This episode of Intersect Ed was taped on the morning of Friday, November 14, 2025, just a few blocks from the Capitol, during the 2025 Texas Tribune Festival. Our panelists discussed the “Legacy Education Fund,” a new, proposed idea about a public education endowment that could move Texas beyond two-year budget cycles and establish a lasting investment in our public schools. Host Morgan Smith was joined by David DeMatthews, a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at The University of Texas at Austin, Mark Estrada, the Superintendent of Lockhart ISD, and Libby Cohen, the Executive Director of Raise Your Hand Texas.

Transcript

Intersect Ed Podcast – Season 3, Episode 8

Note: Intersect Ed is best experienced as a podcast. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis missing from the transcript.

Morgan Smith:

Welcome to a very special live recording of the Intersect Ed podcast where the stories of public education policy and practice meet. I’m your host, Morgan Smith.

Today, the morning of November 14th, I am joined by three guests in Austin at the Texas Tribune Festival to discuss an innovative, long-term strategy aimed at increasing revenue for Texas public schools, an education endowment fund. Let’s meet our guests now.

Libby Cohen:

This is Libby Cohen, executive director of Raise Your Hand Texas.

David DeMatthews:

David DeMatthews. I am a professor in the College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin.

Mark Estrada:

Mark Estrada, superintendent of schools in the Lockhart Independent School District.

Morgan Smith:

Hi everyone. Thanks for being here this morning. We’re really excited to be up here on stage to discuss a possible new strategy for funding public education, an education endowment fund. So Libby, I wanted to start with you to see if you could describe the concept behind the Legacy Education Fund as we’ve been calling it, and talk a little bit about why now is the right time to be having this conversation.

Libby Cohen:

Thanks, Morgan, and I’m excited to be here and to be here with esteemed colleagues like Mark and David. So looking forward to the conversation.

So the Legacy Education Fund would be a new endowment for public education in Texas that would provide a continuously increasing source of revenue for public schools. So the use of an endowment to fund public education is not revolutionary. It’s something that happens in lots of states all across the country. In fact, Texas does have an endowment already, the Permanent School Fund. The really important twist here is that we’d like to structure this endowment such that the money that it brings to public schools would actually grow over time, which is different from any of the existing revenue sources currently on the books for Texas public schools. So we can talk as we go on a little bit about the difference between supplemental funding and supplanting funding, which is a big term in legislative school funding speak, but that’s really the key here, is that continuously increasing source of funding for public schools.

Why is now the right time? Well, Texas has been doing great economically, and we have unusually robust reserves and unusually high general revenue that we’ve enjoyed over the last several sessions. So we see this in a couple different places. First, Texas’s Economic Stabilization Fund, or our Rainy Day Fund is getting ready to hit its cap for the first time in its history. This was founded in the 1980s when I first showed up and started working in the Texas legislative world. It was at, I think 11 and a half billion dollars. This was back in 2019 and the sort of feeling then was, oh my gosh, 11 and a half billion dollars. That’s a huge rainy day fund. It is now at 28 and a half billion dollars. So Texas has significant funds in its bank account that open up possibilities to invest, to create additional resources for priorities that exist now and we know are going to exist into the future as opposed to continuing to again have sort of a savings count that at this point is overflowing. That’s not the only source of potential funding here. Texas also has significant budget surpluses the last couple sessions, which suggests that there are any number of funding streams that this endowment could pull from, just created a new endowment to support water infrastructure this session that is taking a percentage of sales tax. So there are a number of potential sources that we could look at, but in a moment of economic plenty, it would be wise for the state to think about how to do some really meaningful planning and investing for the future.

Morgan Smith:

And what exactly would it take for the legislature to create something like this?

Libby Cohen:

Yeah, so it’s a heavy lift for the legislature to create a new dedicated, permanent source of revenue. They have to pass enabling legislation to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot. We just had our constitutional election a couple of weeks ago, so that’s fresh on everyone’s mind, what that looks like. But that requires a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate. So it is a high threshold of political will that we need before we can then send a proposition like this to Texas voters.

Morgan Smith:

And we’ll continue to kind of get into the details of what this fund might look like. But I wanted to turn to David, our education policy professor here, to give us a big picture look at how does funding in Texas public schools compare to other states and what kind of research is out there that links funding to student achievement?

David DeMatthews:

Sure. So that’s a great question. Funding really does matter, and Texas really is kind of lagging behind the rest of the country. And when we talk about comparisons for school finance purposes, we tend to look at it in three different buckets. So adequacy, so the extent to which there’s enough money in the system to give every student the opportunity to reach a baseline level standard. There’s effort. And so obviously some states have more robust economies, have rainy day funds and resources. Other states don’t have that same degree of effort for a variety of reasons. And then there is an equity measure. And so it’s not just about the average funding per child, but in schools or districts where children have more intensive needs, is there resources to match those needs in schools? And so in Texas, we generally are in the bottom 10 states in terms of both adequacy, so that kind of basic funding level, the effort based on how much resources we have, and our state does have a great deal of resources. And in terms of equity, all of those have been historic struggles in the state. We kind of fluctuate on these measures. Different economists, different ed policy researchers have different measurement tools. But all in all, we have a good amount of resources in our state. We are not dedicating the same sort of resources to public education that we see in a lot of other states, despite the fact that for Texas, it wouldn’t be that much of a financial strain.

Morgan Smith:

And how much does funding matter when it comes to student achievement?

David DeMatthews:

It matters a lot. So there has been a few very popular economists that will travel the country talking about how funding doesn’t matter, but it’s a really pretty straightforward finding. Researchers both in education and in economics consistently find that funding does matter. They find a direct relationship between how well schools are funded and student achievement outcomes, but it also matters how you spend that money. And so just because you have resources doesn’t automatically mean that test scores go up, right? The state, districts, schools, teachers, they all have to make wise decisions with those funds, but it truly matters and it matters beyond just kind of talking about STAAR scores. And I feel like a lot of times in Texas, we get so caught up on STAAR scores. And even though funding matters for STAAR, it also matters for students with disabilities in our state. We have really struggled to ensure that their high quality special educators in every school, the state has reported for more than two decades to the Department of Education staffing shortages for special education teachers and the related service providers that could provide a variety of more intensive services for students.

And so we have a large group of students with the most intense need. And because of, in part, poor investments, we’re struggling to get a qualified workforce and keep them on the job. And so funding provides an opportunity both to improve technology, improve the access to quality resources, but also ensuring that there is a stable, qualified workforce that can work together. They can grow. Schools need time. Teachers need time to build relationships, to coordinate, to serve students with the most intensive needs. And so for a while now, we’ve really been in Texas with serving students with the greatest needs because those investments just haven’t been there. And when in states that make those investments, guess what? We see better outcomes for all students, but we also see them for students that have the most intensive needs. So those resources, they really matter.

Morgan Smith:

And Mark, you’re a superintendent. The things we’re discussing up here are realities for you every day and these types of decisions. Can you tell us a little bit about Lockhart ISD and just what your thoughts are on the Legacy Education Fund if you think this is something that could help Texas Public Schools?

Mark Estrada:

Yes. First, thank you for the opportunity. I’m happy to be here and talk about what’s happening across school districts across the state and Lockhart ISD. I mean, there are countless things happening that are great today in classrooms. Our teachers are working incredibly hard. Our principals are working incredibly hard. Our students, of course, are doing and accomplishing great things. And I think that’s true in public schools across the state, and I think it’s the reason why I’m so passionate about the need for continued investment when something you see every day working, when you see kids being highly successful, teachers being successful, you can’t help but be encouraged to want to do more and continue to make those investments because at the same time, we need to do more. Lockhart ISD is a growing district. We’re just outside of Austin, Texas, and while we’re close to Austin, we’re also pretty far from Austin in terms of resources and those types of things.

But I think that in my reflection, we need more predictability. I think that that is something that is a big challenge for school districts. I’ll give you a quick example. Every February it’s my birthday, so I’m kind of happy about it, but I also have great anxiety because I don’t know when I wake up what our property value appraisal study is going to say, and if we’re going to lose a substantial amount of money that year that we’re already. In every year, the Texas funding system is so complicated. There are so many wrinkles and turns that it’s not like we just create a budget and then we know and we can predict how much money is coming. There’s such complexity to it that I think that we have to provide more predictability in it. I think that the legacy fund is ambitious, but in my personal opinion, maybe not ambitious enough.

When I hear Dr. Matthews talk about that we’re in the bottom 10 across the United States in supporting our public schools financially. Libby, when you’re talking about the access to funds that the state has, and I know I read about it all the time, we see state leadership constantly saying, we’re the eighth strongest economy in the world. If we’re a nation, that is kind of hard to hear that and then see that we’re in the bottom in investment of public education. So I just think that we have to recognize the great things that our teachers are doing and stop taking them for granted. Stop, I heard you say one time, exploiting teachers’ goodwill and passion, and calling for the job and really supporting them with the financial needs that they deserve.

Morgan Smith:

Yeah. Libby, I can think of a lot of questions about how a funding mechanism might work, what agency would administer it, how would the actual funding work? Would it be attendance based? Is there a role for the private sector anywhere? Talk about some of the opportunities that policymakers have to come up with a strategy that’s just very tailored to their goals for public education in Texas.

Libby Cohen:

Certainly, you’re exactly right that there would be a lot of questions and details for the legislature to figure out and Raise Your Hand has been very intentional about wanting to hold space to have a really robust conversation about how this fund could be used to the best effect rather than trying to be overly prescriptive about what this has to look like. That said, I think the most important conversation that lawmakers would have to have would be what the money would go towards, what efforts should be supported, and there are any number of really worthy and important needs within our public education system. So just to pick up on sort of two themes that Mark and David have mentioned, could you use a fund like this to actually ensure more predictability year to year for school districts, especially some of those for whom those differences in property value appraisals can be really meaningful?

Special education, one of the most important and some of the most inspiring work that public schools do is providing meaningful education opportunities to every single kid in Texas, including kids with learning differences, kids with all kinds of disabilities. That’s some of the best work that happens in public schools, and it’s also expensive. The state made progress in the last legislative session towards increasing special education funding, but it left a big gap still to be covered. That’s an interesting thing to think about for something like this. Finally, there are any number of education policies or interventions that the state has identified as a priority for itself over the last several legislative sessions. The biggest one that we saw this last session was teacher pay when the state created a new allotment to support teacher pay across the state, and really thinking about that from several different facets, thinking about that from a geographic point of view and trying to address some of the geographic disparities in teacher pay.

Thinking about that from a tenure and longevity point of view, and also thinking about what merit pay could look like in the teaching profession. Teacher pay is a substantial long-term project. It’s another one where Texas has lagged behind the rest of the country and making sure that we can continue to fund new teacher pay allotments and instruments in a way that increases over time would be a really worthy and sort of aligned to legislative priorities use of this funding. Continuing to support early education interventions that the legislature has invested in, as those expand. Continuing to support some of the classroom to career connection efforts that the state has started to invest in would also be really meaningful. So there is no lack of positive avenues for this spending, and I think that’s really the conversation that’s the most important one for lawmakers to be having.

Morgan Smith:

Yeah, and I’m wondering, Mark, if you had any thoughts on ways that lawmakers could structure this fund to make it most effective to support in supporting public schools?

Mark Estrada:

Absolutely. I heard a very important word that I’ll start with enrollment based. I think that the need for enrollment based funding in Texas and having a mechanism is incredibly important that will do so much to allow school districts to properly budget and plan for serving the students that they serve.

Morgan Smith:

And that’s distinguished from attendance based funding?

Mark Estrada:

Correct. So receiving funding based on the number of students enrolled versus how many show up. Currently in Lockhart ISD, we may have 95% of our kids show up that day. So we don’t get 5% of that budget yet. All the expenses are still there. We don’t get to tell 5% of our teachers to go home that day. They’re still working as we need them. So that enrollment base is incredibly important. Having weights by student need, I think is another thing that a conversation would need to happen because there are students with different needs and sometimes the funding needs to support that. I think that regionally, one of the things that I’ve learned as I talk to colleagues across the state is that the cost of living is different in different regions. In Texas, one service may cost Lockhart a different amount of money than it may cost someone in West Texas or in Dallas or in Houston. So acknowledging that I think is important in any new funding system that we may create. I think being thoughtful and intentional about how inflation impacts school budgets is something that we’ve learned the last five years especially of how important that is to create a system that is being mindful of that fact. And I think last but certainly not least, is that this funding has to be supplemental providing funding that is just supplanting in other ways and shifting dollars, but the net value to school districts stays the same, I think that has to be addressed from the beginning.

Morgan Smith:

And David, there are some people out there, I don’t know if they’re in this room or not, but who might see an idea like the Legacy Education Fund floated and say, wait a second. I saw headlines that the legislature just gave public schools a historic $ 8.5 billion increase. Why do they need more money? Can you break down for us just what that increase actually meant in practical terms for Texas public schools?

David DeMatthews:

Sure. So it’s important to take the $8.5 billion, which it’s something, it’s helpful to get something, especially if districts have been starved for a while. And if costs have been increasing, if we’ve been having more challenges, staffing positions. But a large part of that, $8.5 billion went to teacher raises and staff salaries, which is really important. We want to recognize the value and contribution, and really, we want to elevate the teaching profession as much as possible. Even with that investment. Texas still lags behind most states in terms of average teacher pay, and obviously cost of living in Texas has changed quite significantly in the last six years, even since there was a big school funding increase. And so a big portion of it went there. This wasn’t really flexible for a lot of school districts, but it was helpful. There’s been additional investments into special education because really the state system has really been struggling in a variety of ways.

There was an illegal cap on special education for some time in Texas that led to a big investigation. The pandemic kind of interrupted a lot of special education services. And so now across the state, we’re still seeing a lot of students, potential students with disabilities, unable to get a timely evaluation. And so we desperately needed these investments not to have a quality system, but just to even get to a baseline place where we’re actually complying with federal law. And even from what I’m seeing now, I still don’t think that we’re positioned well. I think it’s really hard for districts to get the people they need. And so that $2 billion is helpful, but still not enough. And so there’s been some other adjustments, a more marginal adjustment to the basic allotment. But if you look across the state, what are you seeing? You’re seeing  – still budget deficits – all throughout the state in big urban districts and suburban districts, and high-growth districts.

It’s just a variety of financial problems. And unfortunately, Texas is so big. So I feel like some of our policymakers like to brag about how big these dollar amounts are. But in reality, other states, smaller states with less robust economies, are actually putting far more effort into funding their schools. I mean, Mississippi is outpacing Texas. We wouldn’t stand for that in football, but unfortunately, this is the system that we have. And so it’s a great start because schools have been starved. There’s been inflation and pandemic. There’s been these scandals around this special education cap. But for those who hear that high dollar amount, it is a lot. $8.5 billion is a lot of money. It’s just not enough for the 1,200 school districts, the 9,000 schools, the 5.5 million children in our schools who are attending schools now that have been resource-starved for quite a long time, and in a state that has not kept pace, not only with rival states with robust economies, but some of the poorest states in the United States.

Libby Cohen:

Can I actually jump in? So I had the opportunity to be on a high school campus not too far from here in Bexar County a couple of weeks ago that I think really interestingly illustrates how the latest round of public school funding has kind of shaped life on a campus. So David pointed to the fact that about half the funding, the biggest piece of that funding by far was a teacher pay raise, which is a really good thing. So how this is playing out on this particular high school campus is teachers got a raise, which is great, at the same time with only a $55 increase in the basic allotment. That district, in order to cope with the fact that a new operational funding hasn’t been able to keep up with the rising cost of all the operations, has had to increase their teacher-to-student ratio.

So yes, teachers got a raise, but they also just got more students in their classroom. And because of the way that changing that teacher-student ratio impacts scheduling, all the teachers just lost a planning period, which means that the teachers on this particular campus now have a planning period only every other day. So yes, they got a raise, and that’s good, but in the same year, they got more kids in their class and had planning hours taken away from them, which means they’re going to do more work at home. So, we have a long way to go despite the fact that we had substantial investment this time around.

Morgan Smith:

Yeah. Mark, can you offer a little insight? What has the funding increased looked like in your school district?

Mark Estrada:

I was going to jump in because when I hear the $55 in Lockhart ISD, and this is one of my major concerns with the Texas system, it’s so complicated. We didn’t receive that $55. Not to get into the weeds too much, but essentially what they did was supplant those funds by changing the yield on the golden pennies, which we had. And we’re a property-poor district. So for districts like Lockhart, and I think there were maybe a hundred other districts around the state, we actually didn’t receive that $55. It was a net wash for us because of our property values and because of our status with our golden pennies. So I would’ve loved to get the $55, but unfortunately, we did not receive it.

Other things that I think were helpful – special ed funding to help us with the valuations, I think that was a great thing. Funding for ROTC. There are other kind of weighted funding, but we won’t see some of that money until 2026-27. So again, all the needs are still there. We were incredibly happy for our teachers to get a raise, but in Lockhart in particular, I’m not sure if that’s why you invited me, but we didn’t even receive that, which I think everyone just assumes that every district’s the same. But in our current system, every district is not treated the same and is incredibly complicated, too complicated, maybe by design.

Morgan Smith:

I think we’re coming towards the end of our time up here, but I wanted to see Mark again, turning to you, what could your district be doing more of? What are the biggest priorities that could be supported if you had the resources?

Mark Estrada:

Yeah, I mean, as I think I speak for my colleagues and other school districts across the state, we have to continue. It is hard because our teachers just received a raise, so we don’t want to seem ungrateful for that. But the reality is teachers, especially in the more urban areas, they can’t afford to live in the places where they’re working. And even with the raise, teachers are leaving because they cannot afford to raise a family. They cannot afford to live in these towns. So we have to continue to increase the amount of funds that we’re compensating our teachers and the benefits that we’re providing them. Smaller class sizes has to be a priority, not just at the secondary level, but at elementary as well. I think that for a district like Lockhart who’s fast growth, we continue to, that becomes hard to predict how many kids are going to show up.

So we’re staffing based on last year’s numbers and predicted enrollment increases. But sometimes more kids show up and we’re having to strategize on that because we don’t have the funds that we can say, okay, we’re going to add all these teachers because this many kids are going to come. I think that response intervention, academic response intervention, behavioral response intervention is a great need across the state, especially after the pandemic and the learning loss that happened there. We have to continue to invest to support our kids. Bilingual education, special education are two groups of students who I worry about. Are we doing everything possible to ensure that their needs are being met? And we have to continue to do that as well as long-term maintenance and preventative capital improvements to our facilities. We currently have a school in Lockhart that just celebrated its 75th year, and I think we’ve done a good job of honoring the taxpayer funds on that building.

We still have kids learning there, but it’s hard when your budget is so thin to replace HVAC systems just to make, and ensure that our kids and staff have a campus that they can be proud to learn. In our current budget, it makes it very challenging. I think we need to be strategic on how we’re working with universities, how we’re working with everyone to develop a pipeline of teachers, grow your own programs, those types of things, because that’s a major area of concern. And then the last thing, insurance. There’s not a superintendent that I talk to that isn’t concerned about insurance and from a cost perspective, but also as a benefit to our staff. And I think that funding is needed so that we can provide the benefits that our teachers and our staff need in the school systems.

Morgan Smith:

Yeah. Well, thank you guys so much for talking with me here today. And thank you to our audience as well. I really appreciate it.

Thank you for listening. To continue to stay informed on critical public education issues, you can sign up online for Raise Your Hand’s Across the Lawn newsletter at www.RaiseYourHandTexas.org/Get-Involved.

Today’s sound engineer is Brian Diggs, our executive producer is Anne Lasseigne Tiedt, and our episode producers are Amelia Folkes, Amanda Phillips, Derek Castillo, Jay Moreno, and Joel Goudeau.

This episode of Intersect Ed discusses the sticking points regarding HB 4 in Texas’ 89th Regular Session, as well as what the special session item – “eliminating the STAAR test” – could mean for accountability in our state. Our Intersect Ed host, Morgan Smith, is joined by Amy Dodson, Dean of Advocacy for Raise Your Hand Texas, in a question-and-answer session focused on the differences between criterion-referenced tests and nationally norm-referenced tests.

Transcript

Note: Intersect Ed is best experienced as a podcast. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis missing from the transcript.

Intersect Ed Podcast – Season 3, Episode 7

Note: Intersect Ed is best experienced as a podcast. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis missing from the transcript.

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

I’m your host, Morgan Smith.

When the doors closed on the 89th Legislature in May 2025, lawmakers left behind a promising proposal to reform standardized testing in Texas public schools.

But now — a few months later —  Gov. Greg Abbott has brought them back to Austin for a special session to tackle a number of pressing items facing the state. And on the list is a call “to eliminate the STAAR test.” So does this mean lawmakers will have another shot at improving the way the state measures student learning in public schools? And what exactly does eliminating the STAAR test mean for accountability? Today, I’ll talk with Amy Dodson — the dean of advocacy, instruction and growth for Raise Your Hand Texas — to find out.

MORGAN SMITH: So, Amy, there was a lot of talk about assessment and accountability during the 89th regular session — and House Bill 4, the legislation addressing those issues went really far — what happened to it in the end?

AMY DODSON: It was a lot of conversation around assessment, accountability and the STAAR test and what are some alternatives and how do we make the system better and stronger toward the end of session and House Bill 4 was a really great vessel for that. Sailed through the House, had some changes from the Senate and ultimately when they went to conference committee, just didn’t have enough time to finish negotiations and to get a good bill out and so it died ultimately.

MORGAN SMITH: We know that a lot of legislative business comes down against those final deadlines — what were some of the sticking points in the negotiations over HB 4?

AMY DODSON: Just some differences as we look at how do we do best by our kids, and different conversations being had around the STAAR and what really works, and should we move, could we move to a nationally norm-referenced test? A lot of good conversations being had, some rich dialogue on both sides, and ultimately all the excitement that was being felt because people across the state, parents, teachers, business leaders, had a lot of strong feelings about the STAAR and it was exciting to see the conversation and ultimately just ran out of time to end up with something that really could have been meaningful. And, hopefully, we’ll pick it up again and have some good things happen in the special or in the next regular session.

MORGAN SMITH: You mention the strong feelings about the STAAR exams that came up during these discussions — what messages were lawmakers responding to from educators, parents, and business leaders with HB 4?

AMY DODSON:

Usually, the biggest question or the biggest thing that comes out is that the STAAR is a one-test on one day. And we don’t hear a lot of people, parents in particular, getting really excited about the STAAR test. They see the stress that it induces in their children for that one day, that everything they’ve worked for all year, it comes down to how they feel or how they perform or how they remember that day. Teachers see the struggle that their students go through and the stress that it causes them, and so there’s a lot of frustration around that part of testing.

The other piece of it, I think that comes up more often than ever is schools do so much more. Schools do so much more than train for a one test, and they want to see something that is more reflective of what really a good school is. I know I said two things, I’m going to say three. When I work with parents in the field, which I do a lot, they tend to say, “Yes, my child gets stressed,” and that’s whether they do really well on that one-day one-test STAAR or whether they struggle. They talk about the stress that their children feel, but they also say, “I don’t believe that the STAAR shows me what my child really learned.” And so that’s what typically comes out over and over again, it’s just that frustration with the current system. Not that we don’t need a tool to evaluate our students, not that we aren’t required and must, for the good of our education system, look to assess growth and to see that we see positive things with our students.

But it’s the current system of the one-day one-test and the stress that we put around it all, the parents, teachers, and even business owners who look back and look at what they’re looking for in terms of CTE programs or workforce skills or soft skills, those are things the STAAR test doesn’t measure, and that’s what we hear in the field from our communities.

MORGAN SMITH: We know that Gov. Greg Abbott is also hearing these frustrations, or he wouldn’t have included assessment and accountability on his special session call. The governor specifically used the language of “eliminating the STAAR” — talk to us a little about what that would look like.

AMY DODSON: We are always going to have to have a test of some sort to evaluate the growth of our students and to look at how our schools are performing. That’s just something that communities deserve, parents deserve, and ultimately that teachers and school leaders want. I think we need to be really clear on that. When you talk about eliminating the STAAR, it’s not just setting aside everything. And when we talk about teachers or school leaders getting frustrated with the current system, it’s not about not wanting to show the great work that’s happening, it’s that they want to show more. And the STAAR is a part of the real conversation for the governor and was a part of House Bill 4. The biggest part of it was how do we make it better? How do we make it more comprehensive, more informative? And a lot of people use the term, how do we make it more instructionally helpful or instructionally relevant or instructionally supportive?

MORGAN SMITH: So it sounds like we aren’t talking about completely getting rid of testing here — more like improving it. What does that mean for the kind of testing public schools would use to replace STAAR?

AMY DODSON: When we look at the STAAR, it’s a criterion-referenced test that is built to evaluate the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, the TEKS, which every bit of our instruction is guided upon what we hope students learn, which that’s good. What we are talking about replacing the STAAR with, the conversation that’s being had, is to add or to replace it with, swap, one one of our new favorite words is to swap the STAAR test with a nationally norm-referenced test. Now, the nationally norm-referenced tests have been around for decades. They are used widely across Texas right now. They’re not a part of the accountability system, that’s what STAAR’s doing, but many, many school districts — I don’t know the exact number, but I know all the school districts that I work with in my field work, pretty much all of them — 90% of the schools I work with probably use the MAP or i-Ready or Renaissance or one of those nationally norm-referenced tests.

MORGAN SMITH: Interesting — so you are saying that Texas public schools already have experience with the tests that could replace STAAR — what do these tests tell them that STAAR doesn’t?

AMY DODSON: They use it in addition to the STAAR for several reasons. Number one, they’re really looking for student growth. They want to know in the beginning of the year test, these nationally norm-referenced tests, when they walk in, where is the student today? Where are they with math and English and science? Where are their learning needs when they walk in the door? It gives information aligned with our TEKS, these nationally norm-referenced tests being discussed are aligned with the TEKS. They can look to see down to the individual-specific level, where is a student right now? Where do they need help? Maybe they’re performing wonderfully in math, but they have this one little struggle and the teacher can see on these tests, “Oh, that’s it. That’s exactly where I can help little John, little Jane. I can help them get better in this.”

These nationally norm-referenced tests really focus on growth. They give instructionally relevant information in the moment. They come back with the results within 24 hours. When many people talk about eliminating the STAAR, one of the things they get frustrated with is recognizing that the STAAR results come back in the summer when students are already gone and in most cases have already moved on to the next grade level. The information is not instructionally helpful to the teachers, to the parents, or to the students, really. I’ve heard many people compare the STAAR test with an autopsy. It’s after the patient is gone, I can’t help that patient and I want to be able to help. I want to do something helpful for my student.

These nationally norm-referenced tests are adaptive so a student that is performing really well, it keeps pushing them to go higher and higher to see what their growth could really look like. It gives them goals to meet and it really helps parents to know where a student is. Another frustration with the STAAR is it takes a long time to take in addition to being the one-day one-test and being something that the results come in much later. These nationally normed-referenced tests are shorter. You can take them most of the time in less than an hour. They really give information that is practical and they are, even in the name, nationally normed-referenced. While they’re aligned with our TEKS to make sure we don’t lose sight of Texas standards, they show students and parents where the student compares to other students in Texas and nationally.

Eliminating the STAAR is not getting rid of the test, it is changing the way we approach and giving more information. That’s the big bottom line is we want to give more information and more things and more tools in the tool chest of parents and teachers so that students have the most growth possible.

MORGAN SMITH: What would all this mean for our public school accountability system, which right now is overwhelmingly based on the results of the STAAR exam?

AMY DODSON: Eliminating the STAAR is that lead piece and sometimes it gets muddled with accountability because STAAR is the feature piece of our A through F accountability system, so that one-test one-day leading to an elementary and middle school, 100% of their A through F score that’s given to a campus is based on that STAAR test. We still want to have this test just like we just talked about, the things that really help teachers do well by students. But you would still use… You could use that information, those tests would absolutely still be able to be a part of and factor into the accountability system.

But schools and teachers and communities, I think, deserve to know all that’s happening and a much more comprehensive look at what’s happening in our schools because our schools don’t just provide good academics and they don’t just want to see students grow in the academics, that’s clearly the primary focus. But schools also provide a safe learning environment, and they provide fine arts, and they provide theater, and they provide work skills. They do so much more every day, every year, on every campus across this state than just prepare for a STAAR test.

When we look at what A through F changes might could happen, it’s adding other indicators. It’s adding things that a community sees as really valuable to them, valuable to their future workforce. So, measure student growth, show their dynamic academic improvements, and then show all the other things that schools do every day that make our public schools so very special. You combine those together and you have a pretty robust accountability system that tells parents and communities much more than what they’re finding out right now.

MORGAN SMITH: So today we’ve talked a lot about nationally norm-referenced tests. During the regular session we also frequently heard that term in discussions about how to measure student growth in private schools funded with education savings accounts under Senate Bill 2. Do you see that factoring into a special session conversation around testing?

AMY DODSON: I think so. I think that what we learned in some of those discussions early on around SB 2 is that the nationally norm-referenced tests are good, quality, reputable tests. They’ve been around for many, many years. They do the things that we want most as parents. As a parent, I wanted to know that my child was growing. I think every parent wants that. That’s the foundational piece we want when we send them to school. Having those conversations around SB 2 really helped highlight for many people who may have been unfamiliar with the nationally norm-referenced tests that they are out there, they are quality, they have a long track record of being excellent and on point of showing the things that they’re supposed to show.

Allowing that to be the mark and the measure for students that are in the ESA program really bolsters the argument in many ways to say, this is a good test, it does good things. It is good for all of our students, and that includes our public school students. I do think that that conversation really helped broaden it out and really bring a spotlight on the quality that’s out there with those and what can happen, the quality and the subtle things, the important things that the nationally norm-referenced test can give. I think it’s a great thing.

MORGAN SMITH: Amy, thank you so much for talking with me today. I want to ask — I know there are a lot of people listening who care a great deal about this topic and are going to want to get involved as we move through the possible multiple special sessions. What’s the best way for them to stay informed?

AMY DODSON: I think to get involved is really pretty simple. The best thing that you can do is to go to raiseyourhandtexas.org, our website. It’s very easy to navigate and there’s a couple of things there that you can do. One, you can sign up for our email, our newsletter, it’s called Across the Lawn, and it gives information about what recently happened in the legislature, comes out during session, gives you simple, concise information that is really, really helpful and shows you what you can do from there to help out.

Another way you can get involved is just to simply sign up for our text alerts. When bills are moving and things are happening, we try to send out text messages to rally voices around Texas. So, signing up for our text alert is a way for us to quickly give you information and allow you to very simply connect and have your voice heard.

And the third way that I would really encourage you to get engaged on is to meet with your regional advocacy director. Raise Your Hand Texas is blessed to have a regional advocacy director for every community in this state. There is not a portion in West Texas where I live, or the Panhandle or the Valley or any metro area, north to south, east to west, that doesn’t have someone there designated to help and to listen and to engage and give more information. Love for you to connect with them. The website has an interactive map. You can click on where you live and it’ll show you how you can send email and connect with your RAD.

Hearing from communities and hearing your stories and hearing your voices is really important to us. We want to do that so connecting with your RAD gives you the opportunity to get more information, sit down and have coffee with, host an event with them, or just find a way to get your story heard. And so I would encourage you to do that, but getting involved really matters. Your voice matters, and as we’re talking about right now around STAAR and A through F, you have a story. You probably have thoughts, please share it with us. We’d love to hear from you.
MORGAN SMITH: The sound engineer for today’s episode is Brian Diggs, and our executive producer is Anne Lasseigne Tiedt. Thank you so much for listening.

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.

Transcript

Intersect Ed Podcast – Season 3, Episode 6

Note: Intersect Ed is best experienced as a podcast. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis missing from the transcript.

Morgan Smith: Welcome to a very special live recording of the Intersect Ed Podcast, where the stories of the public education policy and practice meet.

I’m your host, Morgan Smith.

Today, the morning of June 3, we are just a few blocks from the Capitol, where the 2025 legislative session just wrapped up. I’m joined by four guests who will share their thoughts on what took place over the 140 days of the 89th Legislative Session. Let’s meet them now:

• Scott Braddock, journalist and political analyst from The Quorum Report
• Jaden Edison, education reporter from The Texas Tribune
• Ed McKinley, a bureau reporter for the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, and
• Bob Popinski, senior director of policy at Raise Your Hand Texas.

Before we get into it, I’d like to share that the views expressed by today’s guests are their own, and their appearance on the Intersect Ed podcast does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent.

So here we are the morning after Sine Die. The dust is settling. We know the big ticket items that did make it through vouchers and school finance, and we’re definitely going to talk about those, but I wanted to hand it over to our beat reporter, Jaden first to just talk a little bit about what didn’t make it this session.

Jaden Edison: Yeah. Well, I think the primary thing on everybody’s mind is the STAAR test lives on, which is the state’s standardized exam. Lawmakers seemed to be in agreement on some form of alternative assessment on how to measure the academic performance of kids, but obviously disagreements on specifically how that should happen as well as how the state should handle when school districts disagree with the way the state attempts to hold them accountable, excuse me, through their A through F accountability system. And so there was one proposal that sought to give the Education Commissioner a lot more authority as it pertains to ensuring that school districts don’t sue when they disagree over certain changes. And so that was kind of the big thing. I think that once again, I think Representative Diego Bernal, who’s actually the vice chair of the public education committee, he had talked about earlier in the session. Every year we talk about getting rid of the STAAR test and there seems to be agreement, but this will ultimately be one of the sessions that ultimately it didn’t happen again. And so something that’ll need to be probably will likely be revisited down the road.

We all have to imagine other things that come to mind, really, for me, go with House Bill 2, the big $8.5 billion school finance package, because there were a lot of things that made it into the legislation, but as you can imagine, in how many pages Bob? Almost 300, almost a hundred, almost 300-page bill. You have to imagine there’s a lot of things during negotiations that get left out of that process as well.

Top of mind for me, you talk about pre-kindergarten eligibility, excuse me, for students with disability, children with disabilities, that was something that didn’t make it, which ultimately means that if you have a child with a disability who doesn’t qualify for free and other doesn’t meet any other criteria, then ultimately the school is going to continue to kind of pay for those services. I think about there was a fine arts allotment, which was a big thing. I know some folks had actually showed up and testified about the importance of the state providing more funding for fine arts courses, which are integral to student success when you’re not talking about core subjects and talking about the things that get students excited and passionate about showing up to school. And so those are just some of the things, obviously, a lot more that we could talk about here, but some of the things that are top of mind right now.

Morgan Smith: And I guess with HB 2, there are some things embedded in there that we are in a wait and see when it comes to what the commissioner’s rules are going to be like. We did podcast episodes on teacher certification. Jaden mentioned pre-K. Bob, can you walk us through what we might be looking for in terms of the commissioner’s rules?

Bob Popinski: Yeah, absolutely. They landed the plane, this legislative session. They had to, after not doing anything the prior legislative session. And so they had a lot of issues that they needed to get resolved, including the $1.7 billion shortfall in special education. So the big package within House Bill 2 and Senator Bettencourt’s bill that also got passed, that’s identical language is this new way of funding special education. And so it’s going to take time to develop, but what they’re doing is putting in another $850 million in special education over the next two years. The commissioner is going to have some time to develop this new system of service groups and intensity of service levels for special education students, but they also double the college career military readiness funding bonus. They increased the transportation weight and they get to some of that funding increase. They need to backfill that $1.7 billion shortfall. But what didn’t make it, which was in some of the supplemental bills, is if we remember the school health and related services funding shortfall because of some of the litigation that took place, they needed roughly about a billion dollars to kind of fill that in, that didn’t end up passing in the supplemental bill. So we still have a long way to go. We got some of that shortfall back, but not all of it, but it’s going to take time to implement. -page school finance package, I mean,

Morgan Smith: And I wanted to, while we have you talking about the 300-page school finance package, I mean are public schools going to feel some relief from this? Can you give us kind of an overview of what it does?

Bob Popinski: Yeah, absolutely. Big picture, it is $8.5 billion in new funding for public schools. It flows in various different ways and it’s going to impact schools differently, but it is a big step in where we need to go. Remember we started the session needing $19.6 billion just to maintain the same purchasing power as 2019. So inflation has doubled since 2019. And so this goes a long way. Are some of the headlines going to change as we go through the process because schools are still going to maybe have to close certain campuses or layoffs staff or teachers along the way?

Yes, we still might see some of those headlines, but the headlines that I think a lot of the legislatures want to see out of this as well is that $3.7 billion goes to teacher pay raises depending on experience and the size of your district. So anywhere between $4,000 and $8,000, if you are a teacher at a school district with less than 5,000 kids, $2,500 to $5,000 per teacher, if you’re a teacher at a school district with above 5,000, there’s some money in there, $500 million or $45 per ADA for staff allotments. So districts can give pay increases for staff other than teachers. There’s $1.3 billion in there, about $106 per student for a new allotment called the allotment for basic costs. And we can kind of get into why they developed this here for fixed cost.

And then as I mentioned, $850 million for special education, they increased the school safety allotment, almost doubling it per student, another $430 million there. And then there’s an array of other funding formulas in there. But when you’re looking at what school districts actually have to be flexible kind of moving forward and kind of making their day-to-day operations meet, it really is that $1.3 billion in that new allotment for basic costs. It’s the $45 for staff. And then at that point, it’s all programmatic, right? If they want to draw down additional funding for an extended school day, they’re going to have to apply to TEA. If they want to get some stipends to get their teachers through residency programs, they’re going to have to go through TIA. If they want to do the teacher incentive allotment, they’re going to have to apply to TIA. So it’s a lot of programmatic work wrapped up into House Bill 2 and a lot less flexibility for school districts.

Morgan Smith: And that’s interesting to me because six years ago in 2019, that was the last time lawmakers increased the basic allotment. And I’m curious, what our reporters up here think, and maybe I’ll throw it to you first, Ed, what have you noticed just in the changes in conversation around school finance at this time?

Ed McKinley: I think it ties into something that Jaden brought up earlier with the STAAR test bill where I mean, you think about there are things that there’s broad agreement on in the ledge, which we’re all looking at directly behind us, which you’re not seeing in the podcast, but we’re literally staring at the building and the folks over on the right hand and the left hand, there’s a lot of agreement on things like eliminating the STAAR test or wanting to support schools. But I think that when you zoom out a little bit, there’s a big difference in terms of the folks on the House side and how much kind of faith and trust they have in delegating decisions to the local school boards and the folks on the Senate side, they’re wanting to be a lot more prescriptive about it. So the House favored a much larger increase to the basic allotment than the Senate. The Senate preferred all these sort of targeted investments and strategies to make sure that it went to their particular goals. And as Bob was saying, that leaves a lot of, not a lot of wiggle room for districts to use flexibly for the sorts of expenses that arise. But yeah, I mean I think it’s reflective of an ideological difference between the two chambers that was also present in the STAAR tests where what role does a standardized test play when you have just completely different views about how much you can trust school districts to educate kids? Yeah.

Morgan Smith: Well, let’s get into that. The House versus Senate dynamic, we had new faces in the House, new leadership, Scott who won the session?

Scott Braddock: Senate, oh, the Senate, every time on every issue, the Senate, on every issue that I mentioned, it was the Senate on every issue. The Lieutenant Governor, and you alluded to it, he does not trust superintendents and school boards to make these decisions. And that’s what I kept hearing out of the conversations that House and Senate leadership were having about this and the way in which House Bill 2 was handled. And you and I talked about it a little bit previously. It was done in a way where the Senate didn’t even have to show their cards first. It was done in a way that was very secretive. I think that was frustrating. And what I mean by that is that not just traditionally, but procedurally, the way it has always worked is on a big piece of legislation like this, the House would lay out their plan, have a hearing about it, it would go through the process in the House, and the Senate would then do the same thing, but with their plan, they would say, here’s what our plan is. They would’ve a hearing about it, it would go through the process, but instead, it got stuck.

And I want to talk for a second about why it got stuck because House leadership, and this is a big conversation that’s always had in politics, business, all of life, one skill that it seemed that the speaker either didn’t have or wasn’t using, and I think it was the latter one skill that you’ve got to have in all of these facets of life is knowing what your leverage is and then how to use it.

The President, Donald Trump’s very good at that, the deal maker (sometimes). And the deal was that, and how many times did House leadership say this? And over the last two years, how many times did the Governor and the Lieutenant Governor all say, we can create a school voucher program, a school choice program at the same time that we make a historic investment in public education? Sort of ended up happening, but it didn’t happen that way in the process.

Those two things did not move through the process together and House leadership either when the speaker said that he wanted to make a historic investment and that we could do it at the same time as vouchers, he either meant that and just wasn’t very good at this as far as the process, or he didn’t really mean it at all, and he was willing to just make whatever deal with Dan Patrick. Y’all can decide for yourselves on that.

But the fact that the voucher bill was passed so quickly and it just left the School of Finance stranded, created all the leverage in the world for the Senate and not just on education issues across issues. I mean the school funding ended up two years ago, so many people were upset about school funding being linked to a school voucher program. Now this session, it became linked to a ban on THC.

What do those have to do with each other? Well, the only thing they have to do with each other is that the lieutenant governor was trying to crack down on THC and he was holding money for school’s hostage to be able to get it done. And it wasn’t just that he was holding it hostage, he was also just writing his own plan without even holding a hearing in the Senate, which was very frustrating. I kept hearing, and for members of the House, it was very frustrating. The word they kept using was “acquiescence”, why are we acquiescing to the Senate on everything? The Lieutenant Governor basically just wrote his own plan himself. He didn’t trust the school boards to make any of these decisions. You remember when the House plan was laid out? Originally the speaker had a press conference with superintendents by his side and they were talking about how great this was going to be, and they ended up spending roughly the same amount of money.

But I had one of my friends whose expert in school of finance said this could be simultaneously the biggest and worst school finance bill that we’ve ever had because there’s no flexibility for the districts in the way that they’re doing things. And when you talk about that sort of programmatic funding, that’s the point that it gets to is that when you’re talking school funding, and the Lieutenant Governor’s very good at this. He makes it about politics. He’s very good at it in helping people understand school finance the way he wants them to understand it. School finance gets real complicated. That’s why guys like Bob have jobs, but here’s the deal and I’m all for that. But the deal is that with the Lieutenant Governor, he makes it makes school finance equals teacher pay raises. That’s it.

In 2018 when he had a close election in the closing days of the election, the last month of that cycle when he barely won his race, just like other statewide Republicans that year, his closing argument to voters in rural Texas, he was running nonstop radio ads about teacher pay raises. It wasn’t about sort of the red meat conservative issues. It was about that. And they got him across the finish line. And so that’s the lesson that he took politically from that election was that works. And so when it was time to do this school finance bill, that’s what he wanted to focus on and talk so much in focus, so much on teacher pay raises. But it was my understanding in talking with a lot of folks about it, the school finance plan that the House had put forward actually would have allowed for school districts to raise teacher pay even more than the Senate plan. But the House leadership never talked about it that way.

And it ended up not being House versus Senate at all because the Senate hadn’t even come forward with their plan just yet. I had reported out some of the details of what they were going to do, and then the speaker was asked about the Senate’s plan is starting to emerge. He was asked about it at a news conference and without even seeing the plan fully publicly yet, the speaker said, oh yeah, the Senate plan is great. Well, I don’t think he had checked with his House members about that because there were some of them who were pretty upset. So on each and every issue, the Senate just dominated, and you can chalk it up to either a speaker who was just a rookie, he’s green. I don’t think he can say that Dustin Burrows has been in the House for a decade now and has been one of the key players in House leadership as the calendars chairman. Or you could say it was a speaker who was mostly concerned with, and I think this is maybe oversimplifying a little bit, but I think it speaks to what he felt his sort of directive was from the members when they elected him as speaker.

His main directive was to not have a special session at all costs because two years ago they had, did you know this two years ago in that building, the legislature that year was in session more than Congress because if you count and you have to, (they sure do) if you count the impeachment trial and the fact that Congress wasn’t in session as much as they normally were that year, they were actually there for about a month more than Congress. So these are folks who signed up for a part-time job that pays 600 bucks a month and they don’t want to be here. I mean, most of them, they’re not just gone today. They were gone yesterday as soon as they could get out of town. And so that helped also to create Senate leverage because at this point, the little governor, he has no other life. He’s happy to be here all summer and the House members don’t have that luxury.

Ed McKinley: I think there’s a couple points worth raising just to kind of add some nuance to that. I mean, I think you could say that it was rope a dope or strategy or whatever, but the Senate definitely had a stated preference earlier on in the session of a lower total dollar amount invested in public ed than the House did. And instead, we actually ended up getting more than was even in the original House bill too. So there was at least some give and take on that. And I mean, I think the point that you rose about Dustin Burrows at that news conference saying that he supported the Senate plan before he had actually seen the details of it. I mean, my understanding of how that played out is he heard that the bottom line had been increased and said, okay, done deal. We got our win. That was what we were looking for. And I think maybe he underestimated the importance of how those funds were going to be spent, which is the flexibility that we were talking about. And it’s worth mentioning too, Bob listed this off in the beginning, but there is 1.3 billion for sort a fixed cost allotment. What’s the formal name? A B, C,

Bob Popinski: ABC. Yeah, it’s the “allotment for basic costs.”

Ed McKinley: I mean, this is functionally an increase to the basic allotment,

Scott Braddock: Not

Ed McKinley: Calling basic allotment.

Scott Braddock: No, it isn’t, though, because they’re telling them exactly how they have to spend it and mean.

Ed McKinley: It’s a backdoor way to provide the school districts with more flexible funding without Dan Patrick having to admit that he caved on that.

Scott Braddock: I mean, in some ways. But when the speaker goes out and he endorses a plan when his members voted 142 to 5 for a different plan, that’s a mistake on his part as speaker, as speaker. And that’s the way to not be a speaker next time around.

Jaden Edison: But also to be clear, when we talk about the function of the basic allotment, the plan actually lays out, I think, I don’t want to say a wrong number, but there’s a handful of specific things that school districts can use, specifically use those dollars for, and to also understand that the flexibility of the actual basic allotment goes beyond the handful of things that are outlined in there, right? We’re talking, and I think that’s kind of what kind of gets lost in the conversation is why school districts talk about the basic allotment so much is because you specifically look at a particular school district. If you’re in West Texas, what are the specific, you might have a need where, okay, we got to pour more of the BA into instructional materials. Another district, we need to put it more toward athletics, another district somewhere else in Texas where it’s like we’re going to pour that overwhelming majority of this into all of our salaries, which is usually what happens anyway. So I think, again, in talking to school officials, I don’t think you’ll talk to a superintendent who’s going to say, we won’t use that money. I think people, I heard Representative James Larico actually framed it on the floor. He said he would vote for a bill that provided a $1 increase to schools, but the function of the base allotment, there seems to be some kind of misunderstanding of how that actually works. And it really is when we talk about flexibility, the most flexible avenue to provide districts with more funding to address the unique specific needs of their campus. And what we learned this session is that there’s not a trust from particularly lawmakers in the Senate that districts are going to handle that power and flexibility in ways they best see fit.

Ed McKinley: And definitely so I mean, the point I was really trying to hit home is we’ve spent the last two years with the governor saying schools are indoctrinating kids. There’s groups that are publishing studies about how much superintendents are getting paid. There’s this narrative that schools are indoctrinating, kids are wasting funds, they’re trying to make your kid trans or there’s furries or whatever. And so it would be weird politically if the people who were pushing those things then said, oh, let’s just turn around and hand the schools money to use it however they want. That would be completely out of touch with each other.

So the Senate was holding firm for a long time on no discretionary funds. I mean earlier versions of the bill. I remember they wouldn’t have even been able to use the increases in discretionary funds, wouldn’t have even covered the benefit costs that would’ve gone up under statute to administer the teacher pay raises that they were requiring under the bill. And so there was an evolution on the bill to try to address some of these concerns. Scott’s point about the House getting rolled overall is definitely true, but there are some flexible funds and they do address some of the main core needs that schools said that they needed.

Bob Popinski: The legislature never makes school finance easier. They always make it harder. And so what they’ve done here with this almost 300 pages worth of finance is created more allotments and more complexity. The simplicity of the basic allotment is it flows through your district characteristics, it flows through your student characteristics, and it gives you the amount of money based on all of the formulas we’ve set up over the last decades when you’re adding these little pots of money saying, here’s your $106 for your basic costs now that’s it. That’s it. Until the session comes back two years from now, if you have different student characteristics, you’re getting the flat amount. And so what they are essentially doing is you have to go hat in hand back to the legislatures every session because your utilities have increased, and that becomes a problem for the future.

Jaden Edison: I was going to say, I think Ed made a great point. I get lost even from my standpoint, I didn’t know how they were going to handle the disagreement over the basic allotment and the actual creation of the new allotments. That was something I didn’t see materializing in the way that it did. So certainly we, looking at it from that standpoint, if you’re a school district, if you’re looking at kind of, I think you would probably prefer that solution to at least have something to address some of the inflationary pressures that have been hitting your district than nothing at all. So I think Ed does make a great point.

Ed McKinley: If you talk to people who are in the room, I think people will acknowledge when they’re speaking candidly, that effectively what it is is a way for Dan Patrick to save face, but to give schools at least something to use flexibly.

Scott Braddock: Yeah, but I mean, you said that they always make, Bob said they always make school finance more complicated, but wasn’t that not true in 2019, we had gone all those years of creating all these different funds and the way that money flows to school districts and all that, and they did a lot of work in 2019 to not make it simple but simpler. And now you have leadership moving back and it took a long break from doing school finance, so they had some time to think about it. So over that six years, they went back to this sort of, not just, they went back to this anti-local control model of Dan Patrick and Dustin Burroughs and the crew in that building are going to write the budgets for ISDs and they have to come and ask for their money. The idea of local control is just, it’s over with.

And the Republican party I always have, my Democratic friends will say, I thought Republicans for local control. And I said you have to stop saying that because it’s been a long time, at least about 10 years. Another one of my friends who watches all this, a veteran of the process, said that I think it had always been for years that Republicans would say, when it came to these issues, I’m all for local control. And then, they would explain why they’re doing something different. It was last session that they didn’t even feel the need to deviate from the principal. They would just do it and not say, well, I’m for local. They would not say they were for local control, they would just be against it. And that has now bled over into the school finance debate.

Bob Popinski: TEA needs 85 new staff to administer all of these programs. I mean, that’s how much they’re growing the agency and these grant-type application programs.

Morgan Smith: So I want to shift to the other huge piece of public education legislation: vouchers.

Jaden Edison: Forgot about that.

Morgan Smith: So I want to shift to talk about the other huge education legislation that passed this session, the voucher bill. Did Governor Abbott get everything he wanted in that? What guardrails are in place, and what challenges do you guys see on the horizon?

Bob Popinski: He signed it about a month ago already, which seems like forever ago. And it’s a universal voucher program, and there’s some guardrails in it that we can talk about. And it starts in the 26 27 school year at a billion dollars. And we’ll see how many kids will apply, and we’ll kind of go over those numbers here in a second. But if you look at some of these out-year costs, which the comptroller’s going to have to track under the legislation is that by year 2030, it could balloon to $8 billion for that biennium, depending on how the legislature comes back every session to put money into it. But right now, it is a billion-dollar program.

It is available for all private school students, for all homeschool students, for all public school students. They have to apply, there’s four tiers that cascade down depending on where you fall within the family of income for four on the federal poverty guidelines. And there’s some guardrails within that. If you make more than 500%, you can only get 20% of the overall funding amount in any legislative session. And so, in addition to kind of guard rails for what the eligible expenses are, private schools have to be accredited for two years before you can start pulling down voucher money.

So they did put a lot of guardrails within the system, but from Raise Your Hand’s perspective, it’s always kind of been bad policy for the state of Texas for all sorts of reasons. And the number one reason is that a vast majority of the kids in other states that use a voucher already attended private school anywhere between 70 and 80% of voucher recipients in other states already attended a private school. And that’s what it’s shaping up to be this time around.

I think what the fiscal note kind of looks at is maybe 25,000 public school students will get the ESA within the first year, and the rest will fall to private school students already attending a private school and homeschool students. And so that is the big high-level issue that we’re facing is what did we do here? Was this the program to get students out of failing public schools or was this a program to give funding to students that were already attending private schools?

Ed McKinley: Just to hammer home Bob’s point, not only is it shaping up that way, it’s essentially impossible. If you look at the number of available private school spots, the number of difficulties for people who are trying to access the voucher who are from a public school, you have to apply potentially this fall for enrollment at a private school without knowing if you’ll have the voucher because they won’t have the system set up yet. You have to get admitted, you have to figure all that out, and then you have to find out you got the voucher, which probably won’t cover the full cost, and then maybe you’ll be able to attend. Maybe you won’t. Maybe they’ll have a spot for you, maybe they won’t.

Meanwhile, if you look on the flip side ofto kids who are already in private school, I think it’s like 275,000 or kids who are already homeschooled, which is more than 600,000. Those kids are already in the educational environment that qualifies them for the voucher. In other words, it’s free money. So why would all of those kids not apply? And they fill up all the opening spots in private schools with the voucher kids. That’s like 30,000 kids or whatever. The wait list here is going to be gigantic filled with kids that are already at private schools or kids that are already homeschooled. And under the law, the comptroller’s office for the next biennium is required to request in the legislative appropriation enough funding to cover every single kid on the wait list. I mean, in terms of just what the future holds and comparing the rhetoric from when the bill was passed to what is likely to happen. It’s just very hard to picture how this isn’t going to balloon gigantically

Scott Braddock: Is the, I have a question. Is the wait list going to be long? How do we know that?

Ed McKinley: Because it’s free money for Yeah,

Scott Braddock: But how are people going to know about it? If you think about all of the devil’s advocate, if you think about all of the under-enrollment we have and Medicaid and different various programs where it’s quote free money, people have to know about it. And a lot of the people that have been, I would say used as props in the debate where we say we’re going to get the poor kids out of failing schools. I don’t know that their families even are going to know about this. I mean, is the state going to do, are they required to do some big, some big

Ed McKinley: Advertising thing very directly? They can use the money from the billion-dollar fund, the comptroller’s office. A political office can

Scott Braddock: Do that, but are they going to do it?

Ed McKinley: I mean, they have the ability, and there are private companies that are accessing, I think it’s like what, 5%, so $50 million for some middleman company to promote themselves and access the fund. And they have a vested interest financially in the fund’s growth. And the comptroller’s office politically has one in the fund’s growth. So I mean, no, there’s nothing saying you have to hire X marketing firm in New York, but everyone benefits from it and they’re allowed to do it.

Scott Braddock: Well, I mean, I would say to get started, all of the companies you’re talking about, those vendors that are involved, they’re going to make money no matter what off of the program if they’re administering the deal. And the first people who are going to know about it are those people who, the ones you said who are already in private schools, and oh, by the way, you get a discount if you apply for this.

Ed McKinley: And in other states, we’ve seen private schools that have just started telling their kids, apply for the voucher.

Scott Braddock: Go get it. Yeah, right.

Jaden Edison: And I think too, the wait list is- you’re going to have a wait list of kids who are in private schools too.

Scott Braddock: Sure, I agree.

Jaden Edison: I mean the difference in the Texas program, which is interesting to know, if you look at Tennessee for example, they just passed their voucher program, and their rollout actually happened in the same year in terms of they passed the program and then right away they’re already starting implementation here. And to Ed’s point, they’ve had a huge waitlist already. Texas actually has a lot different implementation than other states in that they actually are waiting an entire school year before they roll out the program. It sounds like what you were talking about kind of talks about specifically if you’re saying you’re going to primarily help low-income kids, it’s just going to help them. When we’re talking about the waitlist, I don’t think that necessarily implies that it’s only going to be those kids on the waitlist. We’re going to talk about kids who are probably already in private school.

And just one more thing that often gets lost in this, right? This was the narrative, the entire legislative session as it pertains, we primarily want to help low-income kids, and students with disabilities, many of whom have maybe both of those situations. These programs, as we talk about the modern version of them, started out with the kind of targeted focus on those particular kids. You look at Milwaukee and Cleveland, DC, I mean, they all had a specific focus toward the most vulnerable kids, right? Yeah, exactly. And so if that was specifically the goal, then you’re able to, other states have already laid out models on particularly how specifically try to serve those particular demographics of students. And this is completely different.

And again, lawmakers, they’ve been very clear about their intentions. I mean, Governor Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Patrick have specifically talked about their disagreements with how schools go about teaching race and America’s history of racism or how they accommodate trans students. And so this is as much about that, maybe even more so than it is the other things about specifically helping low income families. Because again, if that was specifically your primary goal, and again, they may point to the eligibility system and criteria, but I think that’s important to notice the history of these things is you have programs that were specifically targeted that way. You go back before that, you get to the era of Brown V Board of Education where you had entire school districts. You look at – Google “Prince, George County, Virginia”, where an entire school system was shut down for a handful of years to keep schools from being integrated. All those things are connected in a way. I don’t think you can talk about what’s happening here in Texas today without pulling and referencing a lot of that history.

Ed McKinley: And to touch on what you were talking about, some of the curriculum concerns and the bills that have passed over the last few sessions, I think that’s going to be a really interesting thing to watch play out here is like there are some of these private schools that they teach critical race theory. They can do whatever they want over there, just like the classical schools that are teaching this anti-woke curriculum that somebody like Dan Patrick or Greg Abbott might agree with. But just in the previous conversation, we were having about how prescriptive the ledge has gotten towards schools and how much TEA has had to grow to administer it, all of those guardrails, those hoops that schools have to jump through, private schools don’t have to do any of that. They don’t have to do the school safety requirements that public schools do since you’ve all day. So that’s going to be very interesting. I mean, on one hand they’re saying we want schools to be more tightly controlled, but on the other hand, they’re providing this flexibility that parents can go to whatever school they want.

Bob Popinski: And what was the sticking point for the assessment and accountability bill House bill for what tests the students would take? So what tests do the voucher kits get to take a nationally norm reference test? What tests do public school kids have to take criterion reference the STAAR test? That was the major sticking point in all of this. And so we are setting up two distinct systems here that over time is going to even grow wider in margin in addition to the type of certified teachers, we have public school teachers. And within the next three or four years, you have to have a certified teacher in every foundational curriculum, classroom, private schools. You don’t have to have a certified teacher at all. Right? That was passed this session in House Bill 2. And so we’re creating a two vast different systems here. And at some point when you saw those funding increases that $8 billion potentially here in a handful of years, that’s when the fight’s really going to start coming in because how do you attract and retain teachers when if you do have a system that’s growing, whether it’s in charter schools or private schools, how are you going to keep and attract and retain teachers?

Jaden Edison: Would y’all agree that? And it’s interesting you bring that up, the STAAR component. I almost got the sense that that was really top of mind for someone like Chairman Buckley, Representative Buckley, who leads the House Public Education Committee because I think the House, especially, you hear from so many more members. Top of mind is Representative Gina Hinojosa, who has been very vocal about opposition to the STAAR test. And that was some of the debate on the floor where it was like, well, why are we not asking private school kids to take the STAAR test and Representative Buckley’s like, we’re trying to get rid of that too.

Scott Braddock: It seemed like the House got rolled on that too. I mean, on almost everything. And on the question of the testing and the question of the funding, I mean, what did you say? $8 billion within five years. To me, as someone who watches the budget discussions all the time, these amounts, that’s the amount that they’ll want to do for tax compression. For “tax cut”. That’s the amount that they would want to do at some point for public ed is the 8.5 they did. This time around. You’re talking about real money. And so for a lot of the advocates for public ed at the Capitol, as the voucher thing is passing, they kept saying, yes, the governor’s going to get his thing, even if he has to call Donald Trump and get him on live with the members that morning and say, “Hey guys, go win one for me”. Which he did do, which was kind of surreal, but Hey, it’s 2025.

Jaden Edison:  That was huge, by the way-

Scott Braddock: Yeah, I mean they got -pause on that for a second. Even after everything else, the governor had done a scorched Earth campaign in the primary last year and nonstop always with the school, what did he call educational freedom and the school choice and all this stuff that he was doing throughout the session. On the day of the vote in the House, he still had to call for backup from the biggest gun in the Republican party. And I had that morning. The way that the Republican or Democratic caucus meetings work, of course is that’s a private meeting. We can’t go in there. I’m usually at home when they’re doing those meetings. I can’t go in. I just know everybody who’s in there. So they start texting and they say, Hey, what’s going on? And one of the members texted me that morning, he said, well, he just put Donald Trump on the phone. I said, really? And the next thing I got was the video.

The video was texted to me by one of these members. We were first to put that out at Quorum Report before the governor eventually did it. But yeah, there was still some talk to your point, there was still some talk that Republicans might side with Democrats at least on some details of how to do this right? And maybe have a statewide referendum, ask people of Texas what they think about it, put it on the ballot. But once Trump called in, all that starts came out of that opposition. They were ready to just do whatever they were told later. Of course, a lot of those Republicans were asking the question, can I get it in writing that the president’s really going to endorse me in my primary next year? Although I think some of those suburban Republicans might not want that endorsement. We’ll see how it goes.

But yeah, I mean the pressure campaign to get that done, but then back to that whole thing about funding, the advocates kept saying that once they got passed that they would say, okay, well look, they’re still going to do a giant school finance bill, so that makes it okay for now. And in a way, in Texas, we have succeeded ourselves stupid. We can do anything we want. We have all the money in the world. What did we have? A 3$3 billion surplus last time, 25 billion this time. And the legislators, lawmakers, policymakers can do whatever they want because they have enough money. To your point, the real fights will start when they don’t. Right. It could be two years, four years, six years, eight years from now when we have a real deficit budget. And I think we talked about this last time we were here, they don’t have almost any muscle memory for what it’s like to have a deficit budget in Texas. They have not had to make big cuts since 2011 and a House and Senate. I think there are only, and we’ll have some more retirements this time around. So by the time we get to next session, I mean there are 30 members who are still in office now who even know what it’s like to have a budget cutting session that they had in 2011. By next session, there may be none. I can count to as many as eight senators who might not be there next session. I would think we will have a few retirements in the House, 10 to 15. There’s always some turnover and some people get beat in their primaries or general elections as well. I can imagine Democrats could pick up as many as five to six seats next time around. There’ll be new blood people who don’t have any experience for it. And by that time, we may be looking at what just starting to turn into a big fiscal crisis and a manmade crisis because these guys did it to themselves.

Ed McKinley: Just to circle the square there,

Morgan Smith: Just if you guys, our time is kind of wrapping up, but I am, Scott kind of brought us around to our predictions for what are we all going to be sitting up here talking about ahead of next session?

Ed McKinley: Yeah. Well, it’s worth putting a fine point on it that the program won’t increase automatically. The ledge is going to have to come back and approve more funds. And I think it’s easy to imagine if there’s a big waitlist and the comp charter’s office is saying, give us 5 billion more. There’s going to be a big conversation about it. But so far, this has been a campaign. It’s been political campaigns, it’s been advocacy campaigns. And the governor and his folks clearly believe this is a winning issue politically. And you can gripe about the way survey questions are phrased or whether or not Texans would support this or whether it would win in a statewide referendum, which it hasn’t in other states. But clearly they think this is a political winner, but now the rubber is going to meet the road. They’re going to have to actually administer this policy. And I think that the specifics of how they do, so our teachers are getting fired from maybe a religious school for being gay, and that school is being funded with public funds. When stuff like that is actually happening, are people comfortable with it and are they willing to express political consequences for the folks that are building up this program? And on the flip side of the political spectrum, they just banned pride clubs at public schools. Private schools can still have pride clubs like our Republicans going to be comfortable with that when they’re funding them through the voucher program. So I think that those sorts of nuts and bolts questions are going to be really important as we move from the campaign into actual governing.

Jaden Edison: And it transitions from, again, all the rhetoric that we’ve heard all session is that particularly when it comes to vouchers, right? This is going to serve our priority category students, students with disability, students with low-income families. We’re going to get that demographic report when the report, excuse me when the program launches 26, 27 school year, we’re going to be able to see a lot of, we’re going to be able to basically compare what the talking points were during the session and what actually happened. Does Texas follow in the footsteps of other states where the primary beneficiaries are students in private schools? All the evidence points to that being the case. But obviously we’re going to be able to have data to kind of look and assess what is the Texas story of this particular issue. And then obviously, I think we’ll also be talking again, we’ll be talking about accountability again down the road as it relates to STAAR and how to best host. I’m very curious to see what happens between now and the next legislature as it relates to the tension with districts and accountability. But certainly, things that’ll be interesting to continue to watch.

Bob Popinski: Absolutely. Before we get to next session, teachers and students have to sort out a whole bunch of bills that pass this session too. So I thought I’d just rattle off a few. Starting in the next year or two, within House Bill 12, teachers are going to have to post their syllabus. You’re going to have to have an annual posting of what you’re going to do each semester. Middle school students are going to have to take two more semesters of physical education, physical activity. You’re going to obviously go through the state board, but grades 4 through 12, the communist regimes curriculum is going to have to get decided. SB 1191, we’re going to have a statewide standard GPA for the first time. We’ve got the 10 Commandments bill that’s going to move through the process and probably litigation. And most schools already have this, but if they don’t, they’re going to have to have a cell phone ban policy. And so all of these bills with about 1200 education bills are filed every session about a hundred or so passed. Again, we’re going to still have to sort through all of that. So we got rulemaking coming up. We’ve got to kind of find some hidden gems that are in these bills, and we’re going to have to sort through hundreds of pages worth of language. And so as all of these bills roll out, what actually impacts teachers and kids immediately is what we’re going to have to pay attention to.

Jaden Edison: Library books.

Bob Popinski: Library books. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Morgan Smith: Well, that is a wrap on our time up here together. Thank you guys so much for participating. Thanks to everyone in our audience. Thanks.

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Thank you for listening. To continue to stay informed on critical public education issues, you can sign up online for Raise Your Hand’s Across the Lawn newsletter at www.RaiseYourHandTexas.org/Get-Involved.

Today’s sound engineer is Brian Diggs, our executive producer is Anne Lasseigne Tiedt and our episode producers are Amanda Phillips, Jay Moreno, Anne Bannister, and Karen Wang.

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.

Transcript

Intersect Ed Podcast – Season 3, Episode 5

Note: Intersect Ed is best experienced as a podcast. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis missing from the transcript.

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

Today, we are talking about how we measure the performance of Texas public schools — which, right now, means standardized testing and an A-F accountability system that assigns grades to campuses almost entirely based on those tests. It’s a policy that overlooks a lot of what public schools do to prepare students for later success in the workforce — and everything else our public schools do on a daily basis to ensure student well-being.

And the heavy emphasis on how students perform on one test on one day hurts public education in other ways, too — creating a system where teachers are pressured to teach to test instead of focusing on all the other elements that go into learning.

Today we’ll hear about school districts in Texas and around the country who have found innovative ways to preserve a culture of student learning while maintaining high standards of accountability and transparency for their communities — and a promising proposal lawmakers are currently considering as the 89th Legislative Session comes to a close in Austin.

BRAD OWEN: Any given assessment is a snapshot in time of where a child is in relation to their learning journey at that moment. So, trying to say that every child in every school district in Texas should be at the exact same spot in the moment in time in their journey is impossible, and it’s not justifiable.

MORGAN SMITH: This is Brad Owen, who is the superintendent of Burkburnett ISD, a district of 3,000 students on the Texas-Oklahoma border. To make up for the failures of the state’s current accountability system, his school board decided to develop its own local accountability system based on values and standards set by the community. It is among very few districts in the state that have adopted such a system.

BRAD OWEN: So our community-based accountability system is essentially grounded in seven key pillars: student learning and progress, community engagement, student readiness, safety, security, financial. Again, it’s pillars that almost every school district already has the same, we’re just actually formalizing those. And then each pillar breaks down into key questions. So, three key questions, basically, about how we are addressing that pillar. And then each key question has a system response, meaning, what are we as a school district doing to ensure that we’re hitting that pillar every year for all students? And then from that, it then breaks down into all of your strategies, goals, and objectives. And that’s where the reporting comes out on each of those key questions.

MORGAN SMITH: Instead of the single annual report that comes out under the state accountability system, in Burkburnett ISD, the school board issues progress updates in stages throughout the year.

BRAD OWEN: Every quarter our principals report out to our school board and then we put that report out to the public, of where we stand on certain pillars. Those pillars rotate. Twice a year, we report out to the community where we are on every pillar. At the end of the year, we do a 22-page report that has lots of narrative, lots of storytelling, lots of graphics, lots of data, raw data, good data, bad data. We don’t just hang our hat on the good data. We are very open and transparent. And we give that report to the entire public too. Not only to our parents, but also to our community members who are not parents. 70% of communities are non-parent adults. But they still vote, and so they need to be informed on what’s going on in the school district, and they’re an integral part of our community.

MORGAN SMITH: This helps make sure everyone in the district community — parents, educators, students, residents — is engaged in what’s going on.

BRAD OWEN: Our teachers know what it is, our kids know what it is, our teachers know how they’re being held accountable to that. Our kids know how they’re tracking their own learning in relation to that. Our board is better informed than ever on what we’re doing each quarter with students and where we’re at in relation to that progress monitoring. Our community does. It’s aligned to our strategic plan. Our alignment as a whole, because of community-based accountability, is much better. We don’t have random acts of success with initiatives going in every different direction. Everything is aligned to that.

MORGAN SMITH: What’s happening in Burkburnett is part of a larger nationwide trend toward more holistic accountability systems. Texas is one of just six states that has yet to move away from a standardized test-based requirement for a high school diploma.

HARRY FEDER: A lot of states have said either, “We’re going to try to monkey around with those kind of tests and ask the federal government for permission to make it different,” or what really happens is localities are given freedom to create assessments and systems of assessments that operate below at the level of the classroom, at the level of the school that are much better.

MORGAN SMITH: This is Harry Feder, who is the executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a group that was founded in 1985 to combat the misuse of standardized testing across all levels of education and the workplace.

HARRY FEDER: All federal law says is that most of your accountability system has to be a state test, a standardized test. Now, most can mean 51%. There are states that sort of take that percentage more seriously, Kentucky, for example. Yes, they do the state test, but they also, a lot of states, and Kentucky is one of them, use a school survey as an accountability measure. Are my kids happy? Do the teachers respect the kids? Do the teachers seem to know what they’re talking about? The quality of teaching is an accountability measure. How rigorous is the curriculum? You can look at inputs in addition to a test score or other outputs like graduation rates. We talk about growth, but that’s just another test score measure. There are all sorts of things. The city of Chicago has a brand new dashboard of accountability. Parents can see how well does this school do with special needs kids? What is the ratio of teachers for English language learners? There are all sorts of inputs that you could look at, and also, the satisfaction of how many books does each kid read in a year? That could be an accountability metric. It’s a number. The opportunities for advanced mathematics, what are they?

MORGAN SMITH: Right now, in the last few weeks of the legislative session, Texas lawmakers are working on a proposal — House Bill 4 — that would bring major reforms to the state’s accountability system, including doing away with the STAAR exams, the state standardized test that forms the basis for the accountability system and using nationally norm-referenced tests instead.

MAX ROMBADO: These are test products or test instruments that are designed with national scope. This makes it easier for Texas and Texas school districts to compare how their students are doing to a much larger body of students across the country, not just insulated by the state.

MORGAN SMITH: This is Max Rombado, the legislative director for Raise Your Hand Texas.

MAX ROMBADO: The STAAR test is not a nationally norm-referenced test. It’s what we call a criterion-referenced test. And the criteria references are the Texas standards, what we call the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills Standards, TEKS. And so this takes a substantial amount of time and investment to design, and it also takes a while for the results of the STAAR test to actually be made available to schools and to families, which was a major concern and reason for this change.

Now, under House Bill 4, what we see is nationally norm-referenced assessments and school districts have to implement through-year testing. Meaning that there’s going to be a beginning of the year, a middle of the year, and an end of the year assessment that students have to go through. And the reason that matters is because an important aspect of learning is growth. And the current way we test students and use those results for our accountability system doesn’t tell us how much the student has grown from the start of the school year till the end of the school year when they take the STAAR test. And that’s a massive data point that we’re missing in the system. And so the complications with how long it takes to get those results back and the fact that the test, as it currently is designed, doesn’t give us that growth measure, was a big motivation for these revisions.

MORGAN SMITH: House Bill 4 would also use a whole new group of non-test-based metrics to determine school ratings — so, along with test scores, a school’s ratings would include access to full-day pre-K, higher grade level courses, teacher quality development, and career and technical education programs.

MAX ROMBADO: So what we’re seeing now is an expansion of the accountability system that was almost entirely driven by STAAR assessments, now incorporating other aspects of the learning experience that are very highly correlated with better student outcomes and a better life in the long run. We can point to countless studies that show that having full-day pre-K experience improves your chances of success in the long run. We have studies that show when students are engaging in advanced coursework, they’re much more likely to not just complete high school but succeed beyond high school. When they have earlier access to career and technical education (CTE), they’re more likely to complete and meet their college and career and military readiness goals. And when they have access to high-quality teachers, we know that high-quality teachers are the most important in-school factor to student success.

MORGAN SMITH: There’s another significant piece of HB 4, and it has to do with the private school voucher legislation — Senate Bill 2 —  that Gov. Greg Abbott recently signed into law. If HB 4 passed, it would put public schools on more of an equal playing field with private schools when it comes to testing.

MAX ROMBADO: SB 2 requires the students who receive the voucher to take nationally norm-referenced test or the STAAR test. Before House Bill 4, school districts were only going to take the STAAR test. Now, House Bill 4 by allowing school districts to also use nationally norm-referenced assessments in their accountability system, will create important parity between public schools and private schools. There was a larger conversation about competition between private and public schools and the importance of creating competition for the sake of improving quality. Well, it’s important for the playing field to be even if you’re going to have competition, and testing parity was a really important step forward, and creating that level playing field too.

MORGAN SMITH: It’s hard to overstate what a big step HB 4 would be in improving how we measure the performance of our public schools in Texas — and in turn, better support student learning for the sake of learning instead of assessment.

MAX ROMBADO: I think House Bill 4, if it passes, will create a sense of relief and excitement among schools, teachers, and students. And I think it’ll encourage behaviors that actually improve our quality of education and the outcomes for our kids.

I think it would mean less stress. I think it would mean less pressure. I think it would feel more organic for students and teachers to assess growth and learning than it currently feels. I think it will encourage school districts to emphasize these other non-testing aspects of education. It’ll encourage school districts to expand their pre-K programs. It may encourage school districts to expand career and technical education. So I think overall it creates a sense of relief, excitement, and a sense of genuine, authentic quality evaluation.

MORGAN SMITH: But as with all legislation at this point of the session, HB 4’s fate is uncertain. And while HB 4 has received overwhelming support from House lawmakers, it’s unclear whether members of the Senate share their colleagues’ enthusiasm for the bill.

MAX ROMBADO: So, based on what the Senate filed around accountability and assessment and what the House is putting forward through House Bill 4, there does seem to be a mismatch in tone or perspective about what needs to happen moving forward. The hope at the moment is that the amount of support that House Bill 4 has garnered the amount of appreciation that has been shown regarding these changes will encourage the Senate to consider moving in a direction that’s more aligned with House Bill 4 moving in a direction that’s about improving and strengthening the accountability system so that we’re not just more accurately assessing our schools and our students, but we’re also minimizing the potential cases in which litigation might be pursued.

MORGAN SMITH: That means – when it comes to assessment & accountability – the most effective action anyone can take right now, according to Max, is to contact their state senators and encourage them to support HB 4.

MAX ROMBADO: For folks who may not know who their senator is, Raise Your Hand Texas has you covered. We have a page on our website called the “Who Represents Me” page. If you go and visit our website and click on the Who Represents Me page, you can put in your information, and we’ll provide you exactly who it is that represents you both on the House and the Senate side.

OUTRO: Thank you for listening to this episode of Intersect Ed. To stay informed on critical education issues this session, and throughout the interim, you can sign up online for Raise Your Hand’s Across The Lawn Weekly Newsletter at https://www.raiseyourhandtexas.org/get-involved/. You can also sign up for text messages at the same place.

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

Thank you for listening to Intersect Ed. If you want to learn more about how to support Texas public education or how to get involved, head over to RaiseYourHandTexas.org.

This episode of Intersect Ed discusses an often misunderstood topic: funding special education in Texas public schools. Our schools provide special education services to the almost 800,000 students with disabilities in the state. This episode will explore why it costs so much to do it right and the $2 Billion dollar gap that Texas school districts are covering after they allocate the funds received from the state and federal government to ensure special education students receive the services they need.

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.

Transcript

Intersect Ed Podcast – Season 3, Episode 4

Note: Intersect Ed is best experienced as a podcast. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis missing from the transcript.

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

I’m your host, Morgan Smith. Today, we are diving into an often misunderstood topic: special education. We’ll talk to two educators and a public policy expert about how Texas public schools provide special education services to the almost 800,000 students with disabilities in the state — and learn about why it costs so much to do it right.

Over the last decade, the number of students with special education needs has grown rapidly — and Texas public schools have both a moral and a legal obligation to educate them. Though districts receive state and federal funds to do so, that money isn’t enough, forcing school leaders to make tough decisions to draw funds from other programs. For the most recent school year for which we have data, that amounted to a shortfall of about $2 billion. That’s right — Texas school districts are covering an extra $2 billion in funding on top of what they get from the state and federal government to ensure special education students receive the services they need.

But before we go deeper into the issue of funding, let’s back up a bit and talk about why special education services are so important — and why they are so resource-intensive.

STEVEN ALEMAN: It’s about giving an equal opportunity to a student who, with some support can grow just as much as any other student, can demonstrate knowledge and abilities just like any other student. They just need some assistance in doing that.

MORGAN SMITH: This is Steven Aleman, a senior policy specialist with Disability Rights Texas, an advocacy organization for people with disabilities.

STEVEN ALEMAN: And ultimately, just like everything else, what we hope for in public education at the end of the day is a productive citizen who’s contributing to society, contributing to the economy, and people with disabilities have just as much to contribute, needless to say, as anyone else, and have that potential. And if they don’t get the skills and the support they need in public education, then where is that going to happen? It is not going to happen. Just like everyone else, we count on public education. The core function of public education, it’s not just as, as important it is, the books and the reading and the learning. It’s about the formation of relationships and friendships and being able to function in society productively.

MORGAN SMITH: About 14% of Texas public school students receive special education services, which is almost double the percentage of those who received them a decade ago. The students who receive them have a broad spectrum of disabilities that require varying levels of accommodations that can range from the simple — like assistance with test taking — to the incredibly complex — like the support it takes to navigate the behavioral, emotional, and mobility challenges that come with more severe impairments. To provide these kinds of services — which can start at birth and continue to age 22 — school districts must contract with all different kinds of professional staff — from diagnosticians to licensed psychologists to speech pathologists.

AMANDA FUENTES: My current role is Inclusion Teacher. I work with students in the classroom who have dyslexia, I have some who have specific learning disabilities in reading and math, and some of them have some emotional disabilities as well. So there’s a big range of working with academics and then also behavior and balancing the two. Sometimes, it’s more focusing on getting kids to finish work or helping them stay on task and just giving that support wherever needed, either academically or behaviorally.

MORGAN SMITH: This is Amanda Fuentes. She is the Special Education Team Lead at Cibolo Valley Elementary School in the Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City Independent School District near San Antonio. Her job requires many layers of skills, from knowing which of many different academic and behavioral tools will best set each student up for success to interfacing with all the adults in their lives — their classroom teachers, their parents, all of the professional aides who help them manage their disabilities.

AMANDA FUENTES: There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes that people don’t see, really connecting with those families, making those relationships. They’re lifelong. Making sure the kids are successful because our end goal in education is for them to be a successful member of society, so making sure that we are setting up a plan from when they first get identified and put in to receive special education services. Just making sure that we’re setting them up for success and making sure that we’re doing the best that we can for them and giving them everything that we can.

MORGAN SMITH: So what does it cost to provide this level of investment in kids who need these services? Paige Meloni, the superintendent of the Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City Independent School District, where Amanda Fuentes works as a teacher, says her district spends about 60% over what it receives from state and federal funding to provide mandated special education services. That figure, she says, is standard for most districts across Texas.

PAIGE MELONI: I have a lot of parents that will ask me all the time, “Why can’t we have this? Why can’t we have that? You know, we would like something for this particular athletic program,” or, “We’d like to start this new club in our school,” or, “We need better instruments, larger instruments in the band,” things like that. It’s very difficult to manage expectations of all the parents when your funding formula is finite and you’re required by law in some of the programs for a spending requirement. And there is no spending requirement that I know of for football, and there’s no spending requirement that I know of for a marching band. And there is no spending requirement that I know of to put on a play every year at the high school that the whole community comes to. But the minute that you turn those things off as a superintendent, you’re going to get run out of town. So those are the things that really keep me up at night is providing these opportunities no matter who the kid is.

MORGAN SMITH: Paige Meloni said that lawmakers — and others who might not be familiar with special education — can have a hard time understanding the complexities of the services school districts provide. If they visited the high school in her district, she said, it would probably take about three hours to tour through and describe all services happening there on a regular day.

PAIGE MELONI: They would see, sometimes in a regular classroom setting, a student who has trouble with note-taking, just a person who, a paraprofessional who is there who would be helping those students in the general education classroom. They might see a visually impaired student who’s in all regular education classroom and only needs help during transitions. They might see, or they would see in some self-contained special education classroom, students with some severe disabilities that require nursing care but are still accessing sometimes even the general curriculum. They would see a setting for autistic students that are teaching students about scheduling and routine and things that we implement here at school and at home that help them navigate their home life as well. They would see, even in some of our extracurricular programs, that students with disabilities are being able to participate to the maximum extent possible.

And one of the most beautiful things that they would see is our students who do not receive special education services are accepting of all of these students, no matter what, and care for them and help them along the way. And many times at the high school, they’ve been with these students since they were in elementary school, and there’s just a certain care.

MORGAN SMITH: Here’s Steven Aleman again.

STEVEN ALEMAN: It’s important for school districts to have the resources in their special education, in the special education area for two reasons. One is just pragmatic that as costs grow because special education populations are growing, school districts have the responsibility, and frankly, they’re at the short end of the food chain here, at the end of the food chain, where they have to pay for these costs. If the federal government isn’t going to reimburse them, if the state isn’t going to reimburse them, that means that other expenses have to go by the wayside because we have an obligation to help these students and serve students with disabilities.

But more importantly, it’s that investment in the students themselves. So special education funding, fundamentally is about, yes, the dollar signs in terms of the burden on school districts and where they’re having to pull from other places, but ultimately, it’s about the investment in a child and what that child’s potential is like.

MORGAN SMITH: That promise of public education to bring about a child’s best potential as a member of society is what drives Paige Meloni and other educators to continue their work despite the many challenges that come their way.

PAIGE MELONI: When we think of our history in Texas public schools, there’s a whole lot out there that would say what we have to do, what does the law say that we have to do? And then we also have to think about 50 years ago that students with disabilities wouldn’t be served at all. Some of them wouldn’t even have access.

And so we want to do that. I mean, we have an altruistic nature to want to do that, but let’s just talk about what it does for society and what we need to be a productive society.

Every student is not going to go to college. They’re not going to go to law school, they’re not going to become a doctor, but they can have a meaningful career contributing to something that makes a difference in our society. And we are a big part of getting children ready for just that. We’re meeting them no matter where they are, and we’re taking them through a pathway that will make them successful for their own family but then also something that will contribute to society as a whole.

MORGAN SMITH: With less than half of the legislative session remaining, lawmakers are currently considering two major bills that contain recommendations from the Texas Commission on Special Education Funding. SB 568, from Sen. Paul Bettencourt, modifies our current special education funding weights to a new intensity of service model. HB 2, from Rep. Brad Buckley, has similar language in hopes to create new funding tiers for our special education students. The Senate has $700 million set aside for these provisions.

To stay informed on these measures and other critical education issues, you can sign up online for Raise Your Hand’s Across the Lawn weekly newsletter at http://www.raiseyourhandtexas.org/get-involved.

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

Thank you for listening to Intersect Ed. If you want to learn more about how to support Texas public education or how to get involved, head over to RaiseYourHandTexas.org.

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.

Transcript

Intersect Ed Podcast – Season 3, Episode 3

Note: Intersect Ed is best experienced as a podcast. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis missing from the transcript.

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

I’m your host, Morgan Smith. Today we are tackling a topic that is the foundation to student success: pre-kindergarten. We’ll hear from the public school leaders who are getting early education right — and talk about how Texas lawmakers can increase access to all kinds of high-quality childcare for the state’s roughly 2.3 million kids under the age of six.

Study after study has shown that investing in high-quality pre-kindergarten programs reaps dividend after dividend — from setting kids up for strong academic performance later on to the economic stability that comes with keeping more parents in the workforce. In the last decade — largely due to innovative approaches at the local level — Texas has made some progress in supporting its youngest students. But still, more than 90,000 three- and four-year-olds remain on waitlists. 

So what is holding us back? As usual, when it comes to public education in Texas, the answer is complicated — and yes, it does have something to do with funding.

DAVID FEIGEN: Right now parents in Texas deserve options to high-quality early learning programs, and they do not have those options today. And the main reason for that is that access to child care is incredibly expensive. 

MORGAN SMITH: This is David Feigen. He is the director of early learning policy at Texans Care for Children, which is a multi-issue children’s advocacy and research organization focused on state policy. He says that the cost of a Texas family’s average annual childcare for an infant is around $11,000.

DAVID FEIGEN: Families also are having to constantly make a choice between do I pay for child care that I maybe can’t afford? Do I settle for child care that I think is less than my child deserves and in some cases could even be unsafe? Or do I just leave the workforce altogether because none of these options are really doable? Our public pre-K program starts to really become available for families at age four. There are some three-year-old programs. But even for that, it’s a very limited eligibility. It ends at 3:00 p.m., which is not a great option for working parents in some cases, and so the options that are available to parents are inadequate.

MORGAN SMITH: If you aren’t a parent, these details may surprise you. If you are a parent, they are all too real. Currently, the state only provides half-day funding for a limited group of four-year-olds and an even smaller group of three-year-olds who meet certain eligibility criteria, like coming from an economically disadvantaged home or learning English as a second language. But some school districts — recognizing how important early education can be for the success of students and the workforce — have decided to offer access to pre-kindergarten programs even with limited state funding.

MICHELLE RINEHART: So in Alpine ISD, we provide full-day open enrollment, at no cost, pre-K, for three-year-olds and four-year-olds throughout our community. So our board was very committed to adding in a pre-K three program, even though it’s not necessarily state required, but they saw the value in doing that. And our board is equally committed to providing these programs at no cost to our community.

MORGAN SMITH: This is Dr. Michelle Rinehart, the superintendent of Alpine ISD, a West Texas district where about 60% of students come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. There, the district takes an annual financial loss of about $200,000 to operate four pre-kindergarten classrooms. This investment was so important to the school board that they preserved it for the current school year even when facing a $1.5 million deficit on a $10 million budget.

MICHELLE RINEHART: So when I started in Alpine three years ago, we had less than 12 licensed child care spots in Alpine for more than 200 children under the age of three at that time. And so that larger context is both a workforce challenge, but it’s also an educational challenge in our community. And so really, to our end, in a rural location that really had a dearth of high-quality child care options, it was a way to provide high-quality, consistent child care for three-year-olds and four-year-olds within our community while also helping those three- and four-year-olds get kindergarten-ready and start school in kindergarten a year or two years later ready to go and ready to learn.

MORGAN SMITH: Alpine ISD is also a year into an innovative new program that creates a partnership between the school district and private child care providers to help increase access to early education in the community. The partnership provides a way for private schools to dually enroll their students in a public school — so while the students are physically receiving their education from a private center, they are co-enrolled in the Alpine school district.

MICHELLE RINEHART: That activates an additional funding stream for those children that’s then split between the ISD and the child care center. So, in essence, what is happening with this program is that children within these private centers or private schools are then subject to all of the same kind of rules and regulations, if you will, of public schools, but then also receive public funding in support of their education. So the partnership with the ISD helps provide access to that funding stream, but then also provides all of the supports around meeting the state’s requirements in terms of registration, data collection, curriculum, reporting, all of these different pieces, the school helps with that so that the private school doesn’t have to take on all of that burden as well. But the promise of these kinds of partnerships is to bring additional state revenue, both to underfunded school districts like Alpine ISD, but also to underfunded child care centers that also aren’t well compensated from the state side, either. So really to leverage state resources in support of children in both underfunded public schools and then under-resourced private facilities as well.

MORGAN SMITH: The City of San Antonio’s PreK 4 SA — the voter-approved, early learning initiative that is funded through an eighth of a cent of local sales tax — pioneered these kinds of partnerships over a decade ago.

SARAH BARAY: Early learning spans from birth to age eight. When you think about the field of early learning, that is working with young children, birth through age eight. When we get into systems, whether it be the school system or the childcare system, that’s where we start talking about Pre-K and childcare. 

MORGAN SMITH: This is Dr. Sarah Baray, the CEO of Pre-K 4 SA.

SARAH BARAY: Child care is licensed by the state of Texas, and they are providers who provide a warm, loving, caring environment for children to go when their families are working where their parents are at work. Preschool, or pre-K as we know it, is part of the public school system, and that is seen as the grade that happens before kindergarten. These two systems are very separate, both in licensing, funding, in the way that they operate, but they actually have a lot of similarities, and in some places, those two systems actually go together. We understand that young children, a four-year-old is going to become a five-year-old, it’s just like a two-year-old is going to become a three-year-old and a three-year-old is going to become a four-year-old, the children move through the system, and so there really needs to be continuity across the birth through age five system.

MORGAN SMITH: But though these kinds of public-private partnerships show a lot of promise, they’ve been slow to take off in other communities, in part because they can be difficult to implement. There is no one-size-fits-all approach for districts or child care providers — the way forward is different in each community.

MICHELLE RINEHEART: There’s so much work that has to be done in-house. You can learn from someone else about, “Oh, here’s how we did that. We sent our district nurse to that location.” Or, “Oh, we tried to contract with somebody in that city who would do these screenings on our behalf,” or whatnot. You might get high-level ideas, but then in terms of actually putting those into action or thinking, working through all the steps to actually make those happen for your own district, that’s local work, for sure.

MORGAN SMITH: In 2019, the Legislature passed HB 3, which was intended to help pave the way for more of these kinds of partnerships — but there is more work to be done. Here is Sarah Baray again.

SARAH BARAY: HB 3 was big in that it created the vehicle for pre-K partnerships and encouraged school districts to partner with high-quality child care centers to deliver public pre-K in the childcare center. That’s really important because families need options when it comes to early learning because families have all kinds of different needs. For some families, if you have an infant, to be able to drop your infant and your four-year-old off at one place and know your four-year-old’s going to get pre-K, but your infant is going to get high-quality care, that is a really important opportunity for families.

It also provides continuity of care for the young children. They can go from being an infant in a center and knowing the teachers and being a familiar place all the way up to going to get their pre-K education in there. The HB 3 that made that possible was a really important policy move. What would be helpful is the easier we can make that system. Because the school system and the child care system operate on completely different systems and policies and regulations and funding, creating those partnerships can be very challenging because it’s not easy to understand how to translate the regulations that the schools are required into a child care center and vice versa.

Anything that the legislature can do to make that a more seamless process and make it easier for both the superintendents to say yes and to the child care providers to say yes, because what we often hear is a superintendent’s like, “That’s a great idea. I’d love to deliver pre-K in a child care center, but I don’t know anything about child care, and I don’t really want to know anything about child care and all the regulations.” Child care providers say the same thing. They’re like, “This sounds like a great idea, but I don’t really understand the funding. I don’t know what I should be getting from this. I don’t understand the school regulations, so I’m not sure I can take that on, because I’m already stressed enough.”

MORGAN SMITH: There’s another issue. HB3 required school districts to provide full-day pre-K to eligible students, which was a big step forward. But unfortunately, lawmakers only provided funding for a half-day, leaving school districts to make up the difference — and six years later, that’s where funding remains. Here is Michelle Rinehart again.

MICHELLE RINEHART: When we think about what pre-K looks like in practice, we don’t pay a pre-K teacher half of a teaching salary. We actually spend more on staff salaries in those classrooms because we equip those classrooms both with a teacher and a paraprofessional. And so those classrooms are our most expensive classrooms to run across the district. When you walk into a pre-K classroom, you won’t find that it’s only half furnished, or that we only run the heat and AC half the time, or that we only supply half of our students with the materials that they need to access pre-K. But these are the very real impacts of what half-day funding could look like in pre-K classrooms.

MORGAN SMITH: And, as Texas looks to the future, the benefits of fully funding pre-K extend beyond just the improved educational outcomes. Here’s David Feigen.

DAVID FEIGEN: I would say that the legislature, I think, is highly motivated to act on child care this session because of this economic impact. And according to the US Chamber of Commerce, Texas only has 80 available workers for every 100 open jobs. Let me say that again. Texas only has 80 available workers for every 100 open jobs. And what that means is there are more open jobs than available workers. And one of the main reasons for that is child care. According to surveys, we’ve seen around 60% of non-working parents say that child care is a top barrier to them working. And so lawmakers are motivated about this because there’s a significant economic impact of the lack of high-quality child care. And people don’t talk about pre-K that way, but it’s part of this too. We just take for granted that the public education system is an economic driver that parents, once their child enters kindergarten, can rely on full-day child care. But in these early years, parents are really struggling, and that’s having a real economic impact. And so I would just say that if lawmakers want Texas to be this economic miracle, we need to ensure that parents have access to high-quality child care because that’s absolutely holding the economy back.

MORGAN SMITH: Thank you for listening. To stay informed on critical education issues this Session, you can sign up online for Raise Your Hand Texas’ Across the Lawn Weekly Newsletter at www.RaiseYourHandTexas.org/get-involved. Today’s episode was written by me, Morgan Smith. Our sound engineer is Brian Diggs, and our executive producer is Anne Lasseigne Tiedt.

Thank you for listening to Intersect Ed. If you want to learn more about how to support Texas public education or how to get involved, head over to RaiseYourHandTexas.org.

 

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. 

Transcript

Note: Intersect Ed is best experienced as a podcast. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis missing from the transcript.

Intersect Ed Podcast – Season 3, Episode 2 Transcript

Morgan Smith: Welcome to a very special live recording of the Intersect Ed podcast, where the stories of public education policy and practice meet. I’m your host, Morgan Smith. Today, the morning of January 30th, we are just a few blocks from the Capitol, where the 2025 legislative session is already underway. I’m joined by four guests who are going to give us their thoughts on what we should expect over the next four months and beyond. Let’s meet them now.

Jaden Edison: Jaden Edison, the public education reporter with the Texas Tribune.

Scott Braddock: I’m Scott Braddock, editor at Quorum Report.com.

Ed McKinley: This is Edward McKinley, and I’m an Austin Bureau reporter for the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News.

Bob Popinski: This is Bob Popinski. I’m the Senior Director of Policy at Raise Your Hand Texas.

Morgan Smith: Before we get into our conversation, I’d like to share that the views expressed by today’s guests are their own, and their appearance on the Intersect Ed podcast does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent.

So we’re a few weeks into the legislative session as we sit here a block away from the Capitol, and we’re going to spend most of our time up here talking about the reason we’re all here, which is education policy. But starting out, I was hoping that Ed, maybe you could give us an overview of what has happened so far, kind of big picture look.

Ed McKinley: Yeah, I mean, I think the big story so far is definitely the election of the speaker over in the House. I mean, the Senate moved its version of a voucher bill already this session {SB 2}. I think everyone’s kind of expecting that to move really quickly, but the House in my mind is kind of where the action is because it’s going to be, it’s the bigger hurdle to clear. So the election of Dustin Burrows as speaker, I think really spoke a lot to where the chamber is, and there’s a lot of outside forces that are kind of pushing and pulling at the House to try to mold it into a different shape. And it felt like a little bit of a statement of stubbornness from the powers that be that are still there that, hey, we’re going to keep on keeping on the way we have been.

Morgan Smith: Yeah. Well, and Scott, I wanted to turn to you on this because this isn’t your first rodeo. You’ve been observing these political players for a long time. Of course, we have Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and Abbott are familiar figures. We have a new speaker. The fate of a lot of legislation gets tied up in how well those three get along. What are you expecting for this session?

Scott Braddock: I’m going to tell you something. It’s a story that’s not about me, but it’ll sound that way at first. Okay. So the Lieutenant Governor who I call the “little governor”- that’s loving, by the way- he has called me the biggest liar in Texas media, and I was the first journalist he banned from the floor of the Texas Senate. He banned all the journalists after that. So I was just the trendsetter, but I’m telling you that to tell you this, that two days before the speaker vote was going to happen, the Lieutenant Governor’s office had reached out to me of all people, almost begging that I would publish some information in the Quorum Report that the Lieutenant Governor thought would be damaging to Dustin Burrows. He was really on the war path and he was publicly doing it. He was tweeting out all the time, that the other candidate in the race, David Cook, was the correct choice because he had been endorsed by the Republican caucus.

They kind of got a lot of the Republican House members wrapped around an axle about that, but he was so all in against Burrows, that that sets the tone in many ways for how the session will go. These guys will be at loggerheads right now. I was told that in this tracks with some of the public comments in the meantime from the Lieutenant Governor, I was told that they did have a meeting the two of them this week that was said to be cordial and potentially productive. We’ll see how well these guys work together after Patrick so aggressively campaigned against his, Burrow’s predecessor Dade Phelan, and then against Burrows. Now that he’s in the speaker’s office, I can already see on some other issues where they’re going to not agree. That’s clear from the base budgets that they laid out, and we can get into some of that if you want.

Ed McKinley: And just to add on to that a little bit, the other part of the equation there is Governor Abbott, who is I think, a bit of a mystery. In 2023, the House was working for a really long time to hash out a version of a voucher bill that could clear that chamber. And when Chairman Buckley at the end of that session said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a bill. I think this is the shape of it. I think this is what it’s going to look like.’ The governor was like, well, that’s not going to work for me. And it kind of torpedoed the whole thing and it led to the specials. So, a lot of this is going to depend on what the governor wants out of an education package with a bunch of different reforms or out of a voucher bill, but we haven’t heard from him yet. Even when he endorsed in the race for Speaker, when he quasi endorsed Cook, he didn’t actually use his name. I don’t think you have to be a political expert to know that if a politician endorses another politician without using their name, it’s not exactly the strongest endorsement. So I think a lot of people are waiting to see what he says at the State of the State, what the tone looks like, and I think that’s going to have a huge impact in how this plays out.

Scott Braddock: Just to add one thing to that, to my knowledge, the governor has yet to say Burrow’s name as Speaker, that he hasn’t congratulated him for winning the race for Speaker and hasn’t said anything like he’s looking forward to working with him and to the point that Ed was making about the two chambers working together. The thing that they first got at loggerheads about two years ago was property tax reform. And in the base budgets that were laid out by the House and Senate this past week, they don’t agree about that. The Lieutenant Governor wants to go to $140,000 on the homestead exemption, which costs a lot of money and the house wants to keep it at $100,000. And again, the Governor didn’t, I’ll just say he didn’t lead on that issue as far as the details in the last legislative session. It wasn’t until we got into special sessions last time around that the Governor then said that he wanted the legislature to pass the idea that was first pushed by somebody who lost the Governor’s race, Don Huffines, which is to try to use all of our budget surplus to buy down property taxes, to do tax compression. And you might’ve noticed that that didn’t happen. So they’ve got a lot of work to do on those issues.

Bob Popinski: Well, I think the one thing that they do agree on is they want more property tax relief and they both have about $3 billion dollars in their base budget. But the big number, the big takeaway from what we’ve seen in these proposed budgets is $51 billion in tax relief since 2019. That is a huge amount. Texas ranks 46 in the nation or $4,400 below the national average. To get us back up to the national average, we would need about $42 billion or so. So $51 billion, it shows you that if the legislature really wants to move a program over a short period of time, they can. That is a big number and it’s going to continue to grow over time.

Morgan Smith: And speaking of last session, we know that there is a huge amount of unfinished business when it comes to education policy, and I was wondering, Jaden, if you could kind of give us your thoughts on what you see. We’ve already mentioned vouchers and funding, but what you see are going to be the big topics when it comes to education policy this session?

Jaden Edison: Yeah, it’s been really interesting to see how things in the Senate have kind of picked up where they left off. I think Senator Brandon Creighton, it was really interesting in the public hearing on Tuesday earlier this week. He was very adamant about making clear that, hey, the ball is basically in the House’s court. And so that’s basically what I think is really interesting. Obviously, the State of the State will be interesting on Sunday if Governor Abbott declares vouchers an emergency item because we’ve heard Lieutenant Governor Patrick say this week that they’ll pass it as soon as next week. And so that’ll be interesting. But aside from that, one thing I found notable just yesterday, I think Lieutenant Governor Patrick released his kind of top 20 or so priorities and whatnot. And what was absent from that was a priority of public education funding, which I found really notable. And there were things like a 10 commandment bill and something about prayer, a bible in schools, that were in the top 10 to 15. And the absence of public education spending was notable. And so it’d be interesting to see. Now I say that to say money is where your mouth is, right? And then the budget proposal so far they have proposed somewhere around $5 billion, if I’m correct. As it pertains to additional funding for public education, but obviously things will go as far as vouchers do, right? And so we’ll see where those things end up. But aside from that, there are some really core issues I think in public education that are really interesting. One thing, top of mind for me, and we’ve talked about this a little bit behind the scenes, is special education funding. That was one thing that got held up in the voucher battle last time around. And basically, the way special education is funded in the state now, it is largely based on the setting and not the intensity of the services. And so basically you could have two kids in the same classroom, one who maybe needs more hands-on services and more direct attention, but that kid and another kid who maybe requires less, they get funded the same. And so I think those are some challenges as we talk about the state of special education in the state. We know particularly Texas doesn’t have the greatest track record as it pertains to special education services with a lot of the attention they received in the last what decade or so. And so that’ll be interesting. And then more recently we heard Governor Greg Abbott, which I think people have talked about it, but it is interesting in that he talked about wanting to extend the diversity, equity and inclusion ban from higher education to K – 12 public schools. So how that actually manifests would be interesting. Senator Creighton also, I think, co-signed that, and it sounds like it might be somewhat of a priority, so that’ll be interesting. And then lastly, I think some other things too. And there are so many things, as you know, with public education that are interesting, but particularly when we talk about teacher pay and teacher preparation, those are two things to me that are absolutely fascinating. I did a trip to Hutto ISD, this was maybe in the last couple of months and whatnot, and it was really interesting to hear from educators. It wasn’t- when they talked about being their best selves in the classroom, it wasn’t so much about funding as it was feeling like they were supported and prepared. And so to me, it’ll be really interesting to see how the House and Senate prioritize them this session given the lack of significant or meaningful increases last session. So there’s a lot to kind of play out, but I think vouchers is kind of leading the way right now and we’ll see where things fall into the conversation.

Ed McKinley: And just to tie in those two conversations about the kind of broader political dynamics with the specific policies, it’s easy to forget when we think about 2023, and when there was the big vote on the House floor that led to all these people getting primaried, that vote wasn’t actually an up-down vote on whether vouchers were going to pass the House. It was about whether vouchers were going to be considered in the same bill as all of the other education reforms. So based on what I’ve been hearing from conversations with staff and lawmakers and stuff this year, everyone seems to have an appetite to handle them separately in separate bills this year. But I think the question remains how much practically are they separate in terms of the political dynamics and the negotiations that are taking place? So is there a world where a voucher bill doesn’t pass but schools still get extra funds or there are still special ed funding reforms or there are still all these other policies that move forward? I don’t know. That’s going to depend on a lot of things. I’m going to be curious to see if both of those things are emergency items in the State of the State or if just one of them is because, I mean, a lot of those policies, if you just had an up-down vote on it on the special ed reforms for instance, that was a bipartisan commission, they recommended all these changes. I think every lawmaker is hearing from their districts, ‘Hey, the pace of special ed evaluations is really, really high. We don’t get funding for those expenses. This is a huge drag on our budgets at the moment.’ I think that would probably pass pretty overwhelmingly if they just put it up. But is it going to get the opportunity to do that?

Jaden Edison: I would say the politics are really interesting in this scenario because can you actually go another session without public education spending being a priority? Politically speaking, when you’re talking from the standpoint of Governor Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Patrick, it was notable, I think this was sometime in the last month or so where Lieutenant Governor Patrick was talking to a ton of rural educators and whatnot and basically saying, ‘Hey, I’m your friend. We passed this in the Senate.’

Scott Braddock: I was there. They didn’t quite buy that.

Jaden Edison: So again, that to me was notable, right? Because that’s a recognition that hey, what didn’t happen in 2023 was essential to a lot of people and had a significant impact.

Scott Braddock: I think it’s important to remember where this idea came from, that the two things needed to be linked together, vouchers and school funding. Remember, in the middle of the regular session in 2023, it was almost like a Hail Mary by the Senate at the end of the regular session to put them all in the same bill. Remember it was House Bill 100, all that stuff’s up here somewhere. And in that bill, previous to that, it had just been the public ed spending and funding bill, and suddenly the vouchers are in there. Of course, Ken King lit that on fire on the floor of the House. It’s not going to work. But I thought it was especially telling about the thoughts of Lieutenant Governor Patrick and the Governor at that point where Patrick, I think realized at that moment, when it didn’t work, that that’s a bad idea politically, that’s not going to work. And so for the rest of the legislative sessions, all those special sessions, the Senate then kept them separate. And that was the House that put them together. And even though it was a Hail Mary and a mistake by the Senate, Governor Abbott embraced it as his legislative strategy going forward to put them in the same bill. And it just didn’t work out. And I do think that it’s important for those folks who work in public education and advocates for public education to understand that they don’t need to keep fighting that same fight and getting sort of baited into arguing about whether the public education lobby somehow killed $6 billion for public ed. One of the defeated Republicans in his primary told me it was probably six, seven months ago, he said, Scott, they got to stop arguing about that bill. That was never going to be the law. That bill, to your point, that was a farce. The Senate was never going to pass anything like that. And it was Lieutenant Governor Patrick who told CBS Texas in Dallas-Fort Worth. After all of that fell apart, he did an interview where he was asked, would it have been okay in your mind to pass the raises for teachers and the extra money for schools? Would it be okay to do that without the vouchers? And he said, yes, absolutely. And so the entire education community needs to hold him to that. And I think there’s one other thing, is there’s real recognition by Chairman Creighton and some other very conservative Republicans that they can’t go another two years. To your point, they can’t go another two years without funding public ed. Think about this. Tom Oliverson who ran for Speaker on a platform, didn’t work out, but he ran for Speaker on a platform of eliminating power sharing with Democrats. Same guy, put his name, his signature on a letter with Democrats in the Houston area to try to get more public ed funding for the Cy-Fair school district. So even among those folks, there’s real recognition they can’t keep doing this because they’re going to look at a bunch of unemployment in their districts and schools closing and things like that and they can’t have it.

Morgan Smith: I’m going to pause there and really look at that issue of school funding. And Bob, I thought maybe you could give us, what are the numbers right now that lawmakers have to work with? What are school districts faced with, and what can we hope for in the upcoming session?

Bob Popinski: Coming into this school year, a vast majority of school districts have had to adopt deficit budgets, right? They are struggling to give teachers pay increases to keep programs, to even keep campuses open. So if you look back to even what the legislative budget board has in their fiscal size up since 2019, there’s been about 20% inflation. So that amounts to about $9.8 billion a year less purchasing power than school districts had just five years ago. So in Texas, we have a biannual budget, so you have to kind of multiply that by two. So we’re about $20 billion short of where we need to be for just school districts to be even.

And so when you look at that and you see what the House proposed and what the Senate proposed we’re well short of that $20 billion, what the House has in their budget proposal, and it’s the initial proposal is $4.8 billion right now, but that’s a two-year number, so you have to divide by two. And so we have a long way to go to kind of just even keep up with inflation. Now, we don’t know what the funding formulas are going to be or how that’s going to flow on the House side. We hope it’s going to be a basic allotment increase, the building block for how we fund our public schools. But on the Senate side, they have about $5.2 billion in there, and most of that is going to go towards teacher pay raises. They have about $4,000 in there for every teacher across the state, and an additional $6,000 for a total of $10,000 for teachers in rural school districts. And so those are the starting points. They have $400 million in there for increased safety and some other program funding in there. But we have a long way to go and we understand that there’s other competing programs in the state, and especially when you’re looking at water or even property taxes, but there is a $24 billion beginning balance and an additional $28 billion in the rainy day fund that we have now capped out. So the funding is available, and as a lot of people like to say, a budget is a moral document. Where are we going to put public education in our budget? Are we going to make it a priority? And what order is it going to be in this legislative system?

Scott Braddock: Well, to that point, the Texas Senate led by Patrick wants to spend more money on film incentives than school safety. So you can see what their priorities are so far.

Ed McKinley: And similar along that line. It’s not just like the total dollar amount, but it seems like over the last 10 years or so, and I’d be curious what you think about this, Bob, but it seems like there’s much more of an appetite to provide funds for specific programs. It’s a much easier sell to a lot of Republican members of the House and Senate to boost the teacher incentive allotment, which is this merit-based pay program for teachers. And it’s kind of in line with this idea of “running the government like a business”, which I think is something that is a value that’s held by TEA and is informed by business practices. But it’s kind of fascinating because it’s led to Democrats becoming the party of, oh, local control. Local governments just let them do it. And it’s like this reversal of historical roles.

Bob Popinski: There’s only a handful of ways school districts can generate more revenue. You can increase your enrollment or your attendance, you can go after a tax rate increase if you have that capacity left, or you can opt into some of these Texas Education Agency programs. It’s the teacher incentive allotment, it’s the extended-year program. It’s now the high-quality instructional materials that the SBOE passed this last summer. And so those are really the only ways you can opt into additional revenue, which means your flexible spending is not there anymore for community-based programs, and teacher increases and staff increases. Remember, we have 380,000 teachers in this state, and only a fraction of them] are in the Teacher Incentive Allotment Program.

Ed McKinley: And as Jaden was mentioning earlier, there’s more of an appetite for things like DEI or legislating how specific subjects are taught or introducing prayer in schools. And the more specific hooks that the state has with school districts with different programs, the easier it is to get them to go along with those sorts of policies.

Jaden Edison: I always find it really astounding. It just seems like, and I’ve talked about this with Bob a little bit, but there just seems to be a complete disconnect with the needs of what public schools and teachers and administrators say they need and what lawmakers think they need. And so to me, I just find that really astounding in that to me, education is an area where it’s really hard operate like a business because you have kids’ lives at the center of that. And so the fact that isn’t more of those stakeholders at the table or working through some of these issues even, regardless of whatever the political differences are on things, to me, just kind of like I said, it is pretty much astounding to me that we continue to, we’re in hearings and we hear lawmakers talk about how public schools have received the most funding they ever have. And then you go to a school district and you see they’re considering eight closures. What happened in, I think in El Paso earlier this year? And so I think there just seems to be a complete disconnect with what the needs are for public schools here in Texas.

Scott Braddock: Well, and the disconnect is that it’s in the DNA of the state. Our culture is that, and this is my redneck version of Texas Constitution. It basically says it doesn’t matter who your daddy is, everybody gets an equal education. It doesn’t matter if you grow up in Highland Park, one of the richest parts of the state or in East El Paso County where in parts of it they don’t have running water. All those kids are supposed to get a public equitable education. And it’s really a beautiful thing when you look at what’s in that constitution. Here’s what it does not say, that we’ll run a profitable business to educate kids. It doesn’t say that. What it says instead is that, and this is again my redneck version, because it talks about liberty. It says that basically educated people are freer people. And so we do that because, and you know why that’s in the document, it’s in the foundational document of the state in our constitution, because when this was Mexico, the Mexican kids got a free public education and the white kids didn’t. They literally picked up guns over this and fought about it. This was part of the Texas Revolution, was to have a free system of public education in the state. And this is why it has been to the consternation of so many of these groups that have pushed for privatization of schools all over the place. It makes them nuts that Texas is the biggest Republican state to not have a program like this. But they weren’t fighting that culture in those other states when they set those programs up.

Ed McKinley: Those voucher programs, you mean?

Scott Braddock: That’s right. Yeah.

Morgan Smith: Yeah. Well, speaking of vouchers, we have a voucher bill in the Senate.

Scott Braddock: Rock and roll.

Morgan Smith Yeah. Can we go over just what is in that current bill {SB 2} and what you guys expect to happen to it?

Jaden Edison: So basically the parameters, and again, I think Senator Creighton was again very clear that, hey, we passed this bill four times in 2023. He probably said it, I wasn’t keeping count, but he definitely reiterated that several times. But this particular bill Senate Bill 2, so the programs are pretty straightforward, right? $10,000 per year per student for participation in this program if you apply rather to an accredited private school. And then there’s additional funding allocated for students with disabilities. And also there’s a small kind of pot of money too for homeschoolers. And so that’s the general kind of parameters of the bill. But the reason I’m kind of speeding through that part, the part that’s really interesting is, and there’s been a lot of debate about this this week, is the kind of prioritization system if demand for that program exceeds the funding available. The way it is currently set up is that bill would determine, basically it would define a low household income, as 500% of the federal poverty level or below. And so I did the math, really interesting. A household of two, for example, would be somewhere north of $105,000 and would be considered a low-income household. And to me that was pretty notable just in light of when you think about how the Texas Education Agency or even the federal government determines “economically disadvantaged” students, those who are eligible for free or reduced lunch, that’s somewhere around what one 30 to one 85% of the poverty level significantly below that. And so basically, in that prioritization system, you will see really low-income kids and families competing with those who are more well-off. And so I say that to say, that’s going to be really interesting to watch. I think a lot of people, maybe fatigue with the voucher debates and discussion. But I’ve heard public schools shift from this space of like, okay, we know the politics of the moment right now and we understand that perhaps this is inevitable that this is going to happen. And so how do you get the best version of the bill passed if that is a stance that folks are taking? I’ll be really interested to see how the House and the Senate work out some of the- I wonder how the rural Republicans are going to, how are they going to look at the kind of income threshold, understanding that their communities and the importance of making sure that everybody’s adequately served through such a program if they actually support it. And so that’s one of the things I’m looking at. But the bill itself is interesting, but obviously the details and the House is going to be- the Senate can do everything. They can pass the bill as soon as next week if it’s declared an emergency item, but the House is obviously going to be where. Because hit a brick wall in recent years. And so yeah, we’ll see where it goes.

Ed McKinley: I think people have their eyes on how similar universal voucher programs have played out in other states, and there’s a sense of how do we avoid some of the issues that have arisen with that. I mean, for instance, in a lot of other states, there’s been huge majorities of the people in the first years of the program that are using it that are existing private school students. I think if you talk with some of the people who are advocating for vouchers, they’ll say, that’s not a feature, that’s a bug. That’s to help them kind of subsidize it. They deserve access to it like everyone else. But it is sort of incompatible with the rhetoric about why this is necessary to get kids out of failing public schools. So I mean, the specifics like the hyper specifics of how the bill is actually written are going to be really important for determining how that’s going to play out. So I think it’s just very, very early in this. I mean, from the people that I’ve spoken with, there’s not a lot of optimism that if the Senate Bill 2 passed as written currently, that those problems wouldn’t arise in terms of 75% of students being already in private schools.

It’s going to pass the Senate, it’s Senate Bill 2. Senate Bill 1 is the budget which has to pass the Senate for us to have a government. So I think the hyper specifics, and there’s a very interesting kind of tightrope walk happening in the House. I think, and this is the thing that, I mean, frankly, if you talk with a lot of school groups, and I’m sure people listening to this and people in this room are working for a lot of those groups, the sense that I’ve gotten is a bit of a malaise, a bit of, this is going to happen. I don’t know what there is to be done about it. I mean, talking with people within the building, it is difficult to get 76 [votes]. It’s easy to get 76 votes in theory. It’s hard to get 76 votes for words on a page that have specific effects that are going to hit millions of Texas kids. So there’s a balance of people, even people who may have voted for the bill, the procedural motion in 2023 that kind of set all this up, that want to see more accountability. They want to see public information laws, they want to see testing requirements, they want to see this, they want to see that. And it remains to be seen whether that’s going to be something that Abbott wants in a bill or that the groups that are pushing the voucher program in the first place are comfortable with.

Scott Braddock: I think it’s such an important point. People will say the devil is in the details. I would say it this way, that you can’t count the votes on such a significant piece of legislation without knowing what it looks like. You’ve had over the last year or so, the Governor framing up the discussion as in he’s got enough votes, that’s all you hear. And that turns into journalists and others just asking the question, well, are there enough votes? And then I see people who are well-respected, they might be political analysts who’ve been at this a long time, but they never leave their office in Houston. And they will, sorry, they will, not to name names, but their commentary will be along the lines of, oh yeah, vouchers that’s going to happen. You just need to work out the details, but the details like which kids are eligible and how much money we’re going to spend on it, you’re kind of writing the whole bill. And so when it does go to the House, we start to see proposals there. They’re not, to your point, they’re not going to rubber stamp what the Senate is doing. And the Senate really, I mean the senators have really relegated themselves to almost irrelevant on everything. It is what the Lieutenant Governor wants. It’s Senate Bill 2, they’re going to pass it. And by the way, those who have lobbied the Senate across issues will tell you that unless you have the buy-in from the Lieutenant Governor, there’s really no reason to even talk to the senators. You need to make sure that his office is cool with whatever it is first. And that’s on everything from sports betting where he doesn’t think that people should do it on their phone, which is the only way anybody really does it. Right. And on any issue, if you’re going to try to move something through the Senate, there has to be basically a two-year lobby effort to make Dan Patrick cool with whatever that is. Well, he’s cool with this, but we don’t know what the House is going to do. And it’s interesting, I mean, to the election of the speaker to that point here, you have Dustin Burrows, a conservative for sure, from Lubbock, Texas, where would not benefit from school vouchers, and in fact, it might hurt their public education. It was in Lubbock. It’s interesting that Lubbock, as far as just a region of the state, really punches above their weight for influence. Of the 31 million people who live here, they’ve got a Speaker from there now. And so many of these debates within the Republican party play out in West Texas. It was in Lubbock that Governor Abbott acknowledged on a radio show there that whatever this is a couple of years ago, whatever public or whatever private school voucher program has passed. He went on a radio show there and just assured them, Lubbock ISD is great and it’s not going to affect your schools. And then he said that, guess what? We’re not going to be able to tell people who run private education that they have to take any of these kids. So he’s basically making the case there that we’re going to set up this program, but we can’t guarantee that anybody would’ve actually be able to use it in large numbers. And he went out of his way to say, Dan Patrick said the same thing in Lubbock, that this is where he first floated the idea that rural Texas would be exempt from a voucher program that was a couple of years ago. They understand that the fundamentals of the politics aren’t really that different. And the scorched earth campaign that Abbott went on last year certainly changes the numbers as far as where that vote is going to land. But when you start talking to some of the very conservative freshmen members who were just elected, start talking to them about the details. One of them, for example, I’ll leave out his name, but you can see me afterward, a very conservative legislator just elected. He was starting to look at some of the voucher proposals and he said, “Wait a minute, they would give the voucher to a kid who’s already in private school?” He didn’t know that. And all of a sudden he’s thinking, well, maybe I’m not for that. So they would really want to see the details flushed out a lot more.

Jaden Edison: That’s such an interesting thing to me is because Texas is not reinventing the wheel with its voucher proposal. These programs have been around for decades. I mean, dating back to the modern kind of way, we think about vouchers dating back to the early nineties in Milwaukee, which really was targeted toward low-income students. But there are, there’s decades of data, and more recently what we’ve seen with these universal programs are exactly those kind of traits of you have basically a ton of kids who had already been enrolled in private school. Who  are the beneficiaries of those? I think the news outlet, ProPublica, which is an investigative newsroom, they’ve done some great work looking at, I think it was in Ohio specifically I looked at for private schools. They’re not located closely to the poorest zip codes in that particular state. And you’re talking about having to get a kid from A to B,  transportation standpoint. Those are things that cost money. And so when you dig into the details, I know Texas, and maybe this was a theme at the public hearing over Senate Bill 2 was, well, we weren’t first, but now we can learn from other people’s mistakes and lead the way. But I struggle as someone who tries to really read the history and understand some of these other programs, just how different Texas can be, given that the parameters are largely similar to what we see in other states.

Bob Popinski: It’s not going to be much different. And the fiscal note dropped with SB 2 during the Senate education hearing, and they keep calling this a billion-dollar program. And that’s true maybe for this biennium in the second year it starts, but if you look at what the out costs are by year four, it’s $4.6 billion and that’s a reasonable number. Why is it a reasonable number? We can look to Florida. Florida’s universal program and other voucher programs has a one-year cost of $3.9 billion and 70% of the kids there were enrolled in a private school the year before. The funding is all going to private schools. That’s true in Arizona where the numbers, 80% of kids were enrolled in a private school the year before. So we know where this is going, the receipts are in from other states, and we hope that there’s enough guardrails and that there’s a cap on this budget process that it doesn’t get out of control.

Scott Braddock: I think one of the things to keep in mind as far as the mindset of the legislators is that we have, in a lot of ways, I’ve described them as sort of political trust fund babies, a lot of them who are in office now who didn’t really have to earn it, and there’s always been a surplus. It’s always been a surplus for the entire time that they’ve been in office. There was always a surplus for freshmen and sophomore members of the legislature, and even some who have been there longer than that, [they] don’t remember the last time we had a budget-cutting session. That was all the way back in 2011, and y’all remember the first thing they did was cut $5 billion from public education. Does that number sound familiar? $4 or $5 billion here or there. It can cause a real crisis, and now they’re going to commit them to a $4 billion program going forward. We had a $32 billion or $33 billion surplus last time, $21 billion, something like that, or $24 billion this time around. But at some point, we’re not going to have surpluses anymore. There will come a day when Texas isn’t rich, and the guys who have been around for a long time, they know that. But I do think this is important to keep in mind for the legislators who are currently serving. I think for the House and Senate, there are only about 30 or so who were there for that back during the last budget-cutting session. All of these folks have operated in an environment when it comes to property taxes and the way that they’ve been “reforming” that based on the numbers you were talking about before, they’ve always operated in an environment where there’s plenty of money. If anybody up at the building tells you they don’t have money for whatever it is, they lying. That’s not true. But there will come a day, two years from now, four years from now, I can’t imagine that rounding up all these immigrants and imposing tariffs on our big trading partners that might cause economic problems for Texas. So two and four years from now, we might be facing something very different and in the meantime could be committed to this program. Look, to be fair to those kids who would then be enrolled in it, you can’t just pull it back. I mean you’re committed to it at that point. All that would be in perpetuity. And so will those property tax “investments” or buy-downs in compression if the Lieutenant Governor gets his way. And I do think this is a legacy project on his part. One of the things that makes me think he’s getting ready to retire.

Morgan Smith: Scott, I’m going to stop you right there.

Scott Braddock: Well, $140,000 homestead exemption is definitely a legacy project for him. And his point man in the Senate on tax is Paul Bettencourt. And that also is an ongoing cost moving forward because that has to be done through a Constitutional Amendment. So unless they can get people to vote later to raise their taxes, which I don’t think they’re going to do, the state’s going to be on the hook for that as well.

Morgan Smith: I mean, I could sit up here and talk with you guys all day on this stuff, but we are approaching the end of our time and I did just want, we have so much going on at our state capitol, but there is also a new administration in Washington. So I wanted to kind of wrap up by just hearing your thoughts on how some of the Trump administration policies might affect what’s going on at the Capitol and our Texas public schools

Jaden Edison: And talking to some of the school districts even prior to Inauguration day. It was really interesting because I got the sense in talking to some of the districts, and these are districts located near the southern border. It was almost the sense of we’ve dealt with this before, and we’re dealing with this now with our state officials. And so there didn’t seem to be a ton of “we’re putting X, Y, and Z in place”. It was more of we’re going to rely on the practices that we’ve always relied on and we have a good relationship with border patrol in our community. If someone were to approach us, we would reach out to legal, so on and so forth. Right now, obviously a lot has happened since Inauguration Day itself, right? With the erosion of the sensitive locations policy, which that was more of a memo, that wasn’t necessarily like- didn’t hold the teeth that, Plyler v. Doe, for example, which basically guarantees or promises that immigrant students have a right to a public education here in the country.  But it was still maybe worrisome for some districts. And so it was interesting to kind of follow up with at least one superintendent who was like, yeah, we got guidance now from legal and we’re going to follow all the protocols that they’ve laid out for us. So it’ll be interesting. One quick thing I want to note. When we talk about Plyler v. Doe,, right, this longstanding Supreme Court precedent, I mean, Governor Greg Abbott has gone on the record in saying that he feels like the public education, I mean, excuse me, that the federal government rather should foot the bill for the public education of students from immigrant families. And we’ve seen bills filed that would erode that, basically attempt to align with what the Governor has stated. The reason why I bring that up, you have states like Oklahoma who are really pushing the limit right now, and I say that to say is you have a very friendly Supreme Court that is currently in place. And so that to me is a really interesting area to watch, even as it relates to the school voucher legislation because there was conversation in the hearing the other day about does this apply to students who are undocumented? And Senator Creighton was very careful. He talked a little bit about, Hey, the Supreme Court rule that immigrant students are entitled to a public education, and so that’s where we stand. But he did say that they will file an amendment on the floor to implement a trigger that if the Supreme Court were to overturn Plyler v Doe, then those students will no longer apply for those things. So I said to say,that’s a lot. I know I just said, but there’s a lot brewing as it relates to immigration policy at the federal level and how that aligns with Texas.

Ed McKinley: There’s a huge appetite in the building over there for these landmark Supreme Court cases to have the word Texas in the title, I think. And on the question about the federal education policy, a couple of quick things. I mean, there was a lot of-this came up a lot in the conversations about Project 2025 and what it would mean if the Department of Education were actually eliminated, which would require an act of Congress, and I think is very unlikely. A lot of what they do expenditure-wise is related to institutions of higher education. But for K-12, I think a big thing to watch is a 180-degree inverse of what we saw with the Biden administration and Obama before that, which is sort of using the tools of civil rights and investigative powers that the federal government has to kind of institute new requirements to behave a certain way in school or push certain values like no DEI, critical race theory, things like that. Some of the very same things that were being complained about under the Biden administration, as a random example, I remember Ag Commissioner Sid Miller talking about school lunch funding being tied to LGBTQ policies at schools and how wrong he thought that was. Well, I think now we can probably expect to see completely the opposite where it’s like, you might not be able to access these certain federal programs if you are engaging in these kinds of ideologies or policies. And then just one little interesting note in terms of a Texas tie, Penny Schwinn, who used to be a TEA official, was named the Deputy US Education Secretary, so there will be a person with intimate knowledge of the Texas education world and making some big decisions over there.

Morgan Smith: Well, we’re going to end it right there. I want to thank the four of y’all for being up here. This has been really great.

All Podcast Participants: Appreciate you. Thank you. Yeah, thanks so much.

Morgan Smith: Thank you for listening. To stay informed on critical education issues this session, you can sign up online for Raise Your Hand’s Across The Lawn Weekly Newsletter at https://www.raiseyourhandtexas.org/get-involved/. Today’s sound engineer is Brian Diggs. Our executive producer is Anne Lasseigne Tiedt, and our episode producers are Amelia Folkes, Amanda Phillips, Jay Moreno, Karen Wang, and Joel Goudeau.

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.

In this episode you’ll hear from Myrna Blanchard, Ph. D., Talent Acquisition and Policy Director at Castleberry ISD, J. Jacob Kirksey, Ph. D., Assistant Professor of Education Policy at Texas Tech University, Lori Powell, M. Ed., GT Specialist & Social Studies Facilitator at Northside ISD, Bob Popinski, Senior Director of Policy at Raise Your Hand Texas and JoLisa Hoover, Teacher Specialist at Raise Your Hand Texas.

These experts will 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.

Transcript

Note: Intersect Ed is best experienced as a podcast. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis missing from the transcript.

Intersect Ed Podcast – Season 3, Episode 1 Transcript

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.

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

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.

In this episode, we’ll hear from Raise Your Hand Texas’ Michelle Smith, executive director, and Bob Popinski, senior director of policy, alongside Channelview ISD superintendent Tory C. Hill, State Rep. Abel Herrero (HD-34), Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, and Jolene Sanders, advocacy director at The Coalition of Texans with Disabilities as they discuss their views on the current funding crises facing Texas public schools and what’s at stake during the Special Session.

Transcript

Note: Intersect Ed is best experienced as a podcast. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis missing from the transcript.

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.

Transcript

Note: Intersect Ed is best experienced as a podcast. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis missing from the transcript.

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

I’m your host, Morgan Smith.

Today, 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.

But it’s hard to ignore the timing of it all.

GINA HINOJOSA: I think it’s important for people listening to understand that what is happening with cut scores is part of a larger campaign by the governor to make our schools look bad.

MORGAN SMITH: This is Texas State Representative Gina Hinojosa, an Austin Democrat who serves on the House Public Education committee. The former president of the Austin ISD school board and a public school parent, Rep. Hinojosa has closely followed the accountability changes since they were announced this spring.

GINA HINOJOSA: There were efforts to say we had nasty books in the library, we’re grooming our kids, our teachers are not teaching curriculum, but they’re teaching  partisanship. All sorts of allegations that have been launched at our schools that those of us who are in our schools know are not true. All of that is part of a campaign to make our schools look bad so that the answer can be privatization or vouchers or ESAs, and most Texans don’t buy that. They are trying to wear us down, and I think we just need to stay strong.

MORGAN SMITH: It’s important to note here that nobody is arguing schools shouldn’t strive to make sure more students are prepared for graduation or that the state shouldn’t hold its schools to the highest standards possible. In fact, the state regularly ramps up accountability measures every few years. The problem lies in how the Texas Education Agency is rolling out these new standards.

BOBBY OTT: The issue is not the standards. There’s nobody in education that I know of that’s terribly afraid of accountability. I mean, that’s day-to-day in our lives.

MORGAN SMITH: Here is Dr. Bobby Ott, the Superintendent of Temple ISD, a district of about 8,500 students near Waco.

BOBBY OTT: But it’s the way that this has gone about, which has been so different. And so there have been people out in the public that have said, “Well, public schools knew in 2017 and 2018, because there was legislation that said standards were going to change.” Absolutely right. And so we fully expected that to happen sometime. It would’ve happened sooner, but COVID took place, so that didn’t happen. But that’s not what we’re complaining about. What we’re complaining about is there’s no transition year. And we’re also complaining about how drastic the changes are. When you implement changes like this, you typically do it by increments, and you lay it out there as the way you should do it.

MORGAN SMITH: What Dr. Ott says is true—school districts knew standards would increase after the Legislature passed a law making changes to the assessment and accountability system way back in 2017. But what’s happening now with the roll out of new standards was not directed by the Legislature when they passed that bill, 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.

TODD WEBSTER: The legal way to describe it is it’s essentially a delegation of legislative authority to the executive branch. So you have state agencies like the Texas Education Agency, which is an executive branch agency, and the legislature, (who) will enact a law and then say, “Okay, state agency, you go implement it.” Rulemaking is when the legislature gives the agency power to fill in the blanks.

MORGAN SMITH: This is Todd Webster, a government affairs consultant who over the last three decades has worked at many different levels of state government — including stints as the interim commissioner and deputy director of the Texas Education Agency.

TODD WEBSTER: Think of the legislature as directing the state agency to bake a cake, they tell them, “We want the cake to be of a certain type and variety and we want it to look like this.” The agency, it then has to come up with what the ingredients are and how you put them together and what temperature you have to bake the cake at. It takes sort of the basic direction that the legislature made or gave and has to fill in all the blanks so that they can make it happen. Because the legislative process is one where I think it’s coming up with all those details when you have that many people so figuratively in the room trying to figure out how to put all that together. It’s almost impossible to come up with every scenario and every detail and to think about everything in that environment.”

MORGAN SMITH: Over the last ten years, Todd Webster and other state government insiders say they’ve seen two things happen. The executive branch has slowly consolidated power at the agency level—and the Legislature has delegated more of the details of lawmaking to agency decisions.

DEE CARNEY: So when it comes to assessment and accountability, at least over the past four legislative sessions, we have seen bills that were signed by the governor, made it through both houses, signed by the governor. And in TEA’s rulemaking, the rulemaking did not align with the legislative intent of the bill. And when that happens, I’ve learned there is no redress for the legislators, even if they wanted to go back and or speak to TEA and say, “Hey, that’s not what we intended.” Remember in the bill language it says TEA has rulemaking authority. I think to me, trying to implement and trying to help districts understand the legislative process and the rulemaking process, it’s difficult to explain when that happens.

MORGAN SMITH: Dee Carney is a former middle school math teacher and longtime school administrative leader who is now an Assessment and Accountability Policy Consultant.

DEE CARNEY: Rulemaking is way down in the weeds, but it has a ripple effect from the Teacher Incentive Allotment and how teachers receive that additional incentive, because that’s based on test scores in part, to the value of your home. And how that letter grade impacts what you can sell it for, to businesses and workforce development that choose to move into your community or not, based on this letter grade. That’s why it’s important.

MORGAN SMITH: It’s hard to overstate how much these ratings matter to school communities. If a school district performs poorly, it faces the threat of a state takeover. And the ratings affect everything from whether teachers at a school receive bonuses, to real estate property values—to companies’ decisions to relocate to Texas or take that economic investment in our state elsewhere. But despite this, it’s incredibly difficult to influence the rulemaking process once it’s underway—even if you are a longtime lobbyist or lawmaker.

DEE CARNEY: The opportunity for public input around the accountability manual, which is the rulemaking process for accountability that occurred, the public comment period was May to June. So those comments, if people were going to comment on the manual, were submitted to the agency, and then the agency considers those public comments before they finalize the rules. You don’t talk to the agency. There’s not a hearing. You submit them online, the agency reviews them, and then they publish in the Texas Register if they agree with your comment or disagree with your comment. Most of the time, again, most of the time when you go back and look at the register, the agency disagrees with comments.

MORGAN SMITH: And when there’s dissent over what happens in the rulemaking process, there’s very little recourse for lawmakers or members of the public. They can either take it to the courts—which at least seven school districts, including Pflugerville and Del Valle ISD did when they sued the state over the new standards this August—or wait until the next legislative session rolls around to try to pass a new statute.

GINA HINOJOSA: What the commissioner is doing is moving the goalposts for our schools after the game is over and saying that they did not make the cut because they failed to score within the goal.

MORGAN SMITH: Here is Representative Gina Hinojosa again.

GINA HINOJOSA: I know that we hear complaints a lot in the Legislature that the commissioner is applying law in a way that members did not intend. That may be true to an extent, but legislators also bear responsibility here.

MORGAN SMITH: Representative Hinojosa says that lawmakers had the opportunity to pass a bill that would have ensured school districts had a year to transition to the new accountability standards instead of leaving that decision up to TEA Commissioner Mike Morath, but that the bill never got a committee hearing.

GINA HINOJOSA: I do think that Commissioner Morath exercises more discretion and control in his rulemaking than other agency executives, but I don’t think that washes our hands of responsibility to get it right.

MORGAN SMITH: Meanwhile, at the end of September, school leaders will be left to explain to their communities why their schools are suddenly dropping one letter grade or more.

GINA HINOJOSA: I think school leaders need to be transparent and upfront with our communities and not be fearful. This is happening through no fault of theirs. To have a new standard retroactively applied on our schools is 100% the doing of our commissioner, our governor; and most people, vast majority of people, in fact, I don’t think I’ve come across a single person who thinks that’s fair. It just violates our notions of fair play in all sorts of ways. I think once we tell our school communities, “Listen, this is the grade for the school, but the state has retroactively applied this heightened standard without giving us any indication that this was going to be the new standard, we will try to do better next time. But we did not know this was what the standard was going to be.”

MORGAN SMITH: This topic may be confusing and in the weeds. You can learn more about accountability issues at www.RaiseYourHandTexas.org.

To stay informed on critical education issues, you can 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 in the lead up to the special session, text RAISEMYHAND to 40649.

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