high-pressure professions — pilots, doctors and professional athletes among others — have access to high-quality simulators to help them learn and improve their skills. Could teachers benefit from hours in a simulator before setting foot in a classroom? In this session featuring presenters from the Relay Graduate School of Education and Wharton Interactive at the University of Pennsylvania, panelists will discuss virtual classrooms they’re piloting. They’ll also address the challenges, successes and possibilities of developing an AI-driven teaching simulator. .

: In just the first half of 2023, venture capital investors poured more than $40 billion into AI startups. Yet big questions loom about how these technologies may impact education and the world of work. How are education and workforce investors separating wheat from chaff? Hear from a trio of venture capital and impact investors as they share the trends they’re watching. .

: This session will look at the profound transformations in teaching taking place in classrooms that blend AI with tailored, competency-focused education. Laura Jeanne Penrod of Southwest Career and Technical Academy and Nevada’s 2024 will explore AI’s role in enhancing rather than supplanting quality teaching — and what happens when schools embrace the human touch and educators’ emotional intelligence. .

: In this interactive workshop led by women leaders from the University of Texas at Austin and the Waco (Texas) Independent School District, participants will learn how to design effective lesson plans and syllabi that incorporate AI tools such as ChatGPT and DALL-E to help prepare students to address society’s most pressing needs. .

: If we get AI in education right, it has the power to revolutionize how children learn. But if we get it wrong and fail to nourish children’s creativity — their ability to innovate, think critically and problem solve — we risk leaving them unprepared for a changing world. Creativity is the durable skill that AI cannot replace. And this panel, comprising educators and industry leaders, will explore the role we play in nurturing children’s innate creativity. .

: This panel, featuring early AI-in-education pioneers such as Amanda Bickerstaff, founder of AI for Education, Charles Foster, an AI researcher at Finetune Learning, and Ben Kornell,  co-founder of Edtech Insiders, will explore their journeys and what they consider the most exciting future opportunities — and important challenges — in this emerging space. .

Tuesday, March 5:

: AI’s continued adoption in schools raises concerns about bias, especially toward students of color. This session, hosted by Common Sense Education’s Jamie Nunez, will highlight practical ways AI tools impact engagement for students from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. It will also address ethical concerns such as plagiarism and issues with facial recognition tools. And it will feature positive student experiences with AI and practical ways to ensure it remains inclusive. .

: In 2024, what defines “AI literacy”? And how can we promote it effectively in schools? Marc Cicchino, innovation director for the Northern Valley Regional High School District in northeastern New Jersey, shares insights on fostering AI literacy through tailored learning experiences and initiatives like the NJ AI Literacy Summit. As part of the session, Cicchino guides attendees through organizing their own summit. . 

: Come watch a live recording of The Cusp, a new podcast hosted by Work Shift’s Paul Fain, exploring AI’s potential to not only enhance how we develop skills and improve job quality but exacerbate inequalities in our education and workforce systems. Leaders from Learning Collider, MDRC and Burning Glass Institute will share their perspectives on how AI can reach learners and workers in innovative ways, bridging the gap to economic opportunity. .

: While a few school districts have embraced artificial intelligence, neither the technology companies creating the AI nor the governments regulating it have provided guidance on how to integrate the new tech into classrooms. This has left districts wondering how to integrate AI safely, ethically and equitably. This panel of TeachAI.org founders and advisory members will discuss why government and education leaders must align standards with the needs of an increasingly AI-driven world. The panel features Khan Academy’s Kristen DiCerbo, Kara McWilliams of ETS, Code.org and ISTE’s Joseph South. .

Wednesday, March 6:

: Just as artificial intelligence is gaining momentum in education, the early childhood education workforce is experiencing record levels of burnout. A recent survey found many educators say they’re more likely to remain in their roles if they have access to better support, including high-quality classroom tools and flexible professional development. Could we harness AI to empower our early childhood workforce? This panel, led by the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s Stanford Accelerator for Learning, will explore the possibilities and challenges of AI in early childhood education. .

Perhaps no one in education needs to adapt more to AI than principals. This discussion with a principal and consultants from IDEO, The Leadership Academy and the Aspen Institute will explore how principals can lead during this time of swift change. Participants will come away with tangible suggestions for fostering innovation, adaptability and self-awareness. .

: This interactive session will give educators an opportunity to explore how they might use AI to advance their work, regardless of their background or technical expertise. ​Led by project managers and leadership development specialists with Teach For America, it will help participants create their own AI tools, build a deeper understanding of generative AI and develop a better sense of its promises and risks. .

Thursday, March 7: 

: This panel discussion, led by The Education Trust’s Dia Bryant and Khan Academy’s Kristen DiCerbo, will look at whether emerging uses of AI in schools could create a new digital divide. It will explore the intersection of AI and education equity and AI’s impact on students of color, as well as those from low-income backgrounds. The session will offer steps that educators and policymakers can take to ensure that schools factor in the culture and neurodiversity of students. . 

: This session, led by Alex Tsado of Alliance4ai, will explore what’s required to engage diverse learners to become emerging AI leaders. It’ll also explore how educators can help them build tech and leadership skills and promote an “AI-for-good” worldview. And it’ll examine the challenges that Black communities face in AI development — and propose research and solutions that can be scaled easily. .

: This panel brings together of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology and Jeremy of Digital Promise for an interactive conversation about generative AI that will integrate two distinctive and powerful vantage points — policy and research. They’ll reflect on the listening sessions they’ve conducted, talk about policy and share insights from major research initiatives that address the efficacy, equity and ethics of generative AI. .

DALLAS — In Eran McGowan’s math class, students try to teach each other.

If a student is brave enough to share how they solved a math problem, they stand up in front of the other third graders and say, “All eyes on me.” The classroom responds, “All eyes on you,” and the student explains how they did it.

This collaborative method of learning math is part of a new curriculum, named , that was launched in the Dallas Independent School District this school year. It emphasizes helping students better grasp mathematical concepts instead of their performance on the state’s standardized test. The new curriculum is described as a step away from memorization.

The new curriculum “moves away from using tests as a way to measure success,” said McGowan, who teaches at the Eddie Bernice Johnson STEM Academy. “±őłÙ’s more focused on the kids understanding the concept, and in turn, that will help a child pass assessments.”

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While the teaching approach is different, the intent ultimately continues to be helping students do better on the math portion of the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness. Last summer’s showed that Texas students have still not caught up to the math scores they had in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Forty-five percent of students who took math in third through eighth grade or Algebra I last year passed the STAAR test. While their math scores represent a slight increase from last year, they are still 7 percentage points behind the state average in 2019.

What’s more, the number of students who went above and beyond and “mastered” the subject has not recovered since the pandemic. In 2023, 19% of all Texas students mastered math at their grade level, down from 26% in 2019. While Texas students’ overall math scores last year were four points higher than the national average, the percentage of students who master math in the state is significantly behind the national average of 38%, according to the Nation’s Report Card, which samples fourth- and eighth-grade students’ reading and math grades across the country.

Policymakers and educators worry that the low number of students who master math will mean not enough Texans will have the skills to meet the demands of the most lucrative, in-demand jobs in the next few decades. They fear Texas will not be able to produce its own workforce and will be forced to look for talent elsewhere. According to a Stanford University , students who do not bring their math scores back up to pre-pandemic levels will earn 5.6% less over the course of their lives than students with better grades just before the pandemic hit.

“Is our inability to get kids back towards this increased level of mastery — for math — going to limit them in the long run for the types of jobs that you’re going to be able to access, or even feel like they can access, in the future?” said Gabe Grantham, a K-12 policy analyst at Texas 2036, a public policy think tank. “If we don’t do anything about this at the state level in 2025, we’re going to be behind the ball.”

Texas won’t know how well Eureka Math is working until later in the year, when the next STAAR results are released, but there is optimism. About 400 other Texas school districts, both private and public, are using the curriculum. Across the country, districts that have the curriculum have seen scores . Dallas ISD the program at Anson Jones Elementary before adopting it districtwide and found that students’ math scores and confidence in their handling of the subject went up.

The Texas Legislature has also taken steps to make it easier for students to advance in their math studies. Lawmakers last year passed , which automatically promotes middle schoolers to a higher math class if they do well at a lower level.

The law’s author, state Sen. , R-Conroe, said having students perform at a high level in math will increase their lifetime earnings and contribute to a healthy Texas economy. Lawmakers, policy analysts and public education officials are looking for other ways to help students bring up their math scores ahead of the 2025 legislative session, he said.

Grantham said Texas is behind other states when it comes to math reform at the legislative level, but it’s better to design policies based on data and a careful review of what’s working and what’s not.

“We don’t want to throw things at the wall and see what sticks,” he said. “Everyone wants the same silver bullet, but we’re trying to parse out what that actually looks like.”

For now, Texas is betting on laws passed over the last couple of years to help struggling students, such as mandated tutoring and, more recently, a law that makes it easier for teachers and districts to have access to “high-quality” instructional materials. Texas education experts and school administrators believe both policies are promising, though they say staffing shortages have made it difficult to comply with mandatory tutoring.

Teaching challenges

When the pandemic forced Texas schools to close and shift to virtual learning, STAAR scores plummeted to lows not seen in a decade.

Schools and families weren’t ready for the change. Some children didn’t have internet access or computers at home; others were completely absent. Academic achievement in both reading and math took a hit.

Four years later, reading scores have surpassed pre-pandemic levels but students are still struggling with math.

“The pandemic was just such a large-scale interruption, one that our system didn’t really know how to engage with,” said Carlos Nicolas GĂłmez, an assistant professor of STEM Education at UT-Austin. “And due to that, even coming back, we’re still dealing with the interruption.”

GĂłmez and Grantham said the reason why students have recovered faster in reading is because they can practice it at home much easier than math.

“Reading, it’s a lot easier for parents to read to their kids at home,” Grantham said. “Math is going to take a lot more direct instruction. That was just lost when kids were out of school.”

When kids came back to the classroom, many didn’t have a grasp of mathematical concepts they should’ve learned in previous years, said Umoja Turner, principal of the Eddie Bernice Johnson STEM Academy.

It fell on teachers to come up with learning plans that incorporated the concepts students are supposed to learn at each grade level, plus fill out the gaps in learning caused by the pandemic.

But Michelle Rinehart, superintendent of the Alpine Independent School District, said the state’s teacher shortage crisis and the departure of experienced teachers from schools have made it difficult to help students catch up. Only two out of her seven math teachers in grades 3-8 have taught math before, she said.

Experienced teachers lead to increased student achievement, according to the , an education policy think tank. But during the last school year, 28% of new teachers hired in Texas did not have a certification or permit to teach, and 13% of all teachers left the profession. Both figures represented historic highs.

“That is a really high challenge right now,” Rinehart said.

The teaching shortage is especially hard for rural districts compared to their urban counterparts. For starters, Rinehart said, small districts like Alpine can’t pay teachers as much and usually have far fewer resources.

A new way to learn

Before Eureka Math was introduced in Dallas and Alpine ISDs, teachers could use a variety of different curricula, mostly geared toward passing the STAAR and memorizing how to solve equations.

This led to differences in how students across the state learned math. Turner said this sometimes causes students who move to a different campus to struggle when adapting to a new teaching method.

With Eureka Math now being widely adopted across Dallas ISD, students have a more consistent way of learning math, which hopefully will result in better test scores, he said.

McGowan said the curriculum he used in the past heavily emphasized passing the STAAR.

“With previous curriculums, it was just, ‘we have an equation, we solve it,’ but the kids cannot explain the process well,” he said.

Brittany duPont with Great Minds, the company that designed Eureka Math, has been helping Dallas teachers adopt the new curriculum. She said it’s been a huge shift in math teaching, and some veteran teachers have pushed back.

But duPont said the teaching tactics that Eureka Math proposes are needed to help kids catch up with their math studies after the pandemic. They’re also timely because the recently redesigned STAAR test now focuses more on how a child solves a math problem, she added.

Kids are more excited to learn and master concepts with Eureka Math, McGowan said. Another upside of the new curriculum is that it gives teachers room to test kids’ knowledge on a topic before each lesson, making it easier for teachers to collaborate on ways to help students catch up, he said.

The new curriculum also emphasizes collaboration. McGowan lets his students debate concepts with each other and figure out how they got to certain conclusions. The process allows them to gain a deeper understanding of mathematics.

Moving to a new curriculum always poses a bit of a risk and challenge, especially when it’s easier to stick to what you know, but McGowan said he’s seen kids enjoy learning math in a way he never has in his 18-year career.

“±őłÙ’s about trusting the process. Trusting that the kids will learn,” he said. “But we have to be consistent.”

This article originally appeared in at .

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

As a small illustration of her long, idiosyncratic writing career, Joy Hakim likes to tell the story of a chance encounter in an Oakland elevator.

On the way down after a speaking engagement, a woman handed her a slip of paper — it contained the phone number of her son’s private school. He and his classmates, she said, could really benefit from their school swapping out its traditional history textbooks for a set of Hakim’s.

Asked who she was, the woman admitted that she was a representative of one of the big publishing houses.

“I was appalled,” Hakim remembered. “But this is an industry where almost no one believes the books educate well — and scores prove that.” 

Hakim doesn’t know if the school ever switched over. But the episode underscores her uncomfortable place in an industry that has never quite embraced her. By turns raw, thrilling and eye-opening, her writing offers young people a look at history that they rarely get between the covers of mass-produced textbooks.

Her most well-known work, a 10-volume history of the United States that began appearing in the early 1990s, remains in print. And at age 93, she’s still in the fight: Her newest series on biology debuted in September, continuing her tradition of wrestling with complicated ideas and difficult historical and scientific questions. 

But even after three decades, she remains unsure that she’s made much of an impact as textbooks with bigger promotional budgets enjoy much wider readerships. 

That view is belied by her legions of admirers. Praised by leading historians like David McCullough and James McPherson, she also may be the only textbook author to reliably receive fan mail. At one of her kids’ houses sit cases of letters, testament to the gratitude of two generations of readers. 

, podcaster and author of , who has championed deep subject matter knowledge in all areas of study, called Hakim “a force of nature.”

“Most textbooks are either extremely dry or so encyclopedic in their attempts to cover the universe of topics that they’re highly superficial and therefore boring,” Wexler said. “Joy Hakim understands how to use the power of narrative to bring topics in history and science to life.”

Wexler predicted that if more schools adopted Hakim’s titles, reading scores would jump because her work offers both the knowledge and vocabulary kids need to succeed on tests. 

And as the nation grows increasingly polarized about history, Hakim’s work eschews easy categorization. It is championed by liberals for not glossing over our dark past — and by conservatives for offering rigorous, challenging texts and sophisticated arguments.

, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and a former New York City teacher, said Hakim’s history series “had a place of honor in my fifth-grade classroom and deserves a place of privilege in every school. It’s beyond her power to reverse the long-running and in American education, but she’s done her part to make real history accessible and interesting to those who seek it out, or who are engaged by it.”

Hakim’s books, he said, offer an important antidote to those that aim to trick kids into learning a little history via historical fiction or lightweight, fantasy-driven fare. “Hakim is winningly anachronistic by comparison: She takes history — and more pertinently her young readers — seriously.”

But she has often had to fight simply to be heard by school districts under adoption systems she sees as backwards. Teachers and students are hungering for good books, Hakim said, yet the adopted titles often stem from publishers’ long-standing relationships with state education bureaucrats, whom they lobby furiously. 

“I don’t think that they sell whether they’re good or crappy,” she said. “They sell because of this massive promotional effort that goes into them.”

‘I sat down and I started writing’ 

Hakim’s career as a writer for young people began simply, on a long car drive.

A one-time teacher and journalist — she taught in Baltimore for a spell and was both a business and editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk’s daily newspaper — by the 1980s, she was freelancing in Virginia Beach and raising three kids with her husband, a grain importer. She happened upon a notice for a hearing in Richmond, the capital, by a board looking for ways to improve school textbooks. At that pre-Internet time, it was a topic that aroused national attention. Hakim (pronounced HAKE-im) decided to check it out.

She expected to hear testimony from writers and editors. Instead, the publishers sent salespeople, who in her view stonewalled the proceedings by rhapsodizing about how beautifully designed and illustrated the books were.

“The whole thing was just a hoax,” she recalled. “The publishing industry was not serious about doing anything.”

Steaming, Hakim climbed back into her car and began the two-hour drive home. At some point, she thought to herself: Why not write her own history book?

“I sat down and I started writing,” she said.

Hakim didn’t stop for seven years, telling vivid personal stories of America’s founders, pioneers and others.

As she conceived it, the book aimed for a fifth-grade audience. To get direct feedback, she tapped a small group of 10-year-olds in her neighborhood, offering five dollars apiece to critique her manuscript. Hakim instructed the readers — mostly boys — to scrawl one of three reactions in the margins: G for Good, B for Boring and NC for Not Clear. 

Next, she invited classroom teachers to use the manuscripts in exchange for feedback. 

That one book ultimately became a 10-volume manuscript called . 

The books covered much of what she’d decided was important in American history — as she told one interviewer, from “people coming over the Bering Strait” to Bill Clinton’s inauguration.

And they offered children a thrilling narrative. In a chapter on Columbus’ voyages, she wrote that after surviving the treacherous waters of the Sargasso Sea, the explorer’s men wanted to turn back: “The sea seems endless. On October 9 they say they will go no farther. Columbus pleads for three more days of sailing. Then, he says, if they don’t see land they may cut off his head and sail home in peace.”

But for all the books’ originality, Hakim lacked a publisher. Eventually she met a literary agent who successfully garnered the attention of Oxford University Press.

, in a review titled, “Showing Children the Dark Side,” said Hakim “frees children from the grasp of hoary American myth nurtured by novelists and historians; without sermonizing, she allows them to glimpse the horrific underside of the once magical word ‘frontier.'” 

Hakim, for instance, was among the first writers for young people to address the 1839 Amistad rebellion, devoting an entire chapter to the slave uprising four years before the incident rose to prominence with the .

Historian David McCullough called the series “a big breath of fresh air and the best possible news for the youngsters who get to read these books.” 

Princeton University historian James McPherson said he was “impressed by the accuracy and the depth of her research,” telling one reviewer that Hakim’s books represented women and minorities in ways others hadn’t.

‘I have done something that’s quite different’

Like many authors, Hakim felt Oxford did little to publicize the series, leaving her to do much of the promotion herself. But in 1993, a family friend opened a key door: The composer BJ Leiderman, a long-ago classmate of one of her children, was by then writing for National Public Radio. He suggested to colleagues that they feature her, and soon Hakim found herself in front of a microphone at the network’s Norfolk affiliate. The result was a lengthy “Morning Edition” segment that helped introduce her to the world.

In the interview, she told host Bob Edwards, “The history books that are out there, most of them are committee-written, and committees can’t write. Committees have to be bland. So, I am doing something 
 that’s quite different.”

Looking back on the reception she got in 1993, Leiderman said Hakim was “progressive in the best sense of the word, searching out all different areas” to study.

All the same, he recalled, selling the books — sometimes on her own — struck him as a long, tough slog reminiscent of veteran rock stars playing small clubs to keep their music alive.

Despite the struggle — or perhaps because of it — “A History of US” soon became one of Oxford’s rock-solid titles, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, said Damon Zucca, the publisher’s director of content development and reference. The series has also received “the most fan mail from kids, parents, and teachers, who have been sending ardent missives about these books to Joy and to us for nearly thirty years now.”

But keeping them in classrooms has been a battle. Hakim recalled visiting Oakland schools a year after the district adopted her books, curious how they were being used. She couldn’t find them anywhere. “They’d all been replaced,” she said. A few teachers told her they’d saved their copies and were literally hiding them in closets to keep administrators in the dark. 

At one point, Hakim even sued after textbook giant Houghton Mifflin purchased the books’ distributor, D.C. Heath. Fearing it was a bid to bury the titles, she pursued an antitrust violation. Civics-geek alert: The case eventually landed before the federal bench of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who 14 years later would rise to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Hakim eventually got the books out from under the big publisher’s purview. Now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, it didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

Eventually, “A History of US” gave rise to a companion with all-star voice talent including Morgan Freeman, Julia Roberts and Robert Redford. But by then Hakim was on to something new: a three-book series about the history of science, from Aristotle to Einstein.

Then as now, Hakim’s most fervent buyers are often private school teachers and homeschooling parents who are free to use materials that appeal to them. She also holds a kind of magnetic appeal to cultural conservatives like Lynne Cheney who have derided public school readings they view as mushy and politically correct.

Yet conservatives have also protested Hakim’s books. In one case, Texas parents organized a letter-writing campaign, telling state officials that the books were unpatriotic.

They’ve been banned at least twice, as far as Hakim knows — once quite recently after a parent complained that they were too liberal. She jokes that the honor puts her in good company. 

Asked how she’d categorize herself, Hakim doesn’t hesitate. “I’m just a teacher,“ she said. “My books talk. I’m in a conversation with these kids and I respect their intelligence — and they understand that.”

‘This is a tough chapter’

Ask about her workflow and Hakim will tell you that she is blessed with — or cursed by — a journalist’s penchant for accuracy, which often prolongs her creative process. In the case of the science books, she finished the last one — on Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and the origins of quantum mechanics — and her new publisher had submitted it for peer review, when she received an unsolicited email from an unfamiliar name with an mit.edu address.

It was from renowned physics professor , also editor of the American Journal of Physics. He’d read a piece in TIME magazine about her plan to write about Einstein and offered to read the manuscript.

Hakim sent him the first four chapters. A few days later, Taylor wrote back asking if someone had actually reviewed them.

He and Hakim met a few times and, in Taylor’s words, “got to know — and respect — each other.” In all, they spent the next year-and-a-half revising the book, to the chagrin of Smithsonian Books. “They were not happy with me,” Hakim recalled. “But I’m so happy that I did it.”

In the book’s introduction, Hakim wrote of the “private tutorial with one of the greatest physics teachers this country has produced,” adding, “Sometimes my head hurt with all the stretching.”

The book won several best-of-the-year awards, which she credits largely to Taylor’s influence. For his part, Taylor told The 74 that Hakim “made great contributions to high school science teaching” and deserves wider recognition. 

As with the history series, the science books found a devoted audience as Hakim challenged young readers to grasp hard topics and complex ideas. In a chapter explaining Galileo’s writings on relativity, Hakim urged them to “catch your breath, relax and be prepared to stretch your mind.” 

In the chapter, she described how an observer on shore, watching a ball fall from the mast of a moving ship, sees it move in an arc, while an observer on deck sees it travel in a straight line. Acknowledging that the idea seemed outlandish, she warned: “This is a tough chapter; stick with it; the ideas here are important.”

Indeed, when journalist and scholar Alexander Stille set out to capture the essence of Hakim’s history books in 1998, he concluded, “Instead of talking down to children in simplified language, her books invite children to make an effort.” He that “a grandmother from Virginia” could produce books superior to those of most publishing houses.

‘The world has changed’

Now, nearly 20 years after the science texts first appeared, Hakim is out with a new series for teens about the history of biology.

gave the first volume a coveted starred review, calling it “thoroughly engrossing and highly recommended.” 

The second book is due out in April, part of a planned four-volume series. Published by MITeen Press, the last two books won’t appear until 2025 and 2026 respectively, but Hakim jokes that at her age she may not live to see it in readers’ hands.

She has asked her publisher to pick up the pace.

At the same time, she remains unsatisfied about her previous work: Three decades after “A History of US” began appearing on shelves, Hakim says the series could use a refresh. 

“I wrote it 30 years ago, so some of it is really dated,” she said with a self-conscious laugh. For one thing, she wants to recast the role of women, a topic she didn’t adequately address in the 1990s, mostly due to her own blind spot. An avowed feminist, she now sees she didn’t step back enough and appreciate the importance of the women’s movement. 

“Thirty years ago, we were different people than we are today,” she said. “The world has changed.” 

Yet, oddly, little has changed in Hakim’s career. Her husband is gone and the “grandmother from Virginia” is now a great-grandmother, but she still feels like a disruptor and an outsider, angry that we don’t have “better books” in schools. After millions of words on the page and cases of fan mail, she admits that she has barely struck a blow in the nation’s larger battle with historical illiteracy.

The textbook industry that she set out to disrupt in the 1980s is still dominated by a handful of publishers — actually, consolidation has , not more, choices. Together, they still produce what she considers bland, formulaic books that are making the nation’s reading crisis worse, not better.

“I’ve worked all these years and I’m not sure what I’ve achieved,” she concluded. “I’ve sold some books, but I haven’t changed the field.”

Following the example of organizations in health care, social services and both early and higher education, some districts are experimenting with outcomes-based contracting, paying vendors, at least in part, for improvements in student learning. That’s the closest one can get to a money-back guarantee in education. 

Tutoring is particularly well-suited to outcomes-based contracting, since boosting achievement is its raison d’etre. Contracts that pay more when students show academic growth — and pay less when they don’t ― incentivize tutoring companies to produce results and save public money when they fall short.

Two districts that are part of a pilot project led by the Southern Education Foundation — Florida’s Duval County Public Schools and Ector County Independent School District in west Texas — offer informative examples of different approaches to outcomes-based contracting with tutoring providers.

Officials in Duval County, a sprawling, 128,000-student district covering greater Jacksonville, realized that 5,000 ninth-graders each year were starting high school in a low-level, pre-algebra course due to poor outcomes in middle school. So they invested about $2 million in federal COVID recovery funds in an outcomes-based contract with a vendor that delivered three, 30-minute sessions per week of math tutoring to struggling eighth-graders at nine middle schools. 

Duval County’s vendor, FEV Tutor, in partnership with Edmentum, earns a base fee of $800 per tutored student. If a student hits an established midyear growth target, the vendor receives an additional $530. If that student then hits an established end-of-year growth target, the district pays another $700. Finally, if the student also scores proficient or above on the state assessment, the provider earns a $420 bonus. 

Both sides of the deal came into play last year, according to Jasmine Walker, Duval County’s former director of K-12 math, who joined the foundation to help other districts launch outcomes-based contracts. Of the 451 students that FEV Tutor worked with between January and May, 42% achieved at least the growth that was expected under the contract. That meant Duval ended up paying 57% of potential performance fees. As a result, FEV Tutor left nearly $70,000 in bonuses on the table — money Duval could reinvest in more tutoring or a different intervention for struggling students.

Ector County, which serves predominantly Latino students in the oil-rich Permian Basin, took a different approach. Its outcomes-based contracts pay two providers, Air Tutors and FEV Tutor, a base fee of $25 per completed session with each student. If a student shows improvement on the NWEA MAP assessment equivalent to more than one year’s growth in a school year, the district raises its per-session pay to $27.50. As student growth increases, pay can rise further.

But if a student loses ground, the vendor loses money. If a student who made gains regresses below the 49th percentile on the benchmark test, the per-session pay declines to $22.50. If the student regresses below the 40th percentile, per-session pay drops to $21.25.

Tracking each student’s progress is a laborious task that consumes much of High-Impact Tutoring Manager Carina Escajeda’s time toward the end of the school year. But it ensures that vendors make a real difference in student achievement.

Ector County’s providers are comfortable with baking incentives and penalties into their contracts. “We believe in what we do at Air Tutors,” says Hasan Ali, the company’s founder and CEO. â€œWe don’t mind putting our money where our mouth is because we are confident with our results.”  

They have been impressive: 50% of Ector County students who scored below grade level on the previous year’s state assessment and received at least 20 hours of tutoring scored at grade level or higher after one year. And about 30% of students tutored in math scored in the 66^th percentile or higher on the standardized Northwest Education Association’s MAP exam after one year, reflecting more growth than would be expected in a school year.  

“When we think about the public, this shows that we’re being responsible with funding, that we’re tying it to student outcomes and our district’s strategic plan,” says Walker.

School districts have been slow to embrace contracts that tie pay to performance, in part because contracting officers in how to develop them. But as local education leaders work to sustain tutoring and other promising post-COVID programs as federal funding for the work winds down, outcomes-based contracting can help ensure they get the best return on their investment and help build a culture of performance in public education.

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

LUFKIN — Georgia DeVries misses sleeping in a car.

“It was safer than any house I’ve been in,” the 17-year-old said.

By her count, she’s lived in at least 13 different places since the sixth grade, including multiple homes with her mom, extended stays with friends and family, and four trips to behavioral health clinics.

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Then last November, after staying with her aunt, she ended up in her now ex-boyfriend’s broken-down Mitsubishi parked on his family’s property.

It wasn’t much, but she felt at peace — most of the time.

This is how many teenagers in rural Texas experience homelessness: a revolving door of sheltered and unsheltered living, friends’ couches, stints with extended family, nights spent outdoors. Homeless shelters are not an option in Lufkin, a town of 34,000, 90 miles south of Tyler, the nearest major city. Shelters here don’t take unaccompanied minors without reports of violent abuse.

A dearth of shelters is just one way homeless teens in rural areas are at a more significant disadvantage than their urban peers, experts say. A lack of good-paying jobs, poverty and drug abuse can be more common.

Poverty rose in between 2018 and 2022; a majority of those counties are considered rural. East Texas had a higher rate of opioid abuse than the rest of the state, according to a regional needs assessment based on data from 2018 to 2020. Texas, as a whole, was one of eight states where rural communities suffered higher drug overdose rates compared to their urban counterparts, according to a 2022 published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

And teens in rural areas are harder to track, making it more difficult for policymakers to design solutions based on quality data.

More than U.S. residents in 2023 were counted as homeless, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. . The statistic is based on an annual census of homeless people on a single night in January.

Rural and nonrural communities have similar rates of youth homelessness, according to a 2021 study by the University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall, a think tank focused on public policy that supports families.

But these annual counts — which Chapin Hall’s research is based on — face criticism across the board as they struggle to measure homelessness accurately, even in urban areas.

Erin Carreon, a researcher at the University of Chicago, said there is likely a significant undercount in rural areas. That’s because rural teens are often “hidden” from counters.

Georgia, for example, was with her then-girlfriend during the 2023 count, escaping the census.

“When we think of homelessness, we might think of people in shelters or we might think of people on a busy street corner that people are walking by,” Carreon said. “In a rural area, young people are more likely to stay on couches, inside vehicles if they are outdoors, and it might be in a more secluded and hidden spot.”

Six years ago, Georgia was living with her grandma and legal guardian, Jan DeVries. That’s when Georgia’s mother asked her to move to Beaumont, a much larger city about 100 miles southeast of Lufkin.

Georgia said she was excited. But after just one week at the new home, she clearly made a mistake. She left to move in with her girlfriend in Lufkin and stayed for two years.

A lack of early, stable relationships and a stubborn independence streak led Georgia to move in and out of homes frequently, DeVries said. In the years following the breakup, Georgia would stay with friends and family, sometimes lasting just one night.

Georgia acknowledges she has played a significant role in contributing to her homelessness. Her mental health is not the best, she said. She is seeking help and meets with a therapist weekly.

While DeVries has been one of the most stable forces in Georgia’s life, they’ve had their own falling out over Georgia’s sexual identity.

DeVries said she tried not to judge Georgia, who first came out as a lesbian when she was about 14 and then bisexual when she was older.

“I just didn’t like the fact that she was going to make her life that much more difficult for herself,” DeVries said.

LGBTQ+ youths were twice as likely to experience homelessness as their peers, according to another by Chapin Hall.

Georgia loved the company of little stray black cats that roamed the area near the broken-down car she called home last November. A stray dog would wander by occasionally, too, she said.

She is stick-thin. And she rocks a short, modern-day punk haircut dyed a mix of red, blue and green. Tattoos she did herself using a gun purchased online cover her body.

Like any teenager, she can be talkative at points or sit pensively, staring into space.

“I could have stayed there forever,” she said.

However, the freedom she felt came with some consequences. It was November, and the East Texas region was experiencing its first cold front. She posted videos on TikTok of her breaking down, crying about how lonely she was.

Her feet hurt from the cold. And once, she slept for nearly 48 hours straight fighting a urinary tract infection. A cousin later dragged her to the doctor’s office for help.

“There wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it,” DeVries said. “You pray real hard: ‘Protect her. Protect her. Protect her.’ Because she was out there and you can’t make her understand about the danger she’s putting herself in. It was misery.”

There wasn’t anywhere else for the teen to go in Angelina County. Local shelters only accept people over 18 unless violent abuse is reported.

Service providers don’t have an incentive to seek out these teens, because they have nothing to offer them. And public schools are supposed to act as a safety net, but students rarely know that, said Carreon, the University of Chicago researcher.

The Lufkin school district has a social worker. However, there’s little help for the kids who . And Georgia doesn’t remember the last time she was in a classroom.

Two adults who have tried to help Georgia are Pam and Yvonne Smith. They started the Kaleidoscope L.Y.F.E. Foundation to provide access to mentorship for at-risk youth.

Before launching the nonprofit, Pam Smith worked in the juvenile justice system and Yvonne worked at another youth advocacy center. For years, they watched the state and local foster care system struggle. Statewide, the system that is supposed to help young Texans find stable homes has faced scrutiny for staff , home placements and placing kids in hotels when foster homes were unavailable.

Local leaders and organizations, the Smiths say, have failed to close the gap.

“These kids are underage and can’t do anything for themselves,” Yvonne Smith said. “They’re stuck in a situation where they’re supposed to be an adult but are not legally able to act as one.”

They don’t receive support from the state, they can’t register themselves for school or GED programs, and they can’t sign a contract for an apartment or utilities, Yvonne Smith said.

Communities can begin to address homelessness by establishing strategies to divert teens from this path, according to Carreon. And she suggested that federal funding be made more broadly accessible to those communities.

Carreon thinks it really starts with schools, giving them the resources to identify these kids and provide them with help.

“Making sure schools have the capacity to fulfill their roles is really key,” she said.

Until that happens, rural teen homelessness will likely remain invisible and abstract.

Georgia had to move out of the car after it was vandalized.

And DeVries insisted Georgia return home before Christmas. She waits up each night for Georgia, who walks home from her job at Little Caesars. Georgia likes the work because she can munch on pizza during her breaks.

She puts aside as much money as she can for a car.

This article originally appeared in at .

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