Texas Democrats are zeroing in on education issues in their bid to flip several state House districts this fall, as they look to blame GOP lawmakers for teacher shortages and school closures and mobilize their base around defeating Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature school voucher policy.

That approach came into focus last week at the Texas Democratic Convention in El Paso, where party leaders and House candidates repeatedly bashed Abbott’s push to provide taxpayer funds for private school tuition. They also acknowledged the governor’s recent success ousting members of his own party who oppose school vouchers, invoking it as a reason to focus on battleground House races this fall.

State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, an Austin Democrat who is leading House Democrats’ campaign efforts, told delegates at the convention that Abbott’s crusade against voucher opponents in the primary has tipped the scales of the House narrowly toward passage of vouchers next year.

“To put it another way, we need to elect about three more Democrats to the Texas House to defeat vouchers and defend our neighborhood public schools,” she said.

Democrats and rural Republicans in the lower chamber have historically united against measures that would divert state funds to help families pay for private school. Critics say vouchers would siphon money away from public schools that are already facing widespread teacher shortages and budget deficits — a trend exacerbated by lawmakers’ failure last year to tap the state’s historic $33 billion budget surplus to boost school funding, after the effort got caught up in the voucher fight.

Most of the House battlefield this election cycle is centered in the Dallas and San Antonio suburbs and South Texas, across several districts with struggling schools where Democrats hope public education will resonate at the ballot box.

Among their top targets is GOP state Rep. John Lujan, who won his Bexar County district in 2022 by 4 percentage points — overcoming trends atop the ballot, where Democrat Beto O’Rourke carried the district by 2 points over Abbott.

Kristian Carranza, a progressive organizer and Lujan’s Democratic opponent, said when she meets voters on block-walks, “the No. 1 issue at the door is public education and the voucher fight.” She noted that the district — which covers south San Antonio and the eastern side of Bexar County — includes beleaguered districts like Harlandale ISD, which closed four elementary schools last fall amid a funding deficit.

“For people, this is a lived reality when we talk about private school vouchers,” said Carranza, who opposes the measure. “The way I talk about this is, the financial crisis schools are facing is due to massive budget deficits, and that’s the inevitable result of elected officials like John Lujan who have been choosing to toe the line with their party rather than stand up for their community.”

Abbott and his pro-voucher allies argue that parents deserve the option to remove their kids from the public education system, which has been attacked by conservatives over its response to the COVID-19 pandemic and concerns about how race, history and sex are taught in the classroom.

Republicans are already countering Democrats’ narrative, accusing the House voucher opponents of being responsible for the demise of a bill last fall that would have pumped billions into public schools. The bill died after a coalition of House Democrats and 21 Republicans removed vouchers from the package; the bill author then withdrew the entire measure, citing Abbott’s threat to veto education funding that did not include vouchers.

Abbott spokesperson Andrew Mahaleris said Democrats, by putting voucher opposition at the forefront of their campaigns, “are fighting for teacher unions and their self-serving agenda, instead of the Texans they claim to represent.”

“When it comes to education, parents matter, and families deserve the ability to choose the best education opportunities for their children,” Mahaleris said in a statement. “If Democrats want to make their opposition to parental empowerment a central theme of their campaign, good luck.”

Joshua Blank, research director for the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said part of the strategy for Democrats “is to move the debate over public education back onto friendlier terrain” — toward school funding and away from things like curriculum.

In recent years, Blank said, Republicans have mobilized voters “based on the idea that, essentially, teachers weren’t to be trusted and the curriculum had gone off the rails,” allowing them to go on offense in an area typically dominated by Democrats.

“Traditionally, we think of public education as a Democratic issue, because most often if we’re talking about public education, we’re talking about spending, and … there’s almost no debate in which Democrats aren’t going to be more willing than Republicans to spend money on public education,” Blank said. “But if we’re talking about curriculum concerns and parental rights, that puts Democrats in a difficult position.”

Under the banner of protecting kids in public schools, Texas Republicans in recent years have passed laws aimed at keeping sexually explicit books out of school libraries and limiting how topics like race and racism can be taught in public schools. Conservatives have also extended the battle outside the classroom, passing a law restricting sexually explicit performances in front of minors and proposing a bill that targeted drag queen story hours — events typically held at public libraries and bookstores aimed at promoting literacy.

Over the last several days, Republicans including Abbott and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz have taken aim at Democrats for hosting a drag queen, Brigitte Bandit, at their convention. Bandit delivered a speech where she defended the practice of reading books to children at drag queen story hours and took aim at the Legislature’s move to ban transgender youth from taking puberty blockers and receiving hormone therapies.

“These are the same Texas Democrats who thought it was a good idea to parade a drag queen on stage to talk about indoctrinating impressionable children,” Mahaleris said, underscoring how Abbott has painted the public school system as a hotbed of liberal indoctrination in his push for school vouchers.

Carranza is not the only Democratic candidate shaping her campaign around public education and vouchers. In Dallas County, Democratic hopeful Averie Bishop is emphasizing her background as a substitute teacher in her bid to unseat state Rep. Angie Chen Button, R-Richardson. Bishop also has pointed to the firsthand view she received of Texas’ flagging public schools as she traveled the state after winning the 2022 Miss Texas competition.

“I personally saw how severely underfunded and undersupported our schools are,” Bishop said at the Democratic convention. “School vouchers will pass if we do not flip my seat from red to blue.”

Democrats also see a newfound opportunity to pick up the San Antonio-area seat held by state Rep. Steve Allison — a moderate Republican who opposes school vouchers — after Allison was defeated in the March primary by conservative challenger Marc LaHood, a criminal defense attorney who backs vouchers.

State Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, said LaHood holds “extreme views” that are out of step with the district.

“Looking at the contrast between Steve Allison and Marc LaHood, and understanding and knowing the independent and educated voters in the [district’s] Alamo Heights area, there’s no doubt in my mind that our Democratic hopes just increased tenfold,” said Martinez Fischer, who chairs the Texas House Democratic Caucus.

Under its current configuration, the district would have been carried by former President Donald Trump by about 2 percentage points in 2020. Trump would have carried Button’s district by half a point the same year.

LaHood, asked about Martinez Fischer’s comment, said in a statement that “parental choice isn’t a partisan issue.”

“Parents want and deserve to have more options in selecting the best educational environment for their individual children,” LaHood said. “Democrats are in for a rude awakening if they want to make disempowering parents their hill to die on. I welcome the conversation and the fight.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/06/13/texas-democrats-house-election-vouchers-public-education/. The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

A Texas federal judge blocked the Biden administration’s efforts to extend federal anti-discrimination protections to LGBTQ+ students.

In his ruling Tuesday, Judge Reed O’Connor said the Biden administration lacked the authority to make the changes and accused it of pushing “an agenda wholly divorced from the text, structure, and contemporary context of Title IX.” Title IX is the 1972 law that prohibits discrimination based on sex in educational settings.

“To allow [the Biden administration’s] unlawful action to stand would be to functionally rewrite Title IX in a way that shockingly transforms American education and usurps a major question from Congress,” wrote O’Connor, a President George W. Bush appointee. “That is not how our democratic system functions.”

The Biden administration’s new guidelines, issued in April, expanded Title IX to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The changes would make schools and universities responsible for investigating a wider range of discrimination complaints. The rule changes came as several states, including Texas, have approved laws in recent years barring transgender student-athletes from participating in sports teams that correspond to their gender identity. The Biden administration hasn’t clarified whether the new guidance would apply in those cases.

Texas and several other states have sued the Biden administration over the new rule. Carroll ISD also filed a separate suit over the change. A month after the guidelines were released, Gov. Greg Abbott called on school districts and universities to ignore them.

“Threatening to withhold education funding by forcing states to accept ‘transgender’ policies that put women in danger was plainly illegal,” said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a statement applauding Tuesday’s ruling. “Texas has prevailed on behalf of the entire Nation.”

An U.S. Education Department said in a statement it stands by its revised guidelines.

“Every student deserves the right to feel safe in school,” the statement reads.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/06/12/texas-title-ix-lgbtq-students/. The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

As school districts across Texas – including El Paso – prepare to set their budgets for the 2024-25 school year, many are expecting their expenses to outweigh their revenue, leaving them with a deficit.

Despite the state’s multi-billion dollar surplus, lawmakers failed to increase school funding during the 2023 legislative session after Gov. Greg Abbott tied public education dollars to a controversial voucher program that would have allowed parents to pay for private school using state funds.

Now with pandemic-era relief set to expire in September, districts are scrambling to address a budget crisis by cutting staff, closing schools and eliminating programs.

Some like the Canutillo Independent School District have opted to ask voters to increase taxes through a bond measure, in the hopes of increasing enrollment and bringing in more revenue.

Others like the Ysleta and Socorro independent school districts are tightening their belts by eliminating vacant positions and exploring ways to save money. The El Paso Independent School District is looking into closing schools to avoid any future budgetary woes.

Most are unlikely to give raises to teachers or staff in the coming school year.

Most El Paso school districts are expected to approve their budgets for the 2024-25 school year in mid- to late June.

To find out more about how Texas school districts got into this situation, El Paso Matters spoke to two school finance experts: Tiffany Dunne-Oldfield, deputy executive director of the Texas Association of School Boards, and Bob Popinski, senior director of policy for Raise Your Hand Texas.

TASB is a nonprofit organization that provides assistance and training to school boards, and Raise Your Hand Texas is a statewide nonprofit focused on policy reform to improve public education.

El Paso Matters: Why are so many Texas schools expecting a budget deficit next school year?

Dunne-Oldfield: “Several factors are contributing to the rise in school district budget shortfalls as districts are preparing their budgets for next year. The Texas Legislature has not increased the basic allotment — the main component of student funding — since 2019, despite inflationary double-digit price increases.

In fact, legislators left almost $4 billion in additional funding on the table because they could not agree on a school voucher bill. That stagnant per-pupil funding coupled with new mandates, such as the requirement to have a commissioned peace officer on every campus, and ongoing funding shortages, like the statewide $2.3 billion gap in special education funding, are exacerbating school district budget woes.”

Popinski: “The legislature had the ability to change the funding structure of how much flowed to school districts last legislative session. They had $33 billion in surplus funds and another $24 billion in the rainy day fund. The legislature did not act on funding our schools up to the level that it needs to be.

Currently, we are ranked in the bottom 10 in the country in per student funding. That’s about $4,000 below the national average. We pay our teachers about $8,500 below the national average. … So all of that wrapped up is really the perfect storm for districts facing these big budget shortfalls. They’re having to adopt deficit budgets. They’re having to cut programs and in some cases, they’re having to shutter schools. While it’s different in every district it’s reaching almost everyone in the state.”

El Paso Matters: Why might a district with declining enrollment be expecting a deficit?

Dunne-Oldfield: “The state funds schools based on student average daily attendance. Fewer students means less funding. Districts seeing a decline in enrollment will be hit particularly hard by the state’s failure to help schools keep up with inflation, improve student safety measures, or adequately provide for students receiving special education services.

“Consider that school districts still need to keep the lights on, buses running, and their buildings clean and safe. There are certain operational and instructional expenses that don’t simply decrease because a district has fewer students.”

Popinski: “When districts are shaping their budgets like they are right now they have to staff their teachers and paraprofessionals based on how many students they think are going to attend. So they’re going to try to project what that enrollment is going to be and if that enrollment is off, they get less funding.

On average, it’s about $10,000 per student that our foundation school program funds. So if you lose 10 kids, if you’re a small district that’s $100,000 that your school district isn’t receiving in funding. That can be one or two teachers that you won’t be able to afford.”

El Paso Matters: How is the COVID-19 funding cliff affecting school district budgets?

Dunne-Oldfield: “Budget planning generally has been more difficult for school districts because of pandemic-related data anomalies connected to enrollment, attendance and the availability of time-limited (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) funding. The state also passed costly mandates for accelerated instruction as we came out of the pandemic, which has led to recurring costs even as the federal support for that instruction is expiring.”

Popinski: “School districts knew they needed to use (COVID-19) money for one-time expenses. A lot used it on HVAC upgrades or staffing for accelerated instruction. That funding goes away at the end of the school year, but it doesn’t mean the problems from the pandemic era go away as well.”

El Paso Matters: What can school districts do to reduce their deficits?

Dunne-Oldfield: “Because staff account for up to 85% of a district’s budget, it’s nearly impossible to navigate a challenging budget situation without reviewing staffing levels. They will likely balance staffing needs with instructional needs and generally work first to eliminate positions that have not been filled or will soon be vacant.”

Popinski: “There’s only a handful of ways that a school district can earn additional revenue through our funding system: that is to increase enrollment and average daily attendance, or it’s to increase the tax rate. To increase your tax rate you have to go out for an election, and some school districts don’t have any of that tax rate available to them. So there are very limited ways a school district can fix this budget shortfall issue.

“Some school districts are adopting that deficit budget and cutting programs at the same time. What impact is that going to have on academics and instruction for our kids as we go into next school year remains to be seen.”

El Paso Matters: What should lawmakers be doing to help?

Dunne-Oldfield: “It would be helpful for legislators to study how much it costs to educate a student, set the basic allotment at that number, and then set funding to increase automatically as inflation rises.”

Popinski: “The legislature can do a handful of things, including what they were called on to do last legislative session and increase the basic allotment. That basic allotment of $6,160 (per student) has not been increased since 2019. It would need to be a little north of $7,500 to keep up with that 22% inflationary increase since 2019.

“In addition to that, you can make sure that inflationary pressures never really get back to school districts by adding automatic inflationary adjustments so that when inflation does go up, that basic allotment goes up automatically as well.”

El Paso Matters: Can citizens do anything to help?

Dunne-Oldfield: “We’d encourage parents and families to talk with their elected officials about why fully funding our Texas public schools is so important to their local community and to the state as well.

Popinski: “Community members need to stay informed on why they are having to do these budget cuts at the school district level. Make sure that you understand what’s going on in the Texas Capitol come January 2025 because that’s where the funding will flow for our kids. Until that point, school districts are constrained.”

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

Partial scores from the state’s standardized test released Friday show high school students are still struggling with algebra, once again raising concerns about young Texans’ readiness to enter high-paying careers in STEM-related fields.

The State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness end-of-course tests evaluate high-schoolers in five subjects: Algebra I, Biology, English I, English II and U.S. History. The exams gauge whether students’ grasp of a subject is appropriate for their grade level and if they need additional help to catch up.

The percentage of students who took the test this spring and met grade level for Algebra I was 45%, the same as last year. Since the pandemic, students’ academic performance in the subject has remained mostly unchanged. The latest results are still 17 percentage points below students’ scores in spring 2019.

“The data is clear, Texas students continue to struggle with math recovery,” said Gabe Grantham, policy advisor at public policy think tank Texas 2036. “We run the risk of leaving students ill-equipped to enter the future workforce without the basic math skills needed to be successful.”

Education policy analysts closely observe Algebra I results because a wealth of research links the subject to students’ future success in their careers after high school. Kate Greer, the managing director of policy at The Commit Partnership, said STAAR test scores allow researchers to delve into districts that performed better than the state average and form concrete policy proposals to help improve math scores.

“We are still underperforming compared to where we were pre-pandemic, so it is incumbent on us as a state to collectively focus on what we know works,” Greer said. “The value of assessments is it can focus adult behavior, shine a flashlight on opportunities where we can improve more and highlight best practices when we’re seeing impressive growth.”

However, in the past few years, high schoolers have consistently scored better on their English tests since the pandemic. Emergent bilingual students, or students who are learning English as a second language, have steadily performed better on the English I and II tests. The percentage of emergent bilingual students who met grade level went from 12% in 2019 to 30% this spring.

Test results for U.S. history and biology still lag behind pre-pandemic levels, but they are much closer to catching up than in math.

Across all five subjects, low-income students graded lower than students who were not economically disadvantaged. For example, 35% of low-income students met grade level in Algebra I, compared to 61% of all other students.
In a push to improve math skills, the Texas Legislature last year passed Senate Bill 2124, which automatically puts middle schoolers into a higher math class if they do well in previous courses. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick included reading and math readiness on his list of interim priorities, suggesting that lawmakers will revisit the issue during next year’s legislative session.

Disclosure: Commit Partnership and Texas 2036 have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/06/07/texas-staar-scores-math-algebra/.

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

Come July 1, school districts in Florida could authorize volunteer chaplains — those who are religious or not and with no training — to provide support and services for students in public schools, though GOP-controlled legislatures across the country are rejecting similar proposals.

Last year, Texas passed a first-of-its-kind law authorizing schools to pay for religious figures to work in mental health roles, and lawmakers in 15 states followed suit by pitching similar legislation.

Since then, Florida is the only state where the legislature passed the measure and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill (HB 931), though Louisiana, Oklahoma and Ohio could still pass their versions this year.

The proposals from lawmakers to bring chaplains into public schools have varied, with states taking different paths regarding the requirements for people to serve as school chaplains and their purpose.

The school chaplain measures have fallen short this year in Alabama, Nebraska, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, Utah, Missouri and Pennsylvania, according to a Florida Phoenix analysis of the chaplain bills.

Florida’s Legislature is controlled by Republicans, but some Democrats supported the move. So beginning July 1, public school districts can decide whether they’ll adopt a volunteer chaplain program, and parents must provide written consent before their children participate. But there is nothing in the legislation that requires the chaplains to have any specific degrees. Those requirements are up to the school districts.

Rep. James Talarico had concerns.

The third-term legislator from Round Rock, near Austin, pointed Morath to a lesson on the Sermon on the Mount — Jesus’s instruction to “do unto others as you would have done unto you.”

The text makes only passing reference to similar messages in Islam and Hinduism, and never mentions that Buddha taught a version of the Golden Rule 600 years earlier. 

“I think it’s pretty egregious and will shock a lot of Texans,” Talarico said of the curriculum.

If it seems strange that four paragraphs about an ancient text in a lesson for kindergartners arouses such passions, welcome to the latest Texas-sized controversy about Christianity in the classroom.

Talarico is not just a Democrat in a deeply red state, but a former middle school English teacher and a seminary student studying to be a Presbyterian minister. Morath, he said, agreed the new material doesn’t grant “equal time“ to other religions. “I thought that was a fundamental flaw in this curriculum. He did not.”

As parents, academics and activists begin to pore over the thousands of pages the education department released, Morath’s acknowledgement sheds light on the state’s approach. 

The new curriculum is based on the increasingly popular notion of “classical education,” which stresses the primacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition in shaping Western literature and U.S. history. As The 74 first reported last week, the project won praise from conservatives and parents who want students to get more rigorous reading material. Connecting coursework to ancient texts, including the Bible, offers students a cultural vocabulary they’ll need to tackle more complex assignments in middle and high school, Morath said.

He downplayed the religious material as a “small piece” of the curriculum, and called the biblical lessons ”a tiny fraction of the overall fraction.”

But a review by The 74 shows that biblical figures and stories are central to multiple lessons across the 62 K-5 units. The curriculum not only gives short shrift to other religions — Muhammad appears to have escaped mention, despite his role in shaping a faith practiced by half a million Texans — but scholars who have examined the material say it offers a decidedly Christian interpretation of history, particularly the story of America’s founding and civil rights struggles.  

A textual guide for a third-grade unit on ancient Rome recommends teachers play “Silent Night” or “Away in the Manger” as they begin a lesson on the life of Jesus — from his birth and ministry to Crucifixion and Resurrection. In addition to a smattering of New Testament vocabulary (“messiah,” “disciple”) students get what appears to be a factual account from Josephus, a first century historian, on Christ’s death: Jesus’s disciples reported that he “appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive.”

But scholars overwhelmingly reject the authenticity of this account, which they say was likely added by medieval clerics more than a thousand years later in an attempt to prove Christ’s deity.

“To use this as historical proof, which is exactly how it is presented in this lesson, is quite unwarranted and specious,” said L. Michael White, a biblical scholar at the University of Texas-Austin.

In keeping with classical education’s focus on religious allusions, that lesson sets the stage for a fifth grade study of C.S. Lewis’s “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” The celebrated fantasy tells the story of four siblings who evacuate to the English countryside during World War II. They emerge through a magical armoire to encounter Aslan, a noble lion who later sacrifices himself for one of the children and returns from the dead. 

The teacher’s guide calls it a “biblical allegory.” 

“Explain how the Old Testament of the Bible had many prophecies about a future savior that are written as fulfilled in the New Testament by Jesus,” the note says. “There are also prophecies in the New Testament by Jesus. There are prophecies in the Bible about a future where Jesus returns to the world to make wrong right.”

Those instructions alarm one prominent education figure. In the early 1990s, Sandy Kress helped develop an accountability system for Texas schools that inspired No Child Left Behind, the landmark federal education law. Kress, who is Jewish, later advised George W. Bush when the former governor became president.

“I would argue this is teaching Christianity,” said Kress. His school reform days behind him, Kress now teaches and funds projects that encourage interfaith conversations between Christians and Jews.

Morath’s staff called on Kress for guidance on the curriculum last year, and on his advice, recruited his rabbi to review earlier drafts of the material. Kress told The 74 that he wants further revisions and is hopeful the state will consider them.

“Can Christians do this in a way that is respectful of other faiths … without feeling the need to prove Christian doctrine? That’s the test for them,” Kress said. “Whether they pass the test or not will prove whether this is an honorable exercise and whether it would be able to survive a constitutional challenge.”

State officials declined to comment on their dealings with Kress and Talarico. In a statement, Morath said the biblical material in the curriculum “does not include religious lessons as one would find in a religious school.” He added that the content reflects “various religious traditions” and that “students will learn about aspects of most major world religions.”

But in response to criticism, education officials promised to add “language from the First Amendment” on the need for a clear separation between church and state to its lessons on American history.

The public has until Aug. 16 to comment on the proposed curriculum, which goes to the state Board of Education for approval in November. The stakes are high. If adopted, the curriculum would instantly become not only the nation’s largest classical education model, but the biggest infusion of Judeo-Christian teachings into the public education system in decades. The state is encouraging districts to adopt the material by offering incentives of up to $60 per student.

To Morath, the new curriculum offers schools their best chance at raising reading scores in a state that saw sharp declines during the pandemic. In addition to phonics-based instruction in the early grades, the curriculum draws from history, science and the arts to boost students’ knowledge of the world. While the biblical material has drawn the most attention, there are many units that have no religious references and highlight famous Texans, like civil rights leader Héctor García and Black-Native American aviator Bessie Coleman. Students learn best, Morath said, when they get early and repeated exposure to a subject.

“When you’re designing elementary reading materials, you have to pick topics and stick with them for a few weeks,” he told The 74. In districts that have piloted some of the material over the past three years, “the vocabulary complexity is night and day different” than some of the more simplistic reading lessons teachers used before, he said.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush congratulated Texas on offering districts “rich content based on the science of reading and not outdated practices,” while conservative lawmakers and classical education advocates brushed off concerns that the materials have too many biblical references.  

The Texas curriculum “strikes me as a rather mild step in the right direction,” said John Peterson, a humanities professor at the University of Dallas. For years, he said, “anything passingly biblical [has been] treated as a form of pornography, something filthy and shameful, and only to be consumed in private.”

‘Zero reference points’

Jeremy Tate knows firsthand how difficult it can be to engage students who lack a basic knowledge of the Bible. When he taught Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to 10th graders in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, they had “zero reference points” for the collection of stories told by medieval pilgrims on their way to Canterbury Cathedral.

Some students didn’t have any knowledge of the Bible, let alone “anything about a pilgrimage, a relic or any of the language that was so much a part of the vernacular,” said Tate, now CEO of the Classical Learning Test, an alternative college entrance exam.

He’s concerned, however, about the classical movement being “politically hijacked” by Republicans trying to appeal to conservative Christians.

“In some ways, it’s an impossible battle,” he said. “We’re living through a moment where very few people can think outside of political categories.”

As if to underscore that point, the new curriculum arrived just four days after the state’s Republican party unified behind a platform calling for mandatory “instruction on the Bible, servant leadership, and Christian self-governance.” Delegates also want students to study an 1802 letter from Thomas Jefferson that Christian conservatives use to argue that church-state separation is a myth. 

‘Cultural heritage’

That approach contrasts with Morath’s more measured admonitions to those who reviewed the materials. The commissioner’s charge to a 10-member advisory board at their first meeting last summer was to “make sure we were on the side of literature as opposed to a worshipful treatment of that material,” said Marvin McNeese Jr., an adviser who teaches at the College of Biblical Studies in Houston, an orthodox school that he said takes a “traditional interpretation of the Bible.”

The volunteers included some recognizable names, like former GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson, who served as a cabinet member during the Trump administration, and Danica McKellar, an actress and mathematician who has been outspoken about her Christian faith.

McNeese said he spent about 40 hours between August and February reviewing lessons and doesn’t see a problem with its Judeo-Christian emphasis. 

“It’s because of our own cultural heritage,” he said. “All the stories that I read directly explain something that students may very well come across. I mean, we have laws named Good Samaritan laws.”

Under federal law, schools can teach the Bible as literature, but not in a devotional way. Mandatory Bible readings and prayer were common in many public schools until a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the early 1960s ended those practices. The court, however, allows voluntary prayer and under its current conservative majority has increasingly tilted in favor of religious expression. 

Conflicts about biblical material in public school have recently erupted over Bible verses in a Florida financial literacy textbook and in an Oklahoma middle school that posted a New Testament verse on a hallway wall. But experts say the scope of Texas’s undertaking increases the potential for trouble.   

The Bible references in the new curriculum start in kindergarten, when children draw pictures inspired by the creation story in the Book of Genesis. By fifth grade, students studying poetry ponder what King David meant in Psalm 23 when he wrote, “The Lord is my shepherd.” In between are familiar Bible stories about the wisdom of King Solomon, the prodigal son and Paul’s conversion to Christianity on the road to Damascus.

The Texas lessons frequently say “according to the Bible” or “as the Bible explains,” but Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University, dismissed those as “meager efforts” at objectivity. “The literalistic way they present Bible stories encourages very young children to simply take them at face value,” he said. 

He pointed to a fifth grade lesson on Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” in which teachers read a passage from the Book of Matthew for added context. Students, he said, are bound to be left with questions. 

“How did Jesus know someone would betray him? What does Jesus mean when [the teacher] says the bread is his body and the cup is his blood?” Chancey asked. “Is the teacher ready to explain all the different versions of Eucharistic theology found in different forms of Christianity?”

Many of those teachers have probably never received training on how to discuss religion in a public school classroom, said Katie Soules, founder and director of the Religion and Education Collaborative, which focuses on how schools talk about matters of faith. Teachers might be better off focusing on the literary value of Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” than prompting students to think Aslan, the lion, represents Jesus, she said. Teachers could “very quickly end up in violation of the First Amendment.”

The tone and focus is a concerted departure from the curriculum Amplify, a leading publisher, offered the state in 2020 under a $19 million contract. In over 40 pages, that version gives equal weight to Christianity, Islam and Judaism. A separate unit features lessons on Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism.

The state, however, rejected those sections, said Amplify officials, who later balked when Texas asked for additional biblical content. As The 74 previously reported, the company opted not to bid on a contract for the next phase of the project. 

Experts say the current curriculum is notable not only for its emphasis on Christianity, but for what it omits. 

A first grade lesson on American independence, Chancey said, paints an idealistic picture of religious liberty by asserting different denominations “thrived in the colonies.” In reality, pilgrims were often intolerant of those who believed differently. 

The program devotes ample space to the evangelism of the colonists during a period of religious revival known as the Great Awakening. But The 74’s review found no material on the considerable influence of thinkers from the Enlightenment, a concurrent intellectual movement that inspired the writings of early American thinkers on individual rights and church-state separation. 

‘Both sides of that debate’

That stained glass lens extends to the Civil Rights era. In both second and fifth grade, the text emphasizes the Christian faith of Black leaders as key to the movement to end segregation. But there’s no mention of faith leaders who used the Bible to justify racism and Jim Crow laws, like Henry Lyon Jr., who preached that God “started separation of the races.”

“If you just portray that religious leaders were against segregation, that’s extremely misleading,” Chancey said. “You had religious leaders on both sides of that debate.” 

An assignment on “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” points fifth graders to Martin Luther King Jr.’s biblical allusions, including the persecution of early Christians and Jews who refused to worship false idols. But it ignores King’s intended audience — “white moderate” preachers “who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation.” 

“Dr. King’s focus was the incompatibility of racial segregation with Judeo-Christian values and the Christian faith,” said Raymond Pierce, president and CEO of the Southern Education Foundation, a nonprofit focused on equity. 

Pierce has a divinity degree, leads a Sunday school class and teaches political theology at Duke University. His family tree extends back through the founding of the Black Pentecostal Church in the early 1900s. “It does not get much more fundamental than that,” he quipped.

But he’s also a civil rights attorney. In reviewing excerpts from the curriculum for The 74, Pierce found himself turning to James Madison’s cautionary words to Virginia lawmakers in 1785. Madison wrote that while Christians fought for their own religious liberty, they could not “deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.” 

Those who support the Texas curriculum are “pushing a warped version of Judeo-Christian principles,” Pierce said. “It is quite troubling that these supporters either intentionally or naively want to bring divisive issues within the Christian Church into our public schools.”   

To share tips on Texas’s proposed reading curriculum, contact Linda Jacobson at lrjacobson@proton.me.

The shakeup could set the stage for a statewide roll-out of education savings accounts (ESAs), which allow families to use public dollars to pay for private school.

Vote tallies Wednesday morning showed three embattled Republican lawmakers — DeWayne Burns, Justin Holland, and John Kuempel — losing to their primary opponents, each of whom had been endorsed by Abbott and state Attorney General Ken Paxton. A fourth, veteran Texas House representative Gary Vandeaver, dispatched his challenger by a little under 1,400 votes.

The four men had all helped thwart the governor’s push last year behind legislation that would have made ESAs universal throughout the state. Along with House Democrats and a committed faction of rural Republicans, they voted to expressly prohibit the use of state funding for all forms of school vouchers last spring; in a special session called by Abbott several months later, the same coalition again removed a school choice provision from an omnibus K–12 funding bill.  

In response, Abbott and several major conservative donors took the rare step of backing ESA supporters against the incumbents in state legislative primaries. In March, nine Republicans who’d previously defied Abbott lost the party’s nomination, while four more were denied majorities and forced into runoff elections decided on Tuesday. 

Taken together, 13 Republican ESA opponents were pushed aside, which would be more than enough to flip the 84-63 margin against universal ESAs that prevailed last year.  

But the passage of a new school choice bill is still not guaranteed. The Texas Legislature is out of session until next year; elections in November will determine the body’s partisan composition, and while Republicans are favored to retain control over both chambers, the size of their majorities — and the continuing willingness of anti-voucher Republicans to defect again — will help determine the prospects of statewide ESAs.

Ebullient in victory, Abbott announced that House Republicans now held “enough votes to pass school choice.”

“While we did not win every race we fought in, the overall message from this year’s primaries is clear: Texans want school choice,” the governor said in a statement. “Opponents can no longer ignore the will of the people.”

Recent polling suggests that education savings accounts do enjoy the support of large numbers of Texans. While many voters are unfamiliar with the details of particular legislative proposals, a University of Houston survey found that 49 percent of respondents — and particularly African Americans, parents, and churchgoers — favored vouchers, compared with just 27 percent who opposed them. A more recent poll from the University of Texas at Austin found a tighter margin that still supported ESAs.

Zeph Capo, president of the teachers’ union affiliate Texas AFT, said in a statement issued Wednesday that the primary results reflected a crush of spending from deep-pocketed school choice advocates. While the primary campaign had succeeded in its immediate goals, he argued, the fate of ESAs was still to be decided. 

“Just five out-of-state donors have flooded Texas with $33 million, the same as our state’s record-breaking budget surplus last year, in this election cycle,” Capo wrote. “What it’s bought them so far is a smattering of wins for extremist challengers who now must win outright in November.

From the story of Queen Esther — who convinced her husband, the Persian king, to spare the Jews — to the depiction of Christ’s last supper, the material is designed to draw connections between classroom content and religious texts.

“If you’re reading classic works of American literature, there are often religious allusions in that literature,” state education Commissioner Mike Morath told The 74. “Any changes being made are to reinforce the kind of background knowledge on these seminal works of the American cultural experience.” 

With the potential to reach over 2 million K–5 students in the nation’s second-largest state, the update marks a big step in a movement embraced by conservatives to root young people’s education in what they consider traditional values. But it’s bound to raise questions about the potential for religious indoctrination in a state that has been a battleground for such disputes. Last year, for example, Texas passed a law allowing chaplains to work as school counselors.

“It is reasonable to devote some attention to [the Bible], and state education standards across the nation often require such attention,” said Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “The problem, of course, is that sometimes the legitimate reason of cultural literacy is used as a smokescreen to hide religious and ideological agendas.”

In an interview with a Christian talk show, GOP Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who describes himself as a “Christian first, conservative second,” praised the curriculum changes, saying they will “get us back to teaching, not necessarily the Bible per se, but the stories from the Bible.”

The release comes four days after the state Republican party passed a platform calling on the legislature and the state Board of Education to require instruction on the Bible. Texas education department officials declined to comment on the platform and have emphasized that the new curriculum includes material from other faiths.

While largely hidden from public view, the redesign sparked behind-the-scenes debate long before its release. When a leading curriculum publisher balked at the state’s request to infuse its offerings with biblical content, Texas officials turned to other vendors. They include conservative Christian Hillsdale College in Michigan and the right-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation, which supported an unsuccessful effort to require the 10 Commandments in every classroom, according to a list obtained by The 74.

‘Great works of literature’

Going far beyond typical reading and writing fundamentals, the new lessons draw on history, science and the arts — “what many people call this classical model of education,” Morath said.

To understand “Number the Stars,” a book about a Jewish family hiding in Denmark during World War II, he said students should understand more about “Jewish cultural practices” and “the vilification of this ethnic minority.” 

A unit on “Fighting for a Cause,” one of several that officials shared with The 74, includes the Old Testament story of Esther and how she and her cousin Mordecai “fought for what they knew was right and made a difference that not only affected the Jews of Persia but also Jewish people today.”

The mentions range in size from a page on Esther to a few paragraphs about Samuel Adams at the Continental Congress. His plea to fellow delegates to pray together, despite religious differences, is offered as a first-grade vocabulary lesson on the word “compromise.” 

Fifth graders are asked to read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Written after his 1963 arrest for leading a march against segregation, King compared his act of civil disobedience to the “refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar” in the Book of Daniel.

“If you don’t know who Nebuchadnezzar is, you don’t know what [King’s] talking about,” Morath said. “How do you make sure that you can unlock in the minds of our kids their ability to wrestle with … ideas that have surfaced in great works of literature?” 

Not just literature, but art. A lesson on “The Last Supper,” da Vinci’s Renaissance masterpiece, points fifth graders to the New Testament. 

“The Bible explains that Jesus knew that after this meal, he would be arrested, put on trial, and killed,” the text reads. “Let’s read the story in the book of Matthew to see for ourselves what unfolded during the supper.”

While drawing parallels to religious texts, Morath said the lessons would respect bright lines regarding the separation of church and state.

“This is still a curriculum for public school and we’ve designed it to be appropriate in that setting,” he said. 

Slideshow: New religious-related material in a proposed Texas elementary school reading program includes Old Testament references to the Liberty Bell, an exploration of the meaning of the Jewish holiday Purim and the story of Christ’s last supper. (Texas Education Agency)

The role of Amplify

The redesign builds on a $19 million K-5 English language arts curriculum delivered during the pandemic by Amplify, a leading publisher based in New York.

Roughly 400 districts have used their materials since 2021. Some teachers give them high marks for building students’ vocabulary and comprehension. But not everyone has been pleased. Last year, Morath met with conservative parents who decried its emphasis on mythology and minimal attention to Christianity.

“There’s one mention of Jesus, that he was a teacher a couple thousand years ago,” said Jamie Haynes, who runs a website on “concerning” curriculum and library books. “The only other time we can find God, our God — the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — is in the American unit.” 

The issue of how — and whether — to incorporate religious content was fraught long before the curriculum reached school districts.

State officials asked Amplify to provide a lesson on the story of Esther and suggested a unit on Exodus, said Alexandra Walsh, the company’s chief product officer.

While it had previously tweaked its curriculum for other states, Walsh said the company had never been asked to add biblical material. And when it suggested inserting content from other world religions, the state rejected the idea, said Amplify spokeswoman Kristine Frech.

“There was not much appetite for a variety of wisdom texts,” she said. “There was much more of an appetite for the tie to traditional Christian texts.”

The company opted against bidding on a contract to provide additional revisions. In a statement, Texas education officials dismissed Amplify’s charge that they turned down material from other religions as “completely false” and stressed that the finished product “includes representation from multiple faiths.” But the state declined to specify how many of the new lessons have religious themes or derive from Judeo-Christian sources.

In an interview with The 74, Morath pointed to a World War II lesson that focuses on J. Robert Oppenheimer’s famous reaction upon witnessing the explosion of the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The words, featured prominently in the recent Oscar-winning film, derive from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture.   

Kindergarteners studying the Golden Rule would learn that the idea comes from the “Christian Bible,” according to the text, but that similar principles can be found in the “ancient books” of Islam and Hinduism. Another section on the Renaissance highlights Muslim settlers in Spain and their contributions to philosophy, poetry and astronomy.

‘Biblical literacy’

After Amplify bowed out, the state awarded an $84 million contract to the Boston-based Public Consulting Group to revise the curriculum.

For the reading program, the company worked closely with several authors who specialize in Texas history, including its role in westward expansion and launching the national space program, according to a list of vendors provided by the state.

But it also leaned on conservative organizations steeped in the culture wars. Contracts went to two officials at the Texas Public Policy Foundation: Courtnie Bagley, the think tank’s education director, and Thomas Lindsay, a higher education director and vocal opponent of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. The foundation, which called the 10 Commandments bill an “important step in bringing faith-based values back to the forefront of our society,” declined to comment on their contributions. Public Consulting Group officials also did not respond to questions. 

Hillsdale, another vendor, is a major player in advancing classical education. It authored the 1776 Curriculum, a civics and history model that emphasizes American exceptionalism and is a favorite of conservatives opposed to lessons on institutional racism. When the Florida Department of Education rejected dozens of math textbooks in 2020, citing content influenced by critical race theory, a Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald analysis showed two Hillsdale representatives objected to the proposed materials.

The state did not respond to questions on the role Hilldale and the Texas Public Policy Foundation played in the new curriculum. Hillsdale officials said they provided their feedback free of charge. 

“Hillsdale never profits from its work in K-12, nor does it accept one penny from federal, state or local taxpayers,” said spokeswoman Emily Davis. She added, “Religion is taught for the sake of cultural literacy, not to promote a particular religion.” 

Originally the province of well-heeled private or parochial schools, classical education has blossomed in recent years both as a response to pandemic lockdowns and what some parents view as progressive trends in traditional public schools. The philosophy is rooted in the liberal arts and historical texts, with a sharp focus on the Greek and Roman foundations of Western civilization.

The movement entertains healthy debate about the role of religion, but most practitioners agree that giving students a strong body of knowledge requires the use of primary sources, including the Bible.

“They’re going to need to have some biblical literacy, if only to interpret John Milton, or Dante or Shakespeare,” said Robert Jackson, a senior research fellow with the Institute for Classical Education at Florida’s Flagler College.

‘Devotional in nature’

In Texas, the proposed changes would go far beyond any previous attempt to inject biblical content into its classrooms.

A 2007 state law allows school districts to offer high school electives on the Bible. Demand has been extremely low, however. According to the Texas Education Agency, just over 1,200 of the state’s 1.7 million high school students took the course this year.

But even with their limited scope and popularity, the courses offer ample fodder for skeptics. Writing for the Texas Freedom Network, a religious liberty and civil rights organization, Chancey, the Southern Methodist professor, found the courses to be “explicitly devotional in nature.” Despite requirements for teachers to complete special training and maintain “religious neutrality,” Chancey wrote that the Protestant Bible was the preferred text in these courses, while Catholic, Hebrew and Eastern Orthodox Bibles were “presented as deviations from the norm.” In several districts, the courses were taught by local ministers.

The state is now working with a much larger canvas: not a mere elective, but an entire elementary reading curriculum, with a potential audience of millions of students.

Officials are quick to point out that adoption of the new program is voluntary. But a potential $60 per-student incentive it is offering for participation may make it difficult for cash-strapped school systems to refuse.

The updated materials are now open for public review and are scheduled to go before the state Board of Education for approval this fall. Aicha Davis, a Democrat on the Republican-led board, predicted “they would totally support something like that.”

“It doesn’t surprise me that this is happening,” she said.

Relatives of 17 children killed and two kids injured in Texas’ deadliest school shooting are suing Texas Department of Public Safety officers who were among hundreds of law enforcement that waited 77 minutes to confront the gunman at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary, lawyers announced last week.

“Nearly 100 officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety have yet to face a shred of accountability for cowering in fear while my daughter and nephew bled to death in their classroom,” Veronica Luevanos, whose daughter Jailah and nephew Jayce were killed, said in a statement.

The legal action against 92 DPS officers came days before the two-year anniversary of the shooting in which an 18-year-old used an AR-15 to kill 19 students and two teachers in two adjoining fourth-grade classrooms.

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Relatives of most of those students killed and two who were injured also announced last week that they are suing Mandy Gutierrez, who was the principal at Robb at the time, and Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, who was the school district police chief, for their “inaction” that day.

The families’ attorney also announced that the city of Uvalde will pay them $2 million to avoid a lawsuit. Additionally, the city will provide enhanced training for current and future police officers, designate May 24 as an annual day of remembrance and work with victims’ families to design a permanent memorial at the city plaza, among other things.

A DPS spokesperson declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

During a press conference in Uvalde, an attorney for the families, Josh Koskoff, said the state’s failure to prevent the deaths began long before the shooting occurred. He said Texas failed to provide small communities like Uvalde with enough resources to train their officers.

“You think the city of Uvalde has enough money, or training, or resources? You think they can hire the best of the best?” Koskoff said. “As far as the state of Texas is concerned, it sounds like their position is: You’re on your own.”

Koskoff also hinted that the families could also sue state and federal agencies, but did not name which ones. He also said the families are negotiating an agreement with the county, which would also avoid a lawsuit.

Javier Cazares, the father of one of the victims, Jacklyn Cazares, said it had been an “unbearable two years” since the massacre that took his daughter.

“There was an obvious system failure out there on May 24. The whole world saw that,” Cazares said. “The time has come to do the right thing.”

The family’s lawsuit will likely need to overcome a judicial doctrine called qualified immunity, which shields government officials, including law enforcement officers, from liability in lawsuits. Overcoming that immunity will require establishing that the officers violated a constitutional right.

“We think that this situation where kids, after all, are required to lock down in their classrooms, their freedom is constrained,” Koskoff said. “In this situation we feel like qualified immunity is not applicable.”

State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat who represents Uvalde in the Legislature, filed a bill last year that sought to end qualified immunity. Like several other pieces of legislation filed in response to the massacre, that bill failed to pass.

Koskoff, who has also represented the families of children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut, said city officials had also failed to hold their officers accountable but praised the city for working with the families to implement changes aimed at preventing another tragedy like the 2022 shooting.

Hundreds of law enforcement officers from scores of local, state and federal agencies have been heavily criticized for waiting more than an hour to confront the gunman, which conflicted with training that instructs them to confront a shooter if there is reason to believe someone is hurt. The U.S. Justice Department’s investigation of the massacre concluded that the delay likely caused some deaths and that failures in leadership and training contributed to law enforcement’s ineffective response.

Koskoff noted that law enforcement outnumbered the gunman 376 to 1.

“On paper, it should have been no contest. So what happened?” Koskoff said. “Maybe it just turns out that if a kid has a military weapon, the military weapon — the AR-15 — and you get access to it easily, maybe it’s not that simple to stop a kid like that. Of course, they didn’t give themselves a chance, these 376 officers.”

In the settlement with the city of Uvalde that families’ lawyers announced May 22, local officials will implement a new “fitness for duty” standard for Uvalde police officers, to be developed in coordination with the Justice Department and provide enhanced training for current and future police officers.

“For two long years, we have languished in pain and without any accountability from the law enforcement agencies and officers who allowed our families to be destroyed that day,” Luevanos said. “This settlement reflects a first good faith effort, particularly by the City of Uvalde, to begin rebuilding trust in the systems that failed to protect us.”

In a written statement, city officials called the 2022 shooting the “community’s greatest tragedy.”

“We will forever be grateful to the victims’ families for working with us over the past year to cultivate an environment of community-wide healing that honors the lives and memories of those we tragically lost,” city officials said.

An investigation by a Texas House committee found “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” by nearly everyone involved in the response.

That panel’s 77-page report revealed that a total of 376 law enforcement officers descended upon the school in an uncoordinated manner, disregarding their own active shooter training.

The majority of the responders were federal and state law enforcement –– 149 U.S. Border Patrol and 91 state police –– whose responsibilities include responding to “mass attacks in public places.” The other responders included 25 Uvalde police officers, 16 sheriff’s deputies, and five police officers with the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District as well as neighboring county law enforcement, U.S. marshals and federal Drug Enforcement Administration officers.

The myriad of law enforcement mistakes stemmed from an absence of leadership and effective communications, according to the House report. DPS fired at least two officers who responded to the shooting.

A trove of recorded investigative interviews and body camera footage obtained by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE showed that officers failed to set up a clear command structure and spread incorrect information that caused them to treat the shooter as a barricaded suspect and not an active threat — even as children and teachers inside the classrooms called 911 pleading for help. No single officer engaged the shooter for more than an hour despite training that says they should do so as quickly as possible if anyone is hurt.

Following intense criticism of their response, several law enforcement officers resigned or were fired in the months following the shooting. Arredondo, the school district police chief at the time, was fired in August 2022.

About 72% of the state and local officials who arrived at Robb Elementary before the gunman was killed received some form of active shooter training throughout their law enforcement careers. But of those who received training, most had taken it only once. After the shooting, Texas mandated that officers receive 16 hours of active shooter training every two years.

A Uvalde County grand jury is currently considering potential criminal charges against responding officers. The county’s prosecutor declined to comment this week on the status of those proceedings.

DPS is fighting the release of records from its investigation into the shooting. In the aftermath of the massacre, agency leaders carefully shaped a narrative that cast local law enforcement as incompetent.

Koskoff criticized DPS for deflecting blame away from state police.

“As if they didn’t know how to shoot somebody?” he said.

Pooja Salhotra contributed to this story.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/22/uvalde-shooting-texas-dps-lawsuit/. The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

It’s not often that statehouse elections in rural Texas steer the national conversation about school choice. But things might change later this month.

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 a billion-dollar reform 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, an initial round of primary voting 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, funding the GOP insurgents 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 Association of Texas Professional Educators, 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 a special session 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 like Sen. Ted Cruz, while Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton filed lawsuits against seven school districts whose leaders he accused of whipping up opposition to pro-ESA primary candidates. (While several of those districts later resolved the complaints with the attorney general’s office, charges are pending 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 the Texas Politics Project, a research institute housed at the University of Texas at Austin, just 2 percent 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 helped to sweep out 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 personally gifted Abbott with $6 million 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 Club for Growth, a right-leaning advocacy organization based in Washington. Through an affiliated Super PAC, the School Freedom Fund, the Club spent $4 million 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 universal ESA access, 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 community meetings this month to introduce their restructuring plans and gather public input.

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In an interview with El Paso Matters, Sayavedra 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. EPISD closed 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 Socorro 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 public meetings 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

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

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.”

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

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 March report on Title II data 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 Colorado and Michigan that pay student teachers. In Maryland, for instance, some candidates earn a $30,000 living stipend 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 concentrated in the south and midwest, and in key areas like special education and math. 

Enrollment in teacher preparation programs declined 45% in just one decade — about 300,000 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, now under accreditation scrutiny by the state. 

“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 1.2 million fewer students enrolled 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 bearing the brunt 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 the RAND Corporation. 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 highest in the country. 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 FAFSA 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, fix 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 National College Attainment Network, 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 FAFSA Simplification Act in 2021. 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 National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators 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 article first appeared on El Paso Matters 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 election 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 how to register, select a party affiliation, 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 voting machines, confirm identification, 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 U.S. Election Assistance Commission 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 Election Administration and Voting Survey 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 article first appeared on El Paso Matters 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, emotional, 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 improving public education, 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 its policy strategy for overturning Plyler v. Doe, 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 chorus of right-wing activists eager to reopen yet another polarizing front in American political discourse, this time to block some children from U.S. public schools. 

Why? It’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 pursued by the Trump administration and the 2024 race has seen the three-time presidential candidate up the ante on his racist and hate-filled rhetoric 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 long-standing legal reasoning 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.

It’s no surprise, then, that their campaign against these children’s schooling 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 specifically argued 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 to charge unaccompanied migrant children 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 recently juxtaposed 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 found 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. A new forecast from the Congressional Budget Office shows 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 (even more overtly) 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 property taxes? Can they be blocked from attending school if their caregiver gets busted for tax evasion? 

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 religious or intellectual 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; the deaths of six immigrant laborers at the April 2 Baltimore bridge collapse being a heartbreaking example. The country has designed a raft of cruel policies to make their lives difficult and uncomfortable. 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 a major challenge for our economic future. Fewer workers to fill available jobs also means fewer taxpayers 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 2023 study 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 found similar results, 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 attract and integrate immigrant families has long been a strength relative to its peer countries. 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 reproductive rights, civil servants’ technical expertise, 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 list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/04/09/staar-artificial-intelligence-computer-grading-texas/.

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

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

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 EduProgress and The 74 and formed his March Mathness bracket by evaluating each program for strong implementation, scalability and evidence. Jocelyn Pickford, writing for CurriculumHQ, weighs the contenders with eyes focused on the use of high-quality instructional materials and meaningful teacher and family engagement. AssessmentHQ’s 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 evidence based, educator-reviewed 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 evidence-based 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 Kentucky’s Math Achievement Fund 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 Texas, the policy saw a doubling in the percentage of students of color enrolled in advanced math. In North Carolina, 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 evidence-based curriculum and wraparound supports for students, families and teachers. “Any state effort to advance learning should be rooted in access to and use of materials 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 EduProgress 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 $250 million to $300 million deficit 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, down from about 216,100 in 2016-17 to 183,900 in 2023-24. 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 small component of extensive cuts and efficiencies 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 lengthened school year 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 Read Not Guess, 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 article first appeared on Houston Landing 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 report 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 study 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 TEA report. 

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 article first appeared on El Paso Matters 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 FutureEd study 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 School Pulse Panel. 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. It’s a high bar.

Gov. Greg Abbott 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. “It’s that easy.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune. 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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It’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. It’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 the University of North Texas and the University of Texas at Austin, have launched graduate programs and short-term certificate programs. Houston Community College recently became 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 Margaret Ford Fisher, 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 created internal committees 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 writes a newsletter on AI and higher education. “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 list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/12/texas-higher-education-ai/.

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 “Teaching with AI Technologies” 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 Forbes Technology Council 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 OpenAI, 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 Arizona State University and OpenAI. 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 article first appeared on El Paso Matters and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.