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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cabrera did not respond to a request for comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How EPISD plans to implement Algebra 1 for eighth graders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The debate over eighth-grade algebra

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

Some states have drastically different approaches.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moore agreed it may take more preparation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Testing English learners’ skills

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Score changes after human reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not an “accurate reflection”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And because of the pandemic, they say they don’t have to. 

A state official told The 74 that the work — an $84 million contract the state signed in March 2022 — falls under a disaster declaration Gov. Greg Abbott issued to speed up delivery of masks, vaccines and other critical supplies during the height of the pandemic. That means the paper trail that typically follows people who contract with the state, including work and payment reports, doesn’t exist in this case, the official said. 

Some members of the state board of education, which will vote on the curriculum in November, are accusing education Commissioner Mike Morath and his staff of a lack of transparency.

“I did not get a lot of my questions answered when it came to who wrote the curriculum,” said Evelyn Brooks, a Republican board member whose district includes the Fort Worth suburbs. She’s one of at least three members who asked officials at the Texas Education Agency for more details. “It’s hard and it shouldn’t be. Someone knows this information.” 

Morath said the overhaul will bring classical education to over 2 million K-5 students in Texas. The model is designed to strengthen kids’ reading skills while also teaching them culture, art and history, including the Bible’s influence. Interviewed in early May, the commissioner would only say that “hundreds of people” worked on the project.

But that doesn’t satisfy board members who say the curriculum borders on proselytizing and promotes a distinctly evangelical view of American history.

A teacher’s guide for a third-grade lesson on ancient Rome, for example, devotes eight pages to the life and ministry of Jesus — presenting many of the events as historical facts, scholars say. But the Islamic prophet Muhammad isn’t named anywhere. A kindergarten lesson on “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” draws parallels to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. And an art appreciation lesson walks 5-year-olds through the creation story from the Book of Genesis.

“Who are the people that sat down in this fancy room and said this is the knowledge that every Texas student should have?” asked Staci Childs, a Democrat who represents the Houston area. She said she understands teaching the importance of religion in American history, but thinks the balance is off. “I just don’t think that it’s fair to have that many biblical references in the text in public schools across the state.” 

The comments come a day before a Friday deadline for the public to submit feedback or suggest corrections to the curriculum.

Texas won’t force districts to use the materials, but is offering up to $60 per student — a total of $540 million — to any that adopt the program. That’s an incentive many are unlikely to turn down at a time school systems are projecting deficits and calling for tax increases to offset them. 

The controversy is occurring against the backdrop of GOP support for teaching the Bible in several states, including Texas’s neighbors. A new Louisiana law requires schools to hang the 10 Commandments in classrooms, while Oklahoma state Superintendent Ryan Walters is mandating that educators use the Bible for instruction.

But no state has invested as much time and money as Texas in connecting its curriculum to Judeo-Christian messages.

As The 74 first reported in May, Morath signed a contract for K-5 reading and K-12 math materials with the Boston-based Public Consulting Group. In turn, the organization subcontracted with curriculum writers and experts, including officials at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation and Hillsdale College.

At Hillsdale, Kathleen O’Toole, who leads work with charter schools affiliated with the Christian college, said her team only “offered resources on a few units having to do with early American history.” The college performed the work for free, she said.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation declined to comment on its role. 

The contract Morath signed with the Public Consulting Group requires the company to submit monthly progress reports “documenting all subcontractor payments.” But when The 74 requested the documents in June under the state’s Public Information Act, Sherry Mansell, a coordinator in the general counsel’s office, said the state dropped the requirement because of the governor’s pandemic emergency order. The absence of those spending reports “understandably could cause some confusion,” Mansell wrote in an email. In a follow-up, she said the agency is “ensuring we receive the goods and services as specified in our contract.”

The Public Consulting Group did not respond to phone calls or emails. 

When Mansell said no reports were available, The 74 asked an education agency spokesman to identify who wrote the new lessons and how much they were paid.

He didn’t respond until asked again Tuesday night. This time, he replied “absolutely” when asked if the public had a right to know the information and emailed a series of zip files containing over 100 pages of Public Consulting Group invoices for the past three years. None of them contained details about the religious lessons’ authorship. Reached again Wednesday, the spokesman declined to address the matter further.

‘Political considerations’

If board members are expected to approve the materials in November, Brooks said, they should know who wrote them.

She isn’t the only Republican on the board with reservations. Pat Hardy, a longtime GOP board member, said the state developed the new materials to placate the far-right wing of the party, which has pushed hard in recent years to expand Christianity’s presence in public schools. 

“They’re going to appeal to the Christian nationalists with their Bible stories. They’re just trying to gather votes,” said Hardy, who lost in the primary to a candidate who accused her of not being conservative enough. Nonetheless, she’ll remain in office for the vote on the curriculum in November. 

The Republican members’ views could hold sway on a board where they retain 10 of the 15 seats. Morath needs at least eight members to vote yes on the proposed curriculum for it to pass. 

Other Republicans on the board were less outspoken. Tom Maynard, whose district includes Austin, said there are “definite positives” in the curriculum as well as some needed “cleanup,” but didn’t offer specifics. Keven Ellis and L.J. Francis said they would save their comments until after a September meeting when the board will review the materials.

Questions about who wrote the biblical lessons are especially salient “when the curriculum is so shocking,” Democratic Rep. James Talarico, a seminary student and former teacher, told The 74. Talarico has been critical of the materials’ minimal attention to other world religions.

At a House education committee hearing Monday, he grilled Morath about whether “political considerations” influenced the overhaul. Talarico specifically named Tim Dunn, vice chair of the board of the Texas Public Policy Foundation and an oil magnate who has donated millions of dollars to conservative candidates — from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to voucher supporters running for the state legislature. 

“Is the Texas Public Policy Foundation an expert in curriculum design?” Talarico asked the commissioner. He also noted that the state unveiled the material four days after the Texas GOP adopted a platform calling for required Bible instruction in public schools. “Are those two related?” he asked.

Morath dismissed the suggestion. The agency sought expertise from a “pretty broad swath of individuals,” he said. Those included experts in Texas history, which figures prominently in the curriculum. Lessons with engaging stories, including from ancient texts like the Bible, can improve students’ vocabulary and comprehension skills, he told the lawmakers. He shared data from Lubbock, one of the districts that piloted early versions of the curriculum, where the percentage of third graders meeting expectations increased from 36% in 2019 to 47% this year. 

But Talarico questioned whether teachers are adequately trained to respond to student’s questions about religious topics raised in the curriculum like the Resurrection of Jesus and the Eucharist.

“When you’re talking about faith and you’re talking about theology, you’re working with fire,” he said. “These are serious topics. To me, this seems not only reckless, it seems that it could do great harm to students, whether they’re Christian or not.”

Republicans on the committee said their constituents have been “craving” such lessons. 

Rep. Matt Schaefer rejected Talarico’s concerns that students of other faiths might feel left out. Other major world religions, like Islam and Hinduism, he said, “did not have an equal impact on the founding belief systems of our country.” 

Biblical experts who have analyzed the new lessons, however, find inaccuracies and say some of the material is misleading. 

The Texas Freedom Network, which describes itself as a “watchdog for monitoring far-right issues,” released an analysis of the curriculum Thursday, saying several lessons give students a distorted view of history.

The authors of the curriculum “smuggled” in lengthy passages on Christianity when a sentence or two would have been sufficient, David R. Brockman, a religious studies scholar at Rice University and the report’s lead author, said in an interview. He pointed, for example, to a reading from the Book of Matthew on the Last Supper as part of a fifth grade study of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting.

“I really wanted to keep an open mind,” he said, adding that the emphasis on the Bible makes sense when teaching students about Western civilization, but doesn’t help them learn to live in a diverse society. “Are they looking purely backward or are they looking forward? Texas students are not going to be living in 1787.”

Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said he submitted over 80 comments to the state. Some focus on a second grade lesson about Queen Esther, which talks about her faith in God, prayer and protecting the Jewish people’s freedom to worship.

The curriculum authors edited biblical material “to their liking to make it more religious,” he said. “The Book of Esther never mentions God, prayer or worship — not even once.” 

His analysis of at least four other lessons that include Bible verses showed the authors exclusively relied on the New International Version of the text, a 1978 work he called a “distinctively evangelical translation” that was “made by evangelical scholars for evangelical Christians.”

A spokesman for the education agency did not address specific criticisms but said officials would examine potential inaccuracies revealed in the comments.

‘Will it teach students to read?’

Pam Little, another Republican board member, said her constituents are split “about 50-50” over the significance of the biblical material. Some conservative parents, she said, are upset “because they don’t feel like public schools are the place to teach Christianity.”

But others, she said, are more concerned with whether the lessons will improve student performance. This year’s elementary test scores show there’s still a long way to go. The results were mixed, with declines in third and fifth grade and an increase in fourth. 

The real question is “Will it teach students to read?” Little said. “For some reason, we seem to be having problems in Texas with that.”

Most Texas adults agree with arguments against school vouchers, but in the end, they still would support legislation that makes such programs available to all families in the state, according to a new survey released Monday.

The University of Houston and Texas Southern University survey asked 2,257 adults about their opinions on school vouchers, programs that let families use taxpayer dollars to pay for their children’s private schooling, and education savings accounts, a form of vouchers that state leaders like Gov. Greg Abbott have advocated for since last year.

The survey also asked respondents whether they agreed with some of the most common arguments made against and in favor of vouchers. Proponents argue vouchers give families more choices to pick the school that is best for their children while opponents worry they divert money away from already struggling public schools.

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

“When they weigh the pros and the cons of vouchers, [respondents came] down on the side of being pro-voucher,” said Mark Jones, a professor at Rice University and one of the report’s authors.

Black adults in particular were more likely to agree with arguments made against school vouchers while still supporting such programs, Jones said.

Seventy percent of Black adults supported creating a school voucher program that all Texas families have access to, and 72% supported school voucher legislation that would only benefit low-income families. Black adults were also the most likely to agree with arguments against school voucher legislation like “vouchers/ESAs funnel money away from already struggling public schools” and “vouchers/ESAs provide funding to private schools and individuals with only limited accountability for how the funds are used.”

“I think it has to do in part with a growing share of African Americans who look at their public schools and believe that their public schools are failing them, and don’t believe that without some type of change, like the adoption of vouchers, that situation is going to change anytime soon,” Jones said.

People who identified as Republicans were much more likely to support legislation that would create a voucher program for all families in Texas and less likely to support a proposal only for low-income families, the survey found.

Meanwhile, Democrats were more likely to support a voucher program just for low-income families. White Democrats were the least supportive of a voucher program for all families.

The survey didn’t find a significant difference in support for vouchers between respondents in rural, suburban and urban parts of the state.

Vouchers were Abbott’s top legislative priority last year. Proposals for an education savings account program ultimately blocked by a coalition of Texas House Democrats and rural Republicans, who have traditionally opposed vouchers.

During this year’s primary elections, Abbott campaigned heavily against Republican incumbents who voted against vouchers, unseating several. Abbott has said the Texas House now has enough votes to pass a voucher program during next year’s legislative session.

Disclosure: Rice University, Texas Southern University – Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs and University of Houston have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/07/29/texas-vouchers-survey/.

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

From purchasing alarm clocks, donating Uber gift cards, showing up on families’ doorsteps and even attempting to help parents plan their vacations, Clear Creek ISD employees are exhausting their options to get students to show up to school.

In the roughly 40,000-student district southeast of Houston, 17 percent of students were considered “chronically absent” during the 2022-23 school year – meaning they missed at least 18 school days. That’s up nearly double from five years ago.

The issue is not unique to Clear Creek ISD. Mirroring a nationwide, persistent trend, rates of chronically absent Houston-area students exploded after the pandemic. It’s a phenomenon that leaves many wondering why kids aren’t coming to school like they used to – and what it will take to fix that.

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

Houston’s other largest districts did not make administrators available for an interview for this story.

School leaders and education experts say high absenteeism has devastating ripple effects on students’ academic performance, school district funding and society’s overall perceived importance of the classroom. Yet there is no clear solution, causing schools to scramble to improve attendance habits.

“There did become the feeling of, ‘Is schooling optional?’” said Holly Hughes, Clear Creek ISD’s assistant superintendent of elementary education. “We know that the habits start in pre-K, in our earliest years, with parents understanding the value and the intention. It’s a lot to get our students to school in the morning.”

When schools returned in-person after the pandemic sent classes online, most large Houston districts saw their chronic absenteeism rates double. Those rates decreased in the 2022-23 school year — the most recently available state data — but still remain much higher than pre-pandemic levels.

‘Do we even need the school?’

The pandemic shattered the routine of going to school each morning, and once students returned, the lingering option of remote learning was largely seen as an acceptable alternative for when students don’t show up in person.

“People became comfortable staying home and not going to school, where they could dial in or not dial in,” said Kevin Brown, executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators. “There wasn’t anybody there to enforce that.”

That’s created an issue larger than anyone knows how to fix, let alone any one district, says Joshua Childs, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education. To him, it signals to him a shift in the culture of American schooling.

“At this moment, we are wrestling, as a country, as a state, in terms of what we value when it comes to educating the kids under the age of 18,” Childs said. “Like, what’s the value of education, and what’s the purpose of the school itself? And do we even need the school?”

School leaders and education experts agree that a student’s attendance has major impacts on their academic achievement. The Texas Education Agency warns that chronically absent students are more likely to perform poorly on standardized tests, and they’re less likely to attend or complete college.

In a late June State Board of Education meeting, TEA commissioner Mike Morath hypothesized that increased absences could be a reason why student math scores are declining across Texas.

“Our broad hypothesis of this is that Covid caused much higher absenteeism from instruction, and as a result, much more mathematics gaps,” Morath said. “The linear nature of mathematics as a discipline is such that if a student misses little chunks of that discipline along the way, that may or may not cause them immediate problems, but it will certainly, at some point in time, prevent them from achieving higher levels of mathematics.”

But the problem lies in getting students and families to understand these stakes.

“One of the things that the pandemic … maybe raised more questions around, is, ‘What’s actually the purpose of schooling? If I can do it through my phone. I can learn through TikTok. I can learn through using technology in different ways, and arriving in a building every single day may not be what’s best for my kids or myself,’” Childs said. “It has big impacts, as far as academic outcomes, employment, post-secondary opportunities, social, mental, physical health outcomes. All of that is impacted based on a child’s attendance.”

Across-the-board issue

Chronic absenteeism affects students across different demographics – campus-level data shows that in some Houston districts, schools in both affluent and underserved communities post similarly high rates of absenteeism.

Students in underserved areas may miss school because they lack necessities like transportation, or because they have a job to support their families. Meanwhile, students from more affluent families may miss class to take regular vacations or visit colleges. Across the board, it’s easier to keep kids at home because parents are increasingly able to work remotely.

With no simple root cause, there’s no crystal-clear solution to keeping kids in the classroom.

Hughes, the Clear Creek administrator, said she found it isn’t as simple as providing more “wraparound” resources such as clothing and transportation. They’ve had to urge families to schedule doctor appointments and college visits on staff professional development days, supply suggested dates for vacations, and try to communicate the overall importance of the in-person school routine.

“It’s important to start those traditions, those expectations and those structures in the home early,” Hughes said. “Going to school on a daily basis and committing to that follow through every day, it takes a lot on a family unit. … I think it became hard for parents.”

A pricey problem

Brown said declining attendance is a circular issue – the more kids miss school, the less money districts have to rectify low attendance.

The Texas government funds schools based on their average daily attendance, meaning total attendance counts for the year are divided by the number of instructional days to produce the number of students a district is funded for.

Proponents of attendance-based funding say it provides incentive for improving attendance, while critics have long argued it more heavily penalizes schools with students dealing with socioeconomic factors that drive absenteeism.

Many school districts across Texas have outlined multimillion-dollar budget deficits this year, and several Houston-area school boards have pointed to declining attendance rates as a factor contributing to their financial woes.

“Schools are working really hard to try to get the kids in but it takes the parents and the kids, as well, to get them into school,” Brown said. “Schools can’t do much on attendance, other than encourage and try to build an environment where kids want to be there.”

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

Benjamin Gregory, a former community college student, managed to graduate with an associate degree and transfer to a four-year school despite the challenges of enrolling as an older student.

And for Loren Van Tilburg, earning a four-year degree came to a halt when he left college and started his own automobile business.

From financial concerns to questioning the need of a four-year degree, Jennifer, Benjamin and Loren represent many students who were left unprepared to make their college decisions as the path to earn a four-year degree continues to be riddled with barriers.

“If you have some understanding of what you want to make of yourself and you have a plan to apply your skills, leaving college can be the best thing for you,” said Loren, who like many of his peers has had a growing interest in immediate employment and apathy for a four-year education.

Here are the experiences that led to Jennifer, Benjamin and Loren’s college decisions:

Jennifer Toledo, 19

Northwest Vista College

Growing up in Mexico, Jennifer always wanted to live in the U.S. and finally got her chance when she moved to San Antonio, Texas by herself when she was 15 years old.

But there were challenges — including when her high school stopped offering ESL classes — forcing her to learn English and complete schoolwork on her own.

“It was hard,” Jennifer told The 74. “I was using the translator on my computer [because] I didn’t know how to say anything.”

But Jennifer’s experience changed when she took an education class in high school and the teacher helped her learn English.

Intending to join the U.S. Navy post-high school, Jennifer’s teacher encouraged her to enroll in classes at Northwest Vista College instead.

Today, Jennifer has earned her associate degree in teaching and will transfer to The University of Texas at San Antonio in the fall.

Her goal is to earn a bachelor’s degree in bilingual education so she can teach the ESL classes she was unable to receive as a high school student.

“I really want to help students,” Jennifer said. “I want to be that teacher who speaks and teaches them English.”

But Jennifer said navigating her transfer experience was “stressful” because she was balancing her studies with working part-time at a local middle school.

“At some point, I wanted to quit [and] go back to Mexico to stay with my family because of the stress,” Jennifer said.

Jennifer attributes the counseling offered at her community college as one of the support systems that helped her stay afloat.

“I needed help, I needed someone to listen to me and tell me ‘you’re okay, everything’s going to be fine,’” Jennifer said.

Her hope for other students is that they don’t allow their inability to speak English to hinder their higher education goals.

“I want to demonstrate to my family, and to everyone, that it’s possible,” Jennifer said. “I want to be an inspiration for them so they know there’s no limit to what they can do.”

Benjamin Gregory, 27

The University of Texas at San Antonio

Benjamin graduated high school in 2014 and enrolled at Texas A&M University where he majored in aerospace engineering.

But he was more focused on getting a “PhD in partying” and left school after a semester to join the workforce.

He spent three years working as a Target employee followed by one year as a mall security guard — where a physical altercation with a thief altered his life.

“Being a security guard was such a terrible experience for me because I hate being mean to people,” Benjamin told The 74. “I got reprimanded for laying my hands on someone who on the [security footage] obviously attacked me and I ended up quitting my job.”

His parents encouraged him to “give college another shot.”

“This path working an hourly job as a security guard and as a retail worker wasn’t for me. I really didn’t like doing it, but it was just something I had to do to live, pay for food and rent and all that,” Benjamin said. “I just wanted a clean slate.”

In 2019, Benjamin enrolled at Northwest Vista College and eventually transferred to The University of Texas at San Antonio where he majored in mechanical engineering.

“I went from working a job where I didn’t really have to do anything besides walk around a mall…to having homework again,” Benjamin said, adding how grateful he was to have a second chance to take courses in what he is truly passionate about.

But navigating college as an older student without a paycheck came with challenges — most notably how to pay tuition on top of his other bills, including car payments and credit card debt.

“I didn’t know if I was actually going to be able to stick with it the whole time,” Benjamin said. “But fortunately enrolling in community college first was significantly cheaper and a lot more relaxed because [professors] know there’s other things outside of school that students have to worry about.”

Enrolling in community college first offered him a better transition back into higher education, he added.

“The class sizes were so much smaller so you could get to know your professor very easily,” Benjamin said. “And they don’t really do research at a community college so they were a lot more excited to show up to class than a lot of professors you will meet in a university.”

Benjamin recently graduated with his bachelor’s degree and will continue his studies at The University of Texas at San Antonio — but instead of a “PhD in partying” he’ll be working towards a doctorate in chemical engineering.

“I know that classes can sometimes suck…but I’ve been in the workforce without a degree and I know that sucked a lot more,” Benjamin said. 

“I’m thankful to my community college for the professional development and helping me be a more open person,” he said. “It was one of the best experiences of my life.”

Loren Van Tilburg, 19

University of La Verne

Loren originally enrolled at the University of La Verne and majored in economics, but quickly grew disinterested in his studies.

After his first year, Loren made the decision to leave his four-year school and get a job.

He experimented with a few ways to earn income — from day trading to dropshipping — but found his real passion was taking care of cars.

In 2023, Loren started a car detailing business which involves traveling to his clients’ home to clean and repair their vehicles.

“I won’t sugarcoat it, the decision was very difficult,” Loren told The 74. “But at the end of the day, I knew that I wanted to start a business and I wouldn’t need a degree for it.”

While balancing his budding business, he also began working with a brokerage firm to become a financial advisor, which involves studying for a securities license he aims to complete by the end of the year.

Loren’s desire for on-the-job training and trade certification compared to a four-year degree reflects the mindset of a growing number of young students.

“I’ve always wanted to do something like this because managing money makes money,” Loren said, adding that many of his coworkers had similar educational pathways.

“It’s a cool environment to be in,” Loren said. “So if anyone chooses the path that I chose, it’s really good to find a community of people that made similar life choices because they will understand where you’re coming from and your struggles.”

For Loren, leaving his four-year school was the best decision he could make for himself despite initial pushback from his parents. 

“There have been ups and downs, but I definitely don’t regret my decision,” Loren said.

“For me, if I have to resort to going back to school then I failed,” he added. “I’m not saying if you go to college you’re a failure, but I chose this path for myself so if I go back then I kind of just wasted all this time.”

This article is part of a series in partnership with reporter Joshua Bay’s Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship highlighting the struggles of community college students.

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

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

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

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

El Paso Matters: Can citizens do anything to help?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

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

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

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

Rep. James Talarico had concerns.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Zero reference points’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Cultural heritage’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Both sides of that debate’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Great works of literature’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The role of Amplify

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Biblical literacy’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Devotional in nature’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Koskoff criticized DPS for deflecting blame away from state police.

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

Pooja Salhotra contributed to this story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rural pushback

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

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

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

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

According to survey results, the public stir around school choice made little impact on Republicans around the state. In a February poll from the Texas Politics Project, a research institute housed at the University of Texas at Austin, just 2 percent of potential Republican voters listed ESAs as a top issue influencing their primary vote. Asked which politicians’ endorsements might sway them, only 7 percent named Abbott. 

But the governor’s energetic campaigning clearly helped to sweep out a healthy proportion of the state GOP’s biggest ESA critics in the March 5 primary. So did the heavy spending of conservative donors — including billionaire TikTok investor and school choice maven Jeff Yass, who personally gifted Abbott with $6 million in December to spend on the campaigns.

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

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

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

‘A clear message’

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

In addition to the individual contributions made by Yass and other wealthy activists, the conservative challengers have drawn deeply from the coffers of the Club for Growth, a right-leaning advocacy organization based in Washington. Through an affiliated Super PAC, the School Freedom Fund, the Club spent $4 million in the March primaries; they’ve dropped at least as much in the three months since.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

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

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

EPISD enrollment declines

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

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

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

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

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

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

El Paso ISD budget, teacher pay

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

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

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

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

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

The future of EPISD high schools

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

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

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

2025 bond election plans

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

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

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

What’s next in school closure plan?

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

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

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

Timeline:

May 2024: 10 feeder pattern community meetings

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

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

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

2025-26 school year: School consolidations, closures implemented

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contributing factors also include federal pandemic relief funds and new laws in states such as Colorado and Michigan that pay student teachers. In Maryland, for instance, some candidates earn a $30,000 living stipend during their year long teaching residency. 

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

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

Enrollment in teacher preparation programs declined 45% in just one decade — about 300,000 fewer teachers are prepared annually. Compounding social, political and economic strains fueled the decline, including a major recession and education reform efforts that negatively impacted public perception of teaching and America’s schools. 

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

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

About 1.2 million fewer students enrolled in K-12 public schools nationwide in 2022 than before the pandemic. The steepest drops are in the younger grades, partially a result of declining birth rates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fewer seniors complete FAFSA

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

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

In an effort to make the FAFSA process easier, Congress passed the FAFSA Simplification Act in 2021. The new application was to be more user-friendly with fewer questions (36 down from 108). It also was supposed to expand the eligibility for federal financial aid.

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

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

Financial aid offers lag behind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘We’ll fix the problems’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A civic responsibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help America Vote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moreover, new research shows that the presence of immigrant students can benefit U.S.-born peers in the classroom. A 2023 study found that, in most cases, greater exposure to immigrant peers correlated with better math and reading scores among U.S.-born students. In 2021, researchers found similar results, affirming that increasing a student’s immigrant exposure was correlated with bumps in reading and math scores. It also revealed that, on average, immigrant students have fewer serious disciplinary incidents than their U.S.-born peers, which might have a beneficial effect on their classmates’ behavior and academic outcomes.

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

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

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