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

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

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

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

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

Read Transcript HERE.

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

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

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

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

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

Read the Transcript Here

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

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

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

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

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

Read the transcript here.

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

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

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

Read the podcast transcript here.

The formalized practice of having more experienced teachers coach those newer in the profession has the potential to help with a major challenge facing Texas public schools — teacher shortages. It also benefits everyone involved, from the experienced teachers acting as mentors who now have a chance to learn new skills, to the newer teachers they are supporting, and to the students who now have confident, calm educators in the classroom. 

Hear from current and former teachers Mario Piña, Regional Advocacy Director – Central Texas at Raise Your Hand Texas, Jennifer Cook, 7th Grade English Language Arts Teacher at Livingston ISD, and Jerome Johnson, 8th Grade English Language Arts Teacher at Channelview ISD in this episode. They will share how mentoring teachers can create higher-quality classrooms across Texas, and why Texas lawmakers need to take the framework of what’s already a good program and expand it so that more teachers — whether veteran or new in the classroom — can benefit from teacher mentoring for generations to come. 

Read the podcast transcript here.

With just a few weeks left in the 88th Legislative Session, lawmakers are deciding how to spend a record-breaking $33 billion surplus, with tens of billions more in estimated growth in revenue over the next two years. And, as the hours creep closer and closer to the last day of the 2023 legislative session, they are not deciding to spend it on teachers.

You may have seen headlines about some major legislation — Senate Bill 9 and House Bill 100 are two of the proposals out there that would increase teacher pay. But here’s what you need to know about those bills: they don’t come anywhere close to moving Texas teacher pay in line with the national average OR bumping their salaries enough to keep up with inflation. 

Hear from Raise Your Hand Texas teacher specialist JoLisa Hoover and three Texas teachers (Mineola ISD, Northwest ISD, and El Paso ISD). They will share the reasons why a real pay raise is needed, and why one of the teachers is leaving the classroom at the end of this school year. 

Read the podcast transcript here.

We’re taking on a topic that has become a marquee fight of the 88th Legislature: private school vouchers, which are also known as education savings accounts (ESAs). On one side, we have our state’s two most powerful elected officials, Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who say every parent should get the freedom to decide how to use taxpayer money in educating their children. On the other, we have every public education advocacy group in the state, including Raise Your Hand Texas, who all say that vouchers will do nothing but harm students, teachers, and communities.

In this episode Morgan Smith will be joined by Randy Burks, Ed. D., Superintendent of Hamlin Collegiate ISD, and Bob Popinski, Senior Director of Policy, Raise Your Hand Texas. Listen in to learn why ESAs and vouchers are bad policy for Texas and would hurt our rural school communities.

Read the podcast transcript here.

What is the amount of money Texas pays to educate a student in public schools? What’s known as the basic allotment is the per-student sum the state uses as the foundational building block to determine how much money it will pay to educate a student. Learn why it should be increased in the 88th Texas Legislative Session.

Host Morgan Smith will be joined by Laura Yeager, a public school parent and founder of Just Fund It TX, a nonpartisan group of parents, students, and community members, Bob Popinski, Raise Your Hand Texas’ Senior Director of Policy, and David Pate, the assistant superintendent of finance for Richardson Independent School District.

Read the podcast transcript here.

Listen to the episode 15 podcast about advocacy and the 2021 legislative session.

Deep in West Texas is the tiny town of Presidio – a remote community that is 90 miles away from the nearest McDonald’s and more than 150 miles away from the nearest Walmart. So what does a remote city like Presidio have in common with more urban areas hundreds of miles away in the Rio Grande Valley? They are all communities lacking the infrastructure to provide reliable and affordable access to the internet to their residents.

With conversations happening about virtual education options for the future, Texas must solve the digital divide and that solution rests on solving infrastructure and access issues. The solutions need to work for students in major metropolitan areas as well as the students in the most rural communities. In part two of Intersect Ed’s look at the digital divide in Texas, we focus on what innovative solutions communities are finding to close the gap between the haves and the have nots of the internet age.

Read the podcast transcript here.