This episode of Intersect Ed was taped on the morning of Tuesday, June 3, just a few blocks from the Capitol, the day after the 89th Texas Legislative Session ended. Public education and Texas legislative policy experts, who regularly meet with staffers, legislators, and advocates throughout the state, shared their top insights with a live audience. They discuss what has been hailed as Historic legislation for public education -  including the $8.5 billion package in school funding and teacher raises, and the passage of Texas’ new voucher program - as well as the inability of the legislature to agree upon and therefore change our assessment and accountability system. 

Host Morgan Smith was joined by Jaden Edison, public education reporter with the Texas Tribune, Scott Braddock, editor at Quorum Report.com, Edward McKinley, Austin Bureau reporter for the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News, and Bob Popinski, Senior Director of Policy at Raise Your Hand Texas.

This episode of Intersect Ed discusses how we measure the performance of Texas public schools, the value of local accountability systems, and the ways HB 4 could provide meaningful assessment reform for our schools and better support student learning for the sake of learning instead of assessment. Additionally, if HB 4 passed, it would put public schools on more of an equal playing field with private schools when it comes to testing, something that is a focus of SB 2 - the voucher bill that was signed by Gov. Abbott on May 3, 2025. 

Our Intersect Ed host, Morgan Smith, is joined by Harry Feder, Executive Director of FairTest - The National Center for Fair and Open Testing; Brad Owen, Superintendent at Burkburnett ISD; and Max Rombado, Legislative Director at Raise Your Hand Texas.  

Our Intersect Ed host Morgan Smith is joined by Steven Aleman, Senior Policy Specialist at Disability Rights Texas; Amanda Fuentes, Special Education Team Lead at Cibolo Valley Elementary School in Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City Independent School District; and, Paige Meloni, Superintendent at Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City Independent School District. 

This episode of Intersect Ed explores Texas’ early education, focusing in on the challenges faced by public pre-schools and child care providers. Current half-day pre-K funding forces public school districts in Texas to cover costs for their state-mandated full-day programs. At the same time, many Texans can’t afford traditional child care. Learn about successful initiatives and how Texas legislative action can improve the futures of children aged 0-4 with increased state investment and streamlined regulations to expand access to quality pre-K.

Host Morgan Smith is joined by Sarah Baray, CEO,  Pre-K 4 SA; David Feigen, Director for Early Learning Policy, Texans Care for Children; and Michelle Rinehart, Superintendent of Alpine Independent School District. 

This episode of Intersect Ed was taped on the morning of Thursday, Jan 30, just a few blocks from the Capitol, where the 89th Texas Legislative Session is already underway. Experts who meet with staffers, legislators, and advocates throughout the state and regularly report on the issues that matter most to public education shared their top insights with a live audience. Together, they discussed Texas’ newly named Speaker of the House - Rep. Burrows, SB 2, why we need to increase the basic allotment, teacher pay, and the political issues that will capture Texas news headlines over the next four months.  

Host Morgan Smith was joined by Jaden Edison, public education reporter with the Texas Tribune, Scott Braddock, editor at Quorum Report.com, Edward McKinley, Austin Bureau reporter for the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News, and Bob Popinski, Senior Director of Policy at Raise Your Hand Texas.

MORGAN SMITH: Welcome to the Intersect Ed Podcast, where the stories of public education policy and practice meet. 

I’m your host, Morgan Smith, and I am back with you just in time for the 89th Legislative Session. And heading in, it’s fair to say lawmakers have a lot of unfinished business when it comes to education policy.

Let’s do a brief review of how we got here. If one word defined the Legislature’s approach to education policy in 2023, it was gridlock. Bill after bill — including crucial proposals for school funding and teacher pay raises — fell victim to lawmakers’ battle over vouchers. This only intensified the pressure on Texas public schools, leaving them to deal with teacher shortages, budget shortfalls, and rising inflation as they continued to serve the state’s 5.5 million public school students. 

Today, we’ll discuss how our state’s leaders can start this session ready to act on essential education policy items and focus on one area you’re likely to hear a lot about as the session gets underway — how teacher workforce issues, including a shortage of certified teachers, are affecting Texas students. 

BOB POPINKSI: It's not like Texas doesn't know what to do when it comes to our teacher workforce issues. Prior to the last legislative session, they came out with a couple of dozen recommendations under the Teacher Vacancy Taskforce Report.  These recommendations included enhancing teachers' total compensation packages to incentives for hard-to-staff areas.

MORGAN SMITH: This is Bob Popinski, the Senior Director of Policy for Raise Your Hand Texas.

BOB POPINKSI: But the problem is only one of those recommendations was actually implemented last legislative session. The State Board of Education has been going through the rulemaking processes over the last year, and that's the high-quality instructional materials. The other 23 recommendations were left untouched. Part of that has to do with a lot of those policies were in the legislative package that failed during our regular session and four subsequent special sessions.

MORGAN SMITH: There are multiple ways to become a public school teacher in Texas, but traditionally, all of them have required someone who wants to teach to become certified. 

The goal of preparing teachers through high-quality programs with a clinical teaching component is to combine learning about the practice of good pedagogy and classroom management with practical hands-on experience, says Jacob Kirskey, an assistant professor at Texas Tech’s College of Education whose areas of research include the education labor market and teacher pipeline. 

JACOB KIRKSEY: That means they're watching an experienced veteran teacher model classroom management. So what happens when a student is disengaged in a moment, and you don't want to detract from other students' learning, but you also want to make sure that that student becomes engaged if they're not already.

What do you do when you have varying sets of abilities in the classroom based on prior learning or what students are just simply coming in based on demographic differences in the household? How do you as a teacher manage those differences and make sure that, again, kids are staying on track who are already there, but also that kids are a little behind those kids catch up to where they need to be. These are all things that you can read about, but they're not always things that it is easy to translate what you're reading into practice. And so a high-quality teacher preparation experience is one, again, that brings that tangible experience to what candidates are learning in the process of becoming a teacher.

MORGAN SMITH: But as Texas school districts struggle to fill vacancies amid budget cuts and teacher shortages with a very limited pool of candidates, educators are increasingly entering classrooms via another route — with no certification at all. In the 2022-23 school year, uncertified teachers accounted for 1 in 3 of newly hired public school educators in the state, with 43% of them being at the elementary and early education level. They also made up over 80% of new hires in 40 Texas counties. And, according to Jacob Kirksey’s research, almost three out of four uncertified teachers have had no prior experience working in Texas public schools, and nearly one in five do not hold a bachelor’s degree. 

JACOB KIRKSEY: So an uncertified teacher is one that has no record of being in a teacher preparation program. They have no record of completing any coursework. There's literally no record of them in the state Board of Educator Certification, which is our state body that issues the teaching certifications.

MORGAN SMITH: The consequences of relying on uncertified teachers show up in student outcomes. Studies show that students with new uncertified teachers lose about four months of learning in reading and three months in math unless the teacher has previous experience working in a public school. They are also significantly underdiagnosed for dyslexia and miss more days of school. None of this is surprising, as we know teachers are the single most important in-school factor when it comes to student success. 

LORI POWELL: The day-in and day-out struggle is that the pedagogy that's missing that teaches them how children acquire knowledge. And I think every teacher who comes in the building loves kids and wants to work with kids and wants to help kids, but I see how some of these new teachers who are hired straight out of college who have gone through a traditional path hit the ground running as teachers. There's so much that they know about classroom management and how to be prepared, how the kids need to learn something, and a teacher who hasn't gone through that process, there's just so much of that that you don't know. And you don't know that you don't know it.

MORGAN SMITH: This is Lori Powell, a public school teacher of 17 years who is currently a gifted and talented specialist at Northside Independent School District’s Carnahan Elementary School in San Antonio. 

LORI POWELL: A certified teacher has such a bigger box of tools to use, to help the students and to understand the process of the learning. And that just takes time, and exposure and truly understanding. You can't really put a lesson plan in a teacher's hand and say, "Read this word for word and the kids are going to learn." It takes an understanding. So, the process of certification and experience is how you get that understanding… That time with students in the classroom and watching the flow with a teacher who's a master teacher, it's not something to miss. And I understand we're in times that many of these pieces are unavoidable, but you can't replace it, the learning that happens from that teacher who has refined the art. It's an art and it's a science. And it just takes some time to get there.

MORGAN SMITH: Lori Powell says that having an uncertified teacher in the classroom also places an increased burden on certified staff to help fill in the gaps in student learning and to provide the skills and knowledge uncertified teachers are missing. 

LORI POWELL: Nobody's willing to let go of a student and just say, "Oh, they're with a long-term sub, that child doesn't matter. I can't help that child." We really look at the groups of students as all ours, that they're all our students. Every weak link, any group is only as strong as its weakest link, and so where you have a weak link... And I wouldn't say that all of our uncertified teachers are weak links, but when there's a weakness in the background, then there is going to be a weakness there, even if that is a strong advocate for the kid in the person.

MORGAN SMITH: Uncertified teachers are also more likely to leave the profession sooner than certified teachers. A study that looked at teacher retention rates in rural Texas communities found that only 45% of uncertified new teachers stay in teaching beyond three years, while almost 80% of fully qualified new teachers continued in the profession. So, given all we know about the challenges that uncertified teachers face — and the benefits of having a well-prepared teacher in the classroom with our students —why are school districts turning to them in the first place? 

MYRNA BLANCHARD: When you have such a high teacher vacancy - we don't have a lot of people going through traditional certification programs - then that vacancy is going to create some pressure points on districts. It creates pressure points on principals, on the district administration, on teachers. 

MORGAN SMITH: This is Myrna Blanchard, who is the Director of Talent and Acquisition at Castleberry Independent School District, where she has worked for four years overseeing the human resources department. She is describing the bind school districts across the state find themselves in as they struggle to find qualified teachers.

MYRNA BLANCHARD: And the biggest thing we don't want to do is allow those pressure points to bleed into being pressure to our other teachers. So if we just don't hire certified teachers and we increase the class sizes of our teachers, well, now our current teachers that are certified are going to start feeling that pressure point. And then now we have a bigger problem.

MORGAN SMITH: At a legislative hearing over the summer, some lawmakers on the House Public Education Committee suggested that schools may be turning to uncertified teachers because they are cheaper. That, Myrna Blanchard says, is simply not true.

MYRNA BLANCHARD: We still hire them at the same rate of pay as first-year teachers. And the reason why we do that is because competitively, for some of those positions, they could go make those same people who are coming to teach with us could make $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 or more in the industry, and not in teaching.

We don't have the option of paying them less. It's not cheaper for us. If we hire uncertified teachers, let's think of this, we've got to train them. We do usually put them with a mentor, which costs money. We also need to support them sometimes with getting their certifications or supporting them somehow in that. And so the myth of they're cheaper really doesn't pan out because those soft costs that we apply to the time, for instance, I'll give you an example of the time that I spent as an HR director talking to their CERT program, following up with our uncertified teachers to say, "Hey, how are you doing? Okay, if you didn't pass this test, what's your next state that you're going to take? Oh, you're confused about that. Let me guide you." That is not cheaper. I'm not saving money by doing that. I'm actually putting time and money as a resource into those uncertified teachers.

MORGAN SMITH: The reality is that school districts are hiring uncertified teachers because they don’t have any other options. The students are there, and school districts need someone in the class to teach them. 

JOLISA HOOVER: We are asking schools to do things beyond their mission. We're asking them to not only teach students but to teach teachers, and we aren't going to recruit our way out of this problem. We have to start doing strategies that are going to retain the teachers we have. We need strategies that are going to incentivize teachers who have left to come back, and then we also need to make this a profession that is attractive to the current generation of college students. 

MORGAN SMITH: This is JoLisa Hoover, Raise Your Hand’s Teacher Specialist. 

JOLISA HOOVER: Our schools are having to support these teachers, and they're very grateful to have someone who is willing to step up, but that gratefulness does not mean those people are prepared. You're looking at uncertified teachers and support staff having to add to their workload to make sure these people have the tools that they need to do their job.

MORGAN SMITH: And until the state addresses the underlying challenges that are forcing districts to turn to uncertified teachers, they will continue to be a growing presence in Texas classrooms, which only hurts the ability of Texas students to get a quality education. 

JACOB KIRKSEY: So whether you are a parent, a grandparent, an education researcher, a policymaker, I think what we can all agree on is that we want a high-quality teacher in the classroom who is going to positively contribute to the learning of our kids. And so if we think about what we want that teacher to look like, what we want their experiences to be, we want that teacher to feel prepared. We want them to feel like they know what they're doing. They know how to address challenges that they're going to face. We want them to be able to feel like they are making a difference.

And in order to do that, we have to think about the preparation that these teachers have received, the experiences that these teachers have that they can leverage to do a lot of good in the classroom. And we have to think about ways that we can keep them to stay. It all comes down to who do we want to be at the face of the classroom that our kids are interacting with on a daily basis? And that comes down to a teacher who feels prepared has done this before, and wants to stay.

MORGAN SMITH: But here’s the good news: as lawmakers gather for the new legislative session, they already have the building blocks they need to improve teacher preparation and retention in Texas public schools. The Future Texas Teacher Scholarship Program already exists but remains unfunded. As we mentioned earlier, the governor-appointed Texas Teacher Vacancy Taskforce has already made over two dozen recommendations aimed at attracting and retaining teachers, ranging from compensation, teacher mentoring, and expanded access to training. Here is JoLisa Hoover again.

JOLISA HOOVER: I think in the end, we may be talking about the issue of uncertified teachers and teacher shortages, but we can't lose sight of the fact that we're actually talking about our Texas students. This isn't an issue about the adults in the equation. We're talking about children and teens in Texas. If we want to improve student outcomes, Texas must invest in teacher workforce solutions to ensure that all students receive a quality education.

OUTRO

If you would like to review detailed policy recommendations from Raise Your Hand Texas, please visit the Policy Priorities section of Raise Your Hand Texas’ website.

To stay informed on critical education issues, you can sign up online for Raise Your Hand’s Across the Lawn weekly newsletter and text alerts at www.RaiseYourHandTexas.org/Get-Involved. 

Today’s episode was written by me, Morgan Smith. Our sound engineer is Brian Digg, and our executive producer is Anne Lasseigne Tiedt. 

MORGAN SMITH: Welcome to the Raise Your Hand Texas Intersect Ed Podcast, where the stories of public education policy and practice meet. 

Today, we’re talking about the special legislative session that began Oct. 9, and the intense financial pressure facing Texas public schools.

I’m your host, Morgan Smith.

Gov. Greg Abbott has called state lawmakers back to Austin with strict orders to complete some unfinished business from the regular legislative session that ended back in May. And if you listened to our legislative recap episode, you know there’s a lot of that when it comes to education policy. 

But it’s not teacher pay raises, increases to per student funding to help districts keep up  with inflation, or reforms to the state’s standardized testing and accountability system the governor has directed lawmakers to tackle. It’s passing an Education Savings Account that would allow parents to use taxpayer dollars to send their kids to private schools. 

There are a lot of reasons why this is bad policy for Texas, and so many lessons we can learn from the mistakes of other states that have already adopted these voucher-type programs — and we’ll get into all of that. 

But first, let’s unpack the current funding crisis in our public schools. 

During the regular session — despite a record-breaking $33 billion surplus sitting in the treasury — lawmakers failed to increase basic per student allotment enough for school districts to keep up with inflation, much less offer much needed teacher pay raises. At the same time, federal stimulus funding is about to end while many school districts have yet to regain the student enrollment they lost during the pandemic. As a result, school districts have had to make tough decisions about what services or positions to cut in order to minimize effects in the classroom. 

BOB POPINSKI: School districts were really hoping that there was going to be some legislative action during the regular session because they had to adopt their budgets here in July and August for the current school year. They were really bumped up against a lot of pressure. 

MORGAN SMITH: This is Bob Popinski, Raise Your Hand’s Senior Director of Policy. He says a substantial number of Texas school districts have adopted deficit budgets, drawing down fund balances intended to cover incidental costs until the next school year.  

BOB POPINSKI: They're having problems sustaining the revenue that they have in their school districts. And because inflation was in the double digits over the last few years, they're not able to keep pace with not only giving their teachers and staff a salary increase, but they're having trouble keeping pace with just fuel costs and property insurance costs, construction costs, health insurance costs.The cost of food has gone up. And there's added pressure to make sure that they're following laws that were passed last regular session, like armed guards on every campus. There's a lot of pressure for school districts to find the funding they need for a lot of different resources that they've been asked to do over the last few years.

MORGAN SMITH: In Channelview ISD, a district of about 9,500 students on the eastern edge of Harris County, Superintendent Tory C. Hill says that they have had to increase student-teacher ratios across all grade levels to maintain a balanced budget.

DR. TORY C. HILL: There's no secret that there's a teacher shortage. There's a teacher shortage in Channelview, there's a teacher shortage in the State of Texas, really across the entire nation. There were some aggressive things that we had to do in order to be able to attract teachers, and really that was to increase our teacher pay through the use of local funds as well as implement a very aggressive model to try to attract teachers, but that came with an expense of other things. Those challenges aren't going away, and so right now there is a balancing act. Ultimately at the end of the day, our goal is to ensure that we're not impacting student learning as a result of the looming and gloomy funding realities.

MORGAN SMITH: For Superintendent Hill, it’s frustrating to watch as lawmakers begin an education-focused special session on vouchers while the state lags so far behind on issues like school funding and teacher retention and recruitment. 

DR. TORY C. HILL: Education is the great equalizer, and if we miss our mark and opportunity to ensure that all students in the State of Texas receive a quality education, then we will definitely face challenges in the future as it relates to just our overall population as a state. It is critical at this juncture that we keep the main thing the main thing, and that's ensuring that we have quality teachers in our classrooms every day and that we fund public education. We leave public funds in public schools and we continue to support our teachers, who are the backbone of our American society.

MORGAN SMITH: Superintendent Hill says it’s difficult not to view the current push for vouchers — along with the underfunding of public education and crippling standardized testing requirements — as a coordinated effort to destabilize public schools. 

DR. TORY C. HILL: We know the teacher shortage is an issue, but there seems to be great intentionality about the disruption that's being created around public education, from vouchers to assessment and accountability to just the lack of appropriate funding. These are basic elements that are required for us to ensure that we continue to provide the best that we can for our students, and the intentional disruption components are quite disappointing.

MORGAN SMITH: And that brings us to the issue lawmakers are currently considering in Austin — Education Savings Accounts, the voucher-type program that would provide a stipend for parents who want to send their children to private schools. 

JOLENE SANDERS: As a state, and we're talking about public education, we're hemorrhaging, but we're trying to do cosmetic surgery instead of addressing the immediate, urgent need.

MORGAN SMITH: Jolene Sanders is the Advocacy Director at the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities. During the last legislative session she worked extensively to oppose voucher programs, which, as a political strategy, are often initially targeted at students with disabilities and then expanded to include all students. 

JOLENE SANDERS: We know that there's a crisis with teacher shortages, funding, backlogs of evaluations and services for students with disabilities. That really was highlighted by the pandemic. And so I think we have a lot of work to do first in repairing and bolstering public education and the services for all students before we can even contemplate what any kind of ESA or voucher program would look like. 

MORGAN SMITH: What’s happening now in Texas is not an isolated push. Thirty-two states have adopted some form of voucher in the last three decades. About half of those have done so amid renewed efforts to pass these programs in the last three years. 

DR. JOSH COWEN: We've had more voucher programs, voucher-like programs, passed in the last 12 to 15 months than any other given year on record since 1990. Most of those follow a pattern. They're very similar bills in each state, and most of them follow a pattern of strong pressure on the legislative side from a bill-supporting governor, often after a series of Republican primaries because the holdouts for a lot of these have been actually Republican legislators in different states. 

MORGAN SMITH: This is Josh Cowen, an education professor at Michigan State University. He has spent the last 18 years as a professional evaluator for voucher programs, starting with Milwaukee’s in 2005, which was the first in the country. As he’s studied voucher programs over the years, he said he’s come to view them as the educational equivalent of predatory lending. 

DR. JOSH COWEN: Usually these things are tied to other education funding packages like teacher raises or in some cases fully, in my view, holding hostage other public education funding programs to get these things put in because they can't really pass them in clean bills like they used to be able to do when I got into this business. So again, the last year or so, the biggest set of expansions and voucher programs on record. This has been mostly in red states.

 

MORGAN SMITH: The data from other states that have adopted vouchers only provide a cautionary tale. The results are in: not only do these programs balloon in cost, they also just don’t work to improve student achievement. 

DR. JOSH COWEN: We see some of the largest academic loss on record over the last decade. The larger the voucher program and the more recent the voucher program, the worse the academic results have been for those 25 or 30% of kids who switch, who actually do use it to leave public school. And the reason for that is that most of the schools that actually clamor to participate in these programs and take new kids from the public schools, they're what I call subprime, financially distressed private schools. They're not your elite providers who have longstanding rich academic traditions, and there are many such schools out there, right? Those schools are fine. They don't need the money. They often cost three or four times what the voucher cap would be. It's instead the schools that are barely hanging on, the ones that for whatever reason, have really struggled to maintain themselves. And those are the ones that overwhelmingly fund these voucher kids. And the results show that. Many often close anyway. In Wisconsin, where I've spent a lot of time, 40% of the schools taking voucher payments over the life of that program have closed. And the average closed time, the schools make it about four years, and then they close. Four years after they get the voucher payoff. So we talk about this I think as if in these states, this is all about, again, academic hope and opportunity, and it's really not. It's really just, it's a very targeted bailout for these kind of financially distressed private schools.

MORGAN SMITH: In Texas, it’s rural Republicans, along with Democrats, who have traditionally held the line against vouchers. Political observers expect that to continue in the special session, but it will be in the face of extreme pressure from the governor and other special interest groups. 

DR. MICHELLE SMITH: Public education in Texas has always been different than how it's perceived in other states. So in other states, sometimes it's perceived as unions fighting to protect their turf. I really don't see it that way in Texas. I see it as rural communities trying to protect their own communities. I see it as people who really, and I know this is cliche, the Friday Night Lights of Texas that people are trying to protect what they know is good about their community, that this is one of the last places that draws people of differing opinions together to find common ground, to educate their students, to serve their own kids in their own community and really value what's good about public education in Texas.

MORGAN SMITH: This is Michelle Smith, Raise Your Hand’s executive director.

DR. MICHELLE SMITH: I worry, and I know people in our rural communities worry because we've talked to them on a regular basis, that this is just the dismantling of what we know is best for these rural communities in Texas, that their public school is the heartbeat of their community. I also think it's important to point out that there are a lot of really amazing school choice programs that are going on in our public schools in rural communities that are very CTE based. That the school district intricately partners with their businesses and goes to those businesses and say, okay, what do you need? What kind of students do you need to be coming out of our public schools to serve our local businesses? We’ve seen it happen in multiple communities now, that the businesses and school districts are really partnering to do innovative things for their students to make sure that they're ready to enter the workforce when they leave their public school.

MORGAN SMITH: State Rep. Abel Herrero, a Democrat whose South Texas district spans the inland suburbs of Corpus Christi, has dedicated his career to opposing voucher programs in the House. 

ABEL HERRERO: I believe that there are people that stand to gain financially from the voucher system. I think they see that as a business opportunity. More and more people are saying, "Let's give this private sector an opportunity to educate the population of Texas." However, what is not disclosed, is that the monies that follow, or would follow under the proposal of the voucher system, there's no accountability. There's no standardized test that the private school system would have to follow. There's no accountability as to the progression or the numbers or the testing that these individuals, students would have to undergo to prove that this system is better than the public school system that has existed.

MORGAN SMITH: Chairman Herrero says over the years voucher proponents have successfully begun to whittle away their opposition — and that now members are under more pressure than ever before. 

ABEL HERRERO: Long story short, I believe it's a financial interest that these private institutions are seeing in the voucher system that is being proposed. They are spending millions of dollars in elections trying to get people elected that would support this proposition. To me, it's more of making sure that every student, regardless of where they attend school, are able to receive a first class quality education. It needs to be more of an investment in the public school system, in our public school teachers, and making sure that we provide them with the tools and resources necessary to be able to educate all of the student body population that exists.

MORGAN SMITH: As the special session unfolds, be prepared for this to be a long battle. The governor has said that he is willing to call lawmakers back to Austin multiple times to get a voucher program passed, and if that still doesn’t work, he’ll take this fight to primaries.

Here’s Bob Popinski again.

BOB POPINKSI: Now is the time to pay incredibly close attention on a daily basis to what's happening at our Texas Capitol. Special sessions are 30 days. They move rather quickly. Things will get hearings and get voted out of committee potentially in just one day. So pay attention to understand where a bill is in the process and how fast it's moving through the process, because your voice needs to be heard, if not on a daily basis during the special session, at least on a weekly basis before the 30 days runs up because the members over there need to understand how you view the legislation moving through the process. Whether it's a Senate bill or a House bill, there's going to be a lot of policy discussions that are going to be thrown into the mix, and it's going to get confusing. So the more you can pay attention to what's going on, the more you can voice your support or objections to policies that are being talked about.

MORGAN SMITH: In the meantime, while Texas lawmakers duke it out over vouchers, public schools will continue to stretch themselves to the limits, operating without what they really need: adequate funding. 

To stay informed as the special session progresses, sign up online for Raise Your Hand’s Across the Lawn weekly newsletter at www.RaiseYourHandTexas.org/Get-Involved. 

To receive text alerts that will allow you to join Raise Your Hand in taking action at key moments, text RAISEMYHAND to 40649. 

Today’s episode was written by me, Morgan Smith. Our sound engineer is Brian Diggs and our executive producer is Anne Lasseigne Tiedt. This episode also received additional production support from Jessica Garcia. 

 We’re talking about a big change that’s about to wallop Texas school districts. At the end of September, as lawmakers approach an anticipated special session this fall on private school vouchers, about one out of every four public school campuses will see the letter grade that marks their performance in the state’s A-F accountability system drop. 

In many cases this will happen despite student achievement at these campuses having gone up. And for high schools, there’s an added hit: a key component of their rating, the Career, College, and Military Readiness Indicator, will be retroactively applied, based on the performance of students who graduated in 2022. So going into the 2023-2024 school year, there’s nothing they can do to change it, even if they could. 

So why is this happening? Put simply, it’s because of a paperwork change—or in more precise terms, a “technical adjustment”—in how the Texas Education Agency calculates the accountability ratings. So taking the Career, College, and Military Readiness Indicator, or CCMR, as an example—instead of requiring 60 percent of kids to meet the standard to receive an A rating, now 88 percent of kids must meet it. 

The roll out of new standards was not directed by the Legislature, it is an agency level decision. And to understand how we got to this point, we have to take a trip to the opaque world of agency rulemaking. 

In this episode, we will hear from Todd Webster, Former Interim Commissioner of the Texas Education Agency and Rep. Gina Hinojosa explain the rulemaking process. We will also hear from  Dee Carney, Assessment and Accountability Policy Consultant and  Dr. Bobby Ott, Superintendent, Temple ISD discuss the process and how it the upcoming changes can negatively impact schools and their local communities.  

How we measure success in Texas public schools? Right now, standardized testing and an A-F accountability system that assigns grades to campuses is used almost entirely to grade our schools. 

Accountability, and the transparency it brings, is essential. We need to make sure the 5.4 million students in Texas public schools are provided with the tools they need to eventually enter the workforce, and that taxpayer money is being put to good use. 

But what if we had a system that looked at more than how students do on one test on one day? What if we decided that what makes a “good school” goes beyond test scores and we evaluated how districts prepare students for life and career through things like early childhood education, dual language, fine arts, and extra-curricular programs? Or the many crucial resources public schools provide to ensure the well-being of their students, like meals, mental health services, and campus security?

This is a wholly achievable idea — and one that had momentum and bipartisan support during the most recent legislative session. But, like so many other worthy public education issues, accountability and assessment reforms went down in the battle over private school vouchers during the 88th Session.

In this episode, hear from Lori Rapp, Superintendent at Lewisville ISD; Jacqueline Martinex, Former 4th grade teacher at Canutillo ISD; Daniel Saenz, CEO of Nieto Technology Partners; Paola Gonzalez Fusilier, School Board Trustee at Pasadena ISD; and Dr. Libby Cohen, Senior Director of Advocacy at Raise Your Hand Texas, each discusses assessment and accountability from their unique perspectives. 

The 2023 legislative session started with a lot of promise. Lawmakers had a historic $33 billion dollar budget surplus, and there was energy and consensus to address a number of public education issues. Instead, lawmakers failed to give Texas public schools enough funding to even keep up with inflation, much less provide teacher pay raises to help stop the exodus of educators from the classroom. They lost efforts to improve our accountability system so that teachers could focus on their students’ learning instead of their performance on standardized tests. They did not pass any policies to help recruit and retain high-quality teachers. 

There was one tentative win for public education advocates. Thanks to a bipartisan group of determined House lawmakers who withstood enormous pressure from Gov. Greg Abbott  —  no private school voucher program passed. 

In this episode, hear from Raise Your Hand Texas’ Libby Cohen, Senior Director of Advocacy, Will Holleman, Senior Director of Government Relations, and Bob Popinski, Senior Director of Policy, alongside Georgia Polley, public education advocate from Spring Branch ISD, as they discuss their views on the 88th Legislative Session, and why a victory to stave off vouchers is far from certain, and came at a great cost to Texans.