Texas can enforce a state law requiring public schools to display posters of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

A 9-8 majority of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Texas officials’ favor, concluding that the law does not establish an official state religion.

“It does not tell churches or synagogues or mosques what to believe or how to worship or whom to employ as priests, rabbis, or imams,” according to . “It punishes no one who rejects the Ten Commandments, no matter the reason.”

The court heard arguments in January after 16 families sued over the law, alleging that it amounted to state leaders promoting their interpretation of Christianity over other faiths.

All 17 active judges on the court listened to the case — — alongside a similar challenge in Louisiana, the first state to pass a Ten Commandments requirement for its public schools. The court cleared the way in February for Louisiana to fully implement its law.

After Tuesday’s decision, the civil rights organizations representing the families expressed disappointment.

“The court’s ruling goes against fundamental First Amendment principles and binding U.S. Supreme Court authority,” the groups said in a statement. “The First Amendment safeguards the separation of church and state, and the freedom of families to choose how, when and if to provide their children with religious instruction. This decision tramples those rights.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the decision, calling it a major victory for Texas and its “moral values.”

“My office was proud to defend SB 10 and successfully ensure that the Ten Commandments will be displayed in classrooms across Texas,” Paxton said. “The Ten Commandments have had a profound impact on our nation, and it’s important that students learn from them every single day.”

The case is playing a central role in the national debate over whether the laws violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which prohibits governments from endorsing or promoting a particular religion. The civil rights organizations said they plan to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the decision.

Here’s what we know.

Background: The Texas Legislature passed in 2025, with Gov. signing it into law that June. It requires public schools to display donated posters of the Ten Commandments, sized at least 16 by 20 inches, in a visible space on classroom walls.

The families — represented by a coalition of civil rights organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas — sued 11 school districts to block what their lawyers called “catastrophically unconstitutional” legislation.

U.S. District Judge Fred Biery agreed, blocking the law from taking effect in the districts named in the lawsuit: Alamo Heights, North East, Lackland, Northside, Austin, Lake Travis, Dripping Springs, Houston, Fort Bend, Cypress-Fairbanks and Plano.

Biery concluded the law improperly favors Christianity over other faiths and said it would likely interfere with families’ “exercise of their sincere religious or nonreligious beliefs in substantial ways.”

asked the 5th Circuit Court to overturn Biery’s ruling and allow all 17 active judges on the court to hear the Texas and Louisiana cases together.

A federal judge Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law from taking effect in 2024, a decision last year by a panel of three judges on the 5th Circuit Court. Twelve of the appeals court’s were appointed by Republican presidents. The court is considered one of the most conservative in the nation.

The arguments for the case did not include two other challenging the Ten Commandments law.

One lawsuit resulted in a federal judge blocking 14 more school districts from complying with the law. The other asks a federal judge to block all Texas schools from following the law and is pending.

Why the families sued: They argued that the law subjects children to a state-imposed Protestant version of the Ten Commandments that many religious and nonreligious Texans do not recognize.

The families believe the law seeks to pressure students into observing and adopting Texas officials’ preferred religious principles.

They say the law will inflict harm by alienating children of those who do not follow the state’s preferred religion and that parents’ authority to direct their children’s religious education is undermined.

“Posting the Ten Commandments in public schools is un-American and un-Baptist,” Griff Martin, a pastor, parent and plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in a statement last year. “S.B. 10 undermines the separation of church and state as a bedrock principle of my family’s Baptist heritage. Baptists have long held that the government has no role in religion — so that our faith may remain free and authentic.”

The families’ lawyers argue that because children are legally required to attend school, they have virtually no way of avoiding �ձ�油��’ required version of the Ten Commandments.

The U.S. Supreme Court found public school displays of the Ten Commandments unconstitutional in 1980. Civil rights attorneys argue that only the Supreme Court can overturn its previous rulings.

What the state argues: Paxton and attorneys from his office say the Ten Commandments played a significant role in the nation’s history and heritage. State leaders have said previous rulings from federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court did not examine that historical significance.

State lawyers also note that the Supreme Court recently , established by a previous ruling, that determined when a government had unconstitutionally endorsed or established a religion.

“There is no legal reason to stop Texas from honoring a core ethical foundation of our law, especially not a bogus claim about the ‘separation of church and state,’ which is a phrase found nowhere in the Constitution,” Paxton said last year.

Lawyers with the attorney general’s office see the Ten Commandments requirement as requiring only a “passive display on the wall” that does not rise to the level of coercion because students are free to ignore the posters. The law might cross the line if it sought to incorporate the Ten Commandments into lessons or assignments, they argued.

The posters must go up in Texas classrooms only if donated by someone. The law does not specify what would happen if school leaders choose not to comply. The state views that as evidence no threat or harm is posed to families. However, Paxton if schools do not comply and sued three districts for alleged noncompliance.

What happened during oral arguments: Some judges questioned state officials from Texas and Louisiana about their decisions to use a Protestant version of the Ten Commandments and how that would affect families who do not follow those religious principles.

Lawyers for the states argued that the laws do not ask children to subscribe to a particular belief and urged the judges to consider legislators’ intent to teach students about important documents in U.S. history.

The judges questioned how children would know the posters have anything to do with American history. They also asked for historical evidence showing the use of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

Lawyers for the states pointed to early textbooks that referenced the Ten Commandments but acknowledged those materials were largely used in religious settings prior to the establishment of public schools in the 1800s.

Public schools used the materials through the early 20th century. However, a prominent historian who testified in the case that the Ten Commandments were not significant aspects of the texts and that it is unclear how much teachers relied on those specific lessons.

“A legislature in Louisiana, a legislature in Texas, is absolutely well within its right to say: We want to actually teach our students about founding documents,” said Ben Aguiñaga, the attorney representing Louisiana.

Judges asked the lawyers representing the families why they consider the Ten Commandments posters problematic when students recite the Pledge of Allegiance and learn about the Declaration of Independence and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail — all of which refer to God.

King’s letter and the Declaration of Independence may reference religion, the lawyers replied, but they’re about more than religion.

Some judges noted during arguments that the Supreme Court’s 1980 ruling heavily relied on a test that courts no longer use. The families’ lawyers countered that removing the test did not overturn Supreme Court precedent preventing the Ten Commandments from going up in public classrooms.

If students do not follow the religious principles in the state’s mandated version of the Ten Commandments, judges asked, can’t they ignore the posters?

“They can’t just look away, your honor,” said attorney Jon Youngwood, representing the families. “Not for 13 years. Not in every class. Not every minute of every day.”

What the court ruled: A court majority concluded that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1980 ruling in is no longer valid. That case found a Kentucky law requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court recently abandoned the test established in Stone that determined whether states had illegally endorsed or promoted a religion, the 5th U.S. Circuit judges noted. That means “there is nothing left of Stone,” they noted in the ruling.

They concluded that Texas’ Ten Commandments law does not establish an official state religion. Among reasons, they noted that it “levies no taxes to support any clergy. It does not co-opt churches to perform civic functions.”

The judges ruled that the law is not coercive because it does not require students to learn the Ten Commandments or give teachers authority to undermine students’ religious beliefs.

“Yes, Plaintiffs have sincere religious disagreements with its content,” the opinion reads. “But that does not transform the poster into a summons to prayer.”

An opinion written by judges who opposed the decision argued in response that it is insignificant that �ձ�油��’ law does not require schools to teach the Ten Commandments.

The law poses a threat to children’s religious beliefs and undermines what parents may want their kids to learn about religion, they wrote in dissenting statements.

The opposing judges agreed with the argument of families who sued that the Supreme Court has not overturned its Stone v. Graham ruling. Lower courts are bound by Stone even if the test established in it is no longer in use, they added. Taking into account the historical-based approach courts must now use, the dissenting judges said �ձ�油��’ law still violates the Constitution.

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That’s why she’s grateful that her 11th grader Kai can explore a career field at her high school in the Tomball Independent School District, outside Houston. Kai is in the legal studies program, which meets daily at the Tomball Innovation Center, a 70-acre facility that houses programs like aviation maintenance, cybersecurity and app design.

“For her to just get her feet wet and see if it’s something that she might want to do for the rest of her life is awesome,” Davis said. “You don’t want to go into something in college and then all of a sudden not understand what it is you’re getting into.”

Programs like Tomball’s are helping to keep some families in public schools at a time of rapidly expanding private school options, according to from Tyton Partners, a consulting firm that focuses on the education sector. Enrollment in the district has climbed from 10,000 to nearly 24,000 students over the past decade, even as many others in the Houston metro area have . The report attributes such increases to career-connected high schools that not only reflect student interests, but that are popular with both kids and parents. 

“Everyone’s looking to create fun, interesting new programs. In fact, there are probably too many of them,” said Adam Newman, Tyton founder and managing partner. Instead, districts should focus on making sure a “critical mass” of students participate in high school redesign initiatives for those programs to “remain compelling for parents” and attract growth, he said.

A survey of 250 high school administrators showed that more than half of districts and charters with high participation in redesigned programs saw enrollment growth between 2022 and 2025. Those with minimal participation continued to see enrollment decline.

But that hasn’t been the problem in Tomball. The demand to enroll in classes at the facility, a for an oilfield services company, is so great, the district holds a lottery to admit students. With an actual courtroom on site, Kai, who attended a classical Christian school for K-5, has been able to observe traffic court. She’s learning how to prepare oral arguments and properly cite case law. 

“They teach you about how to think like a lawyer,” she said. “I feel like I’ll definitely have a leg up once I get to college.”

Other students can earn a pilot’s license when they graduate or leave with an industry certification in fields like animal science or graphic design. Those in the , an early college model, will complete an associates degree along with a high school diploma. 

With HCA Healthcare nearby and building a branch of its pharmaceutical business in Houston, Tiffani Wooten, assistant director of the Tomball Economic Development Corp., said P-TECH helps “fast track” kids into in-demand careers. 

Health care is a “huge growing industry that we’re going to have to continue to filter kids in,” she said. She describes her role as a “connector” who works with the district to “bring the industry to the table.”

Christian Lehr, managing director at Tyton, said the district views “career-connected pathways as a core enrollment and value proposition strategy,” instead of as an add-on.

‘Enrollment pressure’

The report is a departure for Tyton, which has focused most of its analyses in recent years on efforts to disrupt the public education system. In 2022, it released survey data showing a one-year, 9% drop in families saying their children were enrolled in a traditional district school. Charters, private schools and homeschooling saw increases over that same time period.

In a deeper look at school choice, Tyton researchers reported in 2024 that improving their children’s mental health was the main reason why parents considered leaving the traditional system for alternatives like online programs and private schools.

This year, the team “turned the lens back to the public system because many of them are grappling with enrollment pressure,” Lehr said. With AI changing the workplace, they’re also thinking about the “shift from a college-for-all, No Child Left Behind mentality.” 

There are plenty of reasons to rethink education for teens, said Celina Pierrottet, who leads a high school transformation project with the National Association of State Boards of Education. 

In a from Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation, less than half of students said their schoolwork was challenging in a positive way or matched what they do best. Forty-six percent of 12- to 27-year-olds, including those in K-12, said they weren’t having any engaging experiences at school. Chronic absenteeism also remains higher than it was before the pandemic.

“There are a lot of warning signs flashing that high schools need to change,” Pierrottet said. 

‘A long journey’

The Tyton project, funded by the Walton Family Foundation, also includes brief case studies of districts and charter networks to identify some common redesign elements, like getting input from students on what they want and relying on outside groups, including employers and nonprofits, to execute the programs. 

The pattern revealed itself in Arizona, where over 100,000 students participate in the state’s universal private school choice program. Enrollment in the , outside Tucson, has increased 4.3% since 2022. While new housing development in the area has contributed to growth, enrollment increases have outpaced that of the high school-aged population. 

The Tyton report also features the Anaheim Union High School District in California, which used to remake secondary schools and re-engage students. District leaders took the focus off testing and designed courses like biotech chemistry that link academic content with job skills.  

One school launched a community gardening project that’s used for instruction across the curriculum. But getting the community to notice can be “a long journey,” Lehr said. The Anaheim district has been at its redesign work for a decade. 

In a state where public school enrollment is expected to through the end of the decade, the Anaheim district has seen a slight decline since 2022.

“The key question is whether execution holds,” Lehr said. “If it does, we’d expect stabilization and ultimately growth over the next five years.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

The Texas State Board of Education gave preliminary approval Friday to a mandatory list of books that all public schools will teach starting in 2030, paring down an earlier version students and educators had criticized for being too long, lacking diversity and emphasizing Christianity.

The majority-Republican board voted 9-5 to approve the reading list, which the group will have a chance to revise ahead of final approval set for June. All five Democrats on the board voted against the list.

The board had on the list in January to allow for more time to review the proposal.

A required the Texas Education Agency to design the list of reading materials for public K-12 students. The agency initially recommended roughly 300 books for consideration, far exceeding the requirement of at least one literary work in each grade.

The original list included childhood favorites across a range of genres — from Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat to S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders — while also incorporating biblical material such as The Parable of the Prodigal Son and The Road to Damascus. In addition to the lack of religious diversity, critics raised concerns about the underrepresentation of women as well as Hispanic and Black authors.

The revised list, proposed by Republican member Keven Ellis of Lufkin, cut about 100 readings — including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Frederick Douglass’ What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? — though it still includes Bible texts.

“There are other states, many other states, who have recommended reading lists,” Ellis said. “To my knowledge, there is not one that will have a required reading list as robust as this, that will be common for every student across the state.”

The Texas Education Agency created the original proposal after reviewing books used by other states and organizations. The agency has also said it factored in survey responses from roughly 5,700 teachers, noting that the list contained fewer books than what educators said they currently use.

But during hours of public testimony this week, educators said they considered the survey insufficient because teachers did not review or revise the reading list before the education agency submitted it to the State Board of Education.

They pointed to a different survey of more than 2,600 educators conducted by the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts. The survey concluded that in all but one grade, it would be “mathematically impossible” to read and teach the full list during the typical 36 instructional weeks in a school year.

“I believe that an acceptable list would be one that’s created with teacher expertise, leaning on the strengths of everyone involved in this work,” said Markesha Tisby, president of Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts. “There’s still time. There’s no prize for making this decision quickly. We have time to build something great for our Texas students, and they deserve it.”

The public has not yet weighed in on the revised list the board preliminarily approved Friday.

Member Julie Pickren, R-Pearland, said she was shocked to see writings from Douglass and Booker T. Washington removed. Republican Brandon Hall of Aledo said he views the list as a “starting place.” Members will have opportunities to suggest changes and offer feedback before the final vote in June.

Supporters of the list have said they believe the biblical material will help students better grasp the influence of Christianity in U.S. history. Meanwhile, at least one critic called the original list and its biblical material “a lawsuit waiting to happen,” while many stressed the importance of students needing to see themselves reflected in the books they read.

“As a recent graduate of the Texas public school system, I care deeply about the curriculum my friends and family will be taught,” said Sumya Paruchuri, a freshman at the University of North Texas.

“The best taught English classes that I had were when the teachers were passionate about the text they were teaching, whether they were fans of the work or understood the educational opportunities they presented for students,” Paruchuri added. “The required reading list’s attempt to standardize readings is unhelpful and counterproductive to the real needs of students and educators.”

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State officials, activists and educators have largely shaped public dialogue about �ձ�油��’ social studies overhaul, but young people added their voices to the conversation Tuesday, calling for instruction that includes diverse perspectives and challenges them to think critically.

The majority-Republican education board began last year to redesign �ձ�油��’ social studies standards, which outline what students need to learn by the time they graduate. The board plans to finalize the standards this summer, with classroom implementation expected in 2030.

Up to this point, a majority of the board has to center Texas and U.S. history in social studies while deemphasizing world cultures, world history and geography. A has helped guide the process, almost all of whom have no K-12 classroom experience in Texas and several of whom have ties to . Critics say the panel has assumed full control of �ձ�油��’ social studies rewrite, undermining teacher expertise. of the social studies changes, critics argue, prioritize memorization over critical thinking and simplification over accuracy.

The students who testified before the State Board of Education on Tuesday, the first of four days of meetings in Austin, expressed disappointment in the overhaul — saying it focuses too heavily on Western civilization at the expense of other cultures, lacks historical perspective of people of color, and prioritizes Christianity over other major world religions.

They want to learn the good, bad and ugly aspects of history. They want to understand why things happened and how they connect to other events. They want the board to give parents and teachers more opportunities for input. They want the board to slow down and take more time to develop the standards. They want to eliminate political agendas. They want to feel seen.

“We know when something is being left out,” said Caiden Davis, a high school junior from Humble. “What we need from our schools isn’t a watered-down version of history. We need the truth even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it challenges us.”

Instead of omitting perspectives, said Houston student Zayra Espinoza, Texas should “focus on supporting teachers, investing in students and ensuring classrooms remain spaces for learning, not political control.”

And students need to see their perspectives reflected in social studies, because “everyone deserves to be represented,” said sixth-grader Jomeyra Sharif.

“Schools should do more to promote equality, respect different cultures, and making all students feel included,” Sharif said, “so they can be proud to be American.”

The board will finalize the standards in June. Meetings have only grown more contentious as the deadline moves closer.

Democrats have sought honest depictions of slavery and the historical contributions of people of color. Republicans want to prioritize American exceptionalism and Christianity, criticizing Muslim Texans who testify in favor of Islam being depicted in lessons accurately and fairly. Teachers feel excluded, calling the process rushed and early proposals inadequate. Many feel political actors have assumed control of a process that should instead focus on educating students.

Students who spoke Tuesday, during a meeting that stretched beyond 12 hours, said they want social studies instruction to include more women, Hispanic and Black perspectives. They want to learn about African kingdoms. They want to know more about the Middle East.

When students are not challenged to do more than just identify and describe historical events, “that means less analyzing, less questioning, and less discussion,” said Gannon Davis Keener, a seventh-grader in Humble.

“I want to learn history in a way that challenges me to think, not just remember,” Keener said. “I respectfully ask that you slow down and allow teachers and parents a greater role in revising these standards to keep the level of thinking high so students can truly learn, understand and enjoy history.”

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Editor’s note: This post contains an image that includes a racial effigy.

Jennifer Lee and Kyev Tatum agree that �ձ�油��’ Black students do not receive the same academic support as their peers, that schools punish them unfairly and that recent state laws silence Black history and perspectives in the classroom.

But the two Black Texans sharply diverge on whether the state’s will make education in Texas better or worse for students who look like them.

Lee feels confident that vouchers, which allow families to use public funds for private school and home-schooling costs, will allow the state to drain money from a public school student population while benefiting and . That’s what she sees in other states with vouchers, often referred to as “school choice.”

“It’s impossible to research a school choice program and not come away understanding that it has been detrimental almost everywhere it’s touched,” Lee said.

Tatum, a Fort Worth pastor, believes vouchers will provide Black families who are frustrated by the shortcomings of public education the funding needed to build private schooling options.

“There’s not one person in the whole entire country who can look me in the eye and tell me that public schools have done right by Black kids,” Tatum said.

Texas families faced a to apply for vouchers, which will provide home-schoolers up to $2,000 per year, private school students $10,500 and children with disabilities up to $30,000. State leaders are now deciding which students will receive funding for the 2026-27 school year, pending their acceptance to a school. Of almost , 45% are white, 23% are Hispanic and 12% are Black.

As Texas prepares for its inaugural school year offering vouchers, Lee and Tatum’s opposing viewpoints on what it will mean for Black students differ as much as their perspectives on school vouchers’ discriminatory history in Texas. In 1957, Texas lawmakers proposed a voucher plan as part of a slate of bills introduced to avoid compliance with the landmark Supreme Court decision making it illegal for schools to separate children based on race.

Since that time, the Legislature has grown more racially and ethnically diverse, though it is still .

And Hispanic students now make up the majority of public school students, surpassing white students in enrollment. Yet no other racial or ethnic group lags further behind their school peers than Black children, who make up 13% of Texas students but and .

When today’s Republicans pitched school vouchers, they promoted them as a state-funded option for families to escape the boundaries of their local school districts. The movement achieved its crowning moment after Gov. Greg Abbott and his campaigned against House Republicans who opposed vouchers, helping elect new lawmakers who voted for the program.

“Gone are the days that families are limited to only the school assigned by government,” Abbott said moments before signing the voucher legislation. “The day has arrived that empowers parents to choose the school that’s best for their child.”

Vouchers became Texas law in an era when Republicans say diversity efforts have shifted schools’ focus from core academics toward political activism. They believe such efforts have effectively given people of color preferential treatment.

In recent years, Texas lawmakers have also required public schools to teach about in ways that ensure white students do not feel guilt. Districts can for as long as considered necessary, a form of punishment against Black students. And campus leaders can when creating policies or making hiring decisions, despite evidence that Black educators for students.

“DEI agendas divide us rather than unite us and have no place in the state of Texas,” Abbott said in an banning diversity, equity and inclusion policies in state agencies. “These radical policies deviate from constitutional principles and deny diverse thought. Every Texan is equal under the law, including the state and federal Constitutions, both of which prohibit government discrimination based on race.”

Tatum is fed up. His support for vouchers is about rescuing as many Black kids as possible from public schools.

“What I’m saying is: Those who want to stay in the house and burn, stay in the house,” Tatum said. “But for those of us who don’t want to burn, open the door, allow me to leave, and give me my money so that I can give it to a house that’s not burning, but thriving.”

Lee worries vouchers will leave fewer resources for kids who remain in public schools. She also questions why Texas officials want anything to do with an initiative once proposed to derail Black children from equal opportunity.

“You might believe in parent choice and all of that,” Lee said. “But when you start talking about you, as a person, sitting in church on Sunday, are you really OK with saying, ‘Well, yeah, I do want segregation again’?”

“The best education is an investment”

Texas public schools receive funding based on student attendance, meaning they will lose money for every child who leaves to participate in the voucher program. In other states offering vouchers, a mass exodus of children leaving public schools for private options has not materialized. Still, critics worry the Texas program will grow in size and cost. And if future cuts are needed, they worry political leaders will trim public school budgets first.

Lee, a former public school teacher and a 2024 Democratic candidate for the Texas House, acknowledges public education has a long way to go in helping Black students grow and thrive in the classroom.

Majority-Black schools are more than as majority-white schools to receive a D or F in �ձ�油��’ academic ratings. On state tests, Black students of all racial and ethnic groups. Aside from , Black students all other Texans on national exams, too. They graduate at the and drop out at .

But Lee contends that such inequities do not emerge by accident. It starts, she said, with inadequate resources.

“Our country has demonstrated that time and time again, we believe that the best education is an investment,” Lee said. “Private schools cost ridiculous amounts of money because parents believe that education is an investment.”

In 2023, Abbott said he would not sign sweeping education funding legislation if it excluded a voucher program. When , public schools lost out on billions that could have benefited students. The 2025 legislative session marked the that Texas lawmakers increased across-the-board money for public education.

Hundreds of districts approved budget deficits over that time. They increased class sizes, cut staffing and closed schools to save money. Last year’s nearly boost still fell billions short of catching them up with inflation. Meanwhile, Texas in average teacher salary and per-student spending, respectively, according to the National Education Association.

Public education advocates acknowledge that funding is not the only reason for — or answer to — Texas’ academic shortcomings, especially for Black students who have suffered through resistance to integration, the elimination of Black educators and unequal access to quality facilities and learning materials. And Lee thinks state laws clamping down on initiatives that promote diversity exacerbate negative academic outcomes.

But the advocates see funding as the foundation.

“Teachers are being asked to do so much with so little and then being mocked because they couldn’t quite get there,” Lee said.

Private schools typically face no requirements to accept students who live in their community or make learning arrangements for children with disabilities.

On the contrary, traditional public schools generally do not charge tuition or set admission requirements. They welcome different faiths and religions. They teach students who speak different languages. They accommodate students with disabilities. They offer free lunch, health care and laundry.

In other words, public schools are a public good worth preserving, said Michael McFarland, superintendent of the Crowley Independent School District, a majority-Black school system in North Texas.

“You’re still going to have the masses of children in the public institution,” McFarland said. “If the public institution is no longer serving the public good, then it creates a definite challenge for our country, a challenge for our city and our state.”

When states expand voucher access to include virtually any school-age child like Texas has, tend to benefit most. Lee fears the children of white and wealthy Texans will graduate from well-funded private schools while public school students will graduate from scraps.

“What’s going to happen is that we’re going to see a lot of Black and brown children who have schools that are broken down, very few resources, and basically feeding that pre-K to prison pipeline,” Lee said.

She refuses to allow her 9-year-old son, Brock, to grow up in a bubble where he interacts only with children of the same belief system and social class. If Brock is expected to thrive in the real world, Lee said, she wants him educated in a setting that closely resembles that world. Public schools work, she insists, because they teach children “how to be a human.”

“When we start siloing ourselves and saying, ‘I only want to be around white, straight Christians,’” Lee said, “then suddenly everyone else who doesn’t fit into that category, they’re not people, they’re problems, they’re things, they’re other.”

“They don’t love us back” 

Before Brown v. Board of Education, Black schools suffered from inadequate funding, outdated textbooks and crumbling buildings. Even so, highly credentialed led those institutions, and they nurtured Black children while holding them to high expectations. Students those heightened standards.

But in newly integrated schools after the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown, many white leaders deemed Black teachers and administrators unfit, demoting them, firing them or forcing their resignation. So while Black and white students began attending the same schools, Black educators became rare.

“You had a system where Blacks wanted kids to do well,” said Tatum, who argues that �ձ�油��’ current teachers and administrators resent Black students’ culture and achievements.

“You don’t protect what you do not respect,” Tatum added. “Since Brown, we’ve tried to love them, but they don’t love us back.”

A civil rights activist who founded and previously ran a charter school, Tatum is the one Black families call when public schools have wronged their children. One teacher multiple times during a class presentation, another into a child’s mouth. Black trauma pushed Tatum to a stark conclusion: Public schools have a culture problem.

The Texas Legislature could grant school districts access to all the money in the world, Tatum insists, but additional funding will not change school leaders who for sporting locs or who for celebrating hip-hop. In the Fort Worth Independent School District, a majority Hispanic and Black district in Tatum’s hometown, only one-third of students are testing on grade level.

“Let’s be real,” Tatum said. “These kids have been traumatized in these inner-city communities, in schools.”

In Tatum’s vision, Black churches will open small schools. Black teachers will lead instruction. Students will celebrate Juneteenth and learn to read. Administrators, by fostering a nurturing learning institution, will kill the school-to-prison pipeline.

At that point, voucher advocates say, Black communities will have used the environment of “education freedom” to their advantage, reclaiming their students and prioritizing their values.

“And that’s what we should do — first of all, because Black people have never been served well by the public education system,” said Denisha Allen, executive director of Black Minds Matter, a national organization advocating to improve academic outcomes for Black children.

Noliwe Rooks, an Africana studies professor at Brown University, wrote a book detailing how resistance to integration decimated Black school systems and subjected many Black students to discrimination and violence from their white peers.

Rooks agrees that many Black students today still lack the support they enjoyed in schools before the Brown decision.

However, she also noted that building Black schools without deep knowledge of how to manage finances, how to develop curricula and teach, and how to assist students with varying disabilities will create similar challenges that plague other schools. Black communities possessed that knowledge during segregation, Rooks said, which is why “losing the infrastructure for Black education matters.”

“Just having some Black people say, ‘I’m going to start a school for Black kids,’ has not worked,” Rooks said. Vouchers, she added, are also not the fix.

“It further exacerbates what’s broken,” Rooks said. “The problem is the education system — the idea of it as a public good, as something that’s supposed to be shared, that’s a national priority — that’s what’s broken.”

But Tatum has heard those arguments before. The grandfather of 15 does not get consumed with the “philosophical” — how he describes evidence that voucher programs tend to benefit wealthy white families, do not significantly improve learning and were once proposed by segregationist white lawmakers trying to undermine integration.

In his mind, nothing is worse than the trauma Black families have experienced in public schools or the fact that too many students in his hometown of Fort Worth cannot sufficiently read.

Tatum views the real problem as Texas forcing Black children to exist in a toxic educational environment. If Black families want to use state resources to exert more control over their kids’ education, he said, they deserve an opportunity to do so.

“You can get philosophical with me. You can get theological with me,” Tatum said. “But I’m trying to get practical with everyone.” 

“Same song, different verse”

Voucher programs, where almost all school-age children qualify, have only existed since 2022. In the , vouchers primarily served limited groups, such as low-income students and students with disabilities.

show that vouchers increase the likelihood that students graduate high school and go to college, while others conclude that they lead to small improvements in public schools. Meanwhile, some research also shows students for public schools at high rates. And while older studies demonstrate mixed effects on test scores, research in the past decade shows vouchers leading to .

Despite evidence that vouchers can harm test scores — the primary metric Texas leaders use to judge public schools — advocates are standing their ground. Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Abbott, said the governor believes the program will unlock new opportunities for students to grow.

“An overwhelming majority of Texans from all walks of life support expanding school choice to all Texas families — including minorities, Republicans, Democrats, independents, and people across rural Texas,” Mahaleris said. “Texas is on a pathway to becoming number one in education, and the passage of school choice is an unprecedented victory for Texas families, students, and the future of our great state.”

The will launch at the start of the 2026-27 school year. Almost 275,000 students applied — demand that exceeded available funding. In a state where about 53% of public school students are Hispanic and 13% are Black, nearly half of voucher applicants are white and 75% previously attended a private school or home school.

To divide the money, Texas will consider the applications of students with disabilities and low-income families first, though students are not fully approved until accepted to a private school. Families have more than 2,200 voucher-approved private schools to pick from, and those schools have the power to accept or deny students as they see fit.

Fears that the program will create two tiers of publicly funded education date back to the 1950s. Two years after the Brown decision, candidates in the Texas gubernatorial race of Black and white children learning together. In a Texas Democratic primary, several hundred thousand voters for school segregation. White Texans Black families, hanging dolls that resembled Black students being lynched.

that advocated for vouchers, a state legislative subcommittee wrote: “While showing great concern for the effect of segregation on the psyches of negro children, the Court neglected to display any concern whatsoever for the effect of integration on Southern white children and their parents.”

In 1957, lawmakers passed bills authorizing the attorney general to in desegregation lawsuits and allowing the governor to where federal troops showed up to enforce integration. A voucher bill, passed by the Texas House, would have to families who pulled children out of integrated schools. When the bill moved to the Senate, a small group prevented passage with the help of a .

One of the opposing senators was Henry B. Gonzalez, whose son Charlie Gonzalez, a former U.S. representative, sees vouchers as a choice to divest from a state education system that serves mostly students of color while propping up majority-white private schools.

“I always say it’s the same song, different verse,” Charlie Gonzalez said.

“To me, it really is about segregation. It really is resisting diversity,” he added. “Am I wrong? I don’t think so. I don’t think my dad was wrong in 1957. I don’t think I’m wrong today.”

“We can do both”

Lee and Tatum may never find out if the voucher program worsens or improves long-term academic outcomes for Black children because participating schools are not required to administer the same tests as public schools.

Voucher supporters argue instead that parent satisfaction will determine success.

In defending the program during the 2025 legislative session, Rep. Brad Buckley and former Sen. Brandon Creighton expressed confidence that vouchers would not harm public schools or promote discrimination.

“In harmony, we can lift up our public schools and our public school teachers like never before in historic ways, and we can provide education opportunities that fit the needs and are customized for our individual Texas students,” Creighton said during a Senate debate. “We can do both of those at the same time. Those aren’t warring provisions or concepts unless we allow stakeholders to manufacture a narrative that supports such a division, such chaos, such a lack of harmony.”

The two Republicans, who co-sponsored the voucher legislation, did not respond to requests for comment. The Texas comptroller’s office, which oversees the program, declined to comment.

On the fifth day of Black History Month last year, Sen. Borris Miles occupied the same floor where Henry B. Gonzalez and Abraham “Chick” Kazen Jr. filibustered seven decades before.

Miles, a Houston Democrat who is Black, reminded colleagues that Southern states proposed school vouchers to avoid integration. He reminded them that states defunded and closed Black schools. He warned that if it happened then, it will happen again.

“I’m sure that history is going to show that this body has created a separate but unequal education structural system and made it law,” Miles said, “made it law by sacrificing the masses for the very few.”

This first appeared on .

Most of �ձ�油��’ school voucher applications came from white families and children who previously attended a private school or home-school.

The Texas comptroller’s office, which manages the program, released final applicant data Thursday evening, saying it will continue verifying information before admitting students in the coming months. The program will allow families to use taxpayer funds for private school or home-schooling costs.

Of the 274,183 Texans who applied for vouchers before Tuesday night’s deadline, 45% are white, 23% are Hispanic and 12% are Black. Low-income families make up 37% of applicants — defined by the program as a family of four earning $66,000 or less per year. Children with disabilities make up 16% of applicants.

For comparison, 24% of Texas 5.5 million public school students are white, 53% are Hispanic and 13% are Black. About 60% of students are considered low-income — defined in public education as a family of four earning $61,050 or less annually. Children with disabilities make up 16% of enrollment.

Meanwhile, about 75% of voucher applicants attended a private school or home-school during the 2024-25 academic year. The comptroller did not provide data on students’ current enrollment.

The state found nearly 25,000 voucher applications ineligible.

The applicant pool, while not fully reflective of the families who will ultimately receive voucher funds, indicates that taxpayer money will mostly flow to families who, before the program, had already committed to having their children educated in a private school or home-school.

During the 2025 legislative session, state lawmakers and advocates as a benefit for low-income families and students with disabilities fed up with inadequate public schools. Of all applications, 63% came from middle- to high-income families — 27% of them making at or above $165,000 per year for a household of four.

“It’s not surprising that a state as big as Texas has more voucher applicants than other smaller states, especially with such a large marketing budget,” Carrie Griffith, executive director of Our Schools Our Democracy, a public education advocacy group, said in a statement.

“It’s also not surprising that so few public school families have applied for a private school voucher,” Griffith added. “Public schools deliver special education services, provide transportation, support extracurriculars, keep kids safe, and prepare them for life. They are one of �ձ�油��’s most effective, unifying public institutions. And the data remains undeniable: Most Texans want strong, fully funded public schools — not vouchers.”

Travis Pillow, a spokesperson for the comptroller, said Texas anticipates having only enough funding to offer vouchers to children with disabilities and students from low- and middle-income families. Program participants, Pillow believes, will look different than the pool of applicants.

“We are working on a detailed report that captures all our outreach efforts for year 1, but we know there’s going to be more work to do to get the word out in year 2 and beyond,” Pillow said. “We’ll be looking for opportunities to reach more families we didn’t reach in year 1 and for ways to build trust in this new program.”

In with voucher programs structured like �ձ�油��’, white families with children previously in private school make up the majority of participants.

Most participating Texans with children in private schools will receive about $10,500 annually. Home-schoolers can receive up to $2,000 per year. Children with disabilities qualify for up to $30,000 — an amount based on what it would cost to educate that child in a public school.

Demand for the program exceeds $1 billion in available funding, which means the state will conduct a lottery to determine who can receive vouchers. The state will consider, in order of priority:

• Students with disabilities and their siblings in families with an annual income at or below 500% of the federal poverty level, which includes a four-person household earning less than roughly $165,000 a year (12% of applicants).
• Families at or below 200% of the poverty level, which includes a four-person household earning less than roughly $66,000 (32% of applicants).
• Families between 200% and 500% of the poverty level (29% of applicants).
• Families at or above 500% of the poverty level (22% of applicants); these families can receive up to $200 million of the program’s total budget. Children who attended public school for at least 90% of the prior school year will receive priority within this group (5% of applicants).

Families must still find private schools — which are generally not required to accommodate students with disabilities — to accept their children. Whether families identify a private school will ultimately determine who receives voucher funding. Parents must have their children enrolled in a school by July 15.

Later this month, families will begin finding out if they can receive voucher funding. Most families applied to receive funding for pre-K, though the state deemed half of those applications ineligible.

This first appeared on .

was originally reported by Lauren Nutall of .

ARLINGTON, TEXAS — In early December, drilling resumed near Mother’s Heart Learning Center.

Newly installed gas wells dot property at 2020 S. Watson Road, less than one mile from the day care. One day in December, the sound of fracking machinery was so cacophonous that children couldn’t play outdoors.

For gas companies and stakeholders, the project is . But many Arlington residents and experts say it could come at the expense of the community��— especially its children.

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In January 2025, the Arlington City Council unanimously approved a permit allowing French oil and gas company TotalEnergies to install 10 new gas wells in East Arlington, which has a heavy concentration of Black and Latinx residents. It marked the first time in over a decade that the city council approved a permit for a new drill site after years of community opposition.

Named Maverick, the new site also lies near three schools — Johns Elementary, Adams Elementary and Thornton Elementary. Five wells owned by the same company already occupy the plot of land near the new drilling site, which the company has owned since 2008.

Hydraulic fracturing — or fracking — is used to extract gas by pumping pressurized water, sand and chemicals into bedrock. Texas policymakers have lauded the activity as a boon to local communities, garnering $2.48 billion in state tax revenue in 2025, according to the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. Arlington is choked with hundreds of these gas wells. The city, which sits atop the Barnett Shale, is a modern-day Golconda. ��

But fracking has drawn sharp criticism from health experts, who say it could be linked to severe conditions like preterm births, congenital anomalies, lung diseases and childhood cancers.

The practice has also elicited backlash because of its role in accelerating the global climate crisis through greenhouse gas emissions. TotalEnergies has been embroiled in legal controversies for years, and its troubles have mounted in recent months. , brought on by a coalition of French environmental groups and more than a dozen municipal authorities.

The company has rejected proposed limits to its fossil fuel production. “It makes no sense at all to prevent TotalEnergies [from] producing oil and gas that the global energy system still uses today,” it “The courtroom is not the right place to advance the energy transition.”

The 19th interviewed Arlington residents about the impact fracking has had on their lives. They shared their fears about their grandchildren’s health, their experiences living in neighborhoods impacted by fracking and their reservations about TotalEnergies expanding operations in the city.

Devastated residents throughout Arlington

Ingrid Kelley, 69, has grown tired of the gas wells sprouting throughout North Texas. Several sit less than a mile from her house in East Arlington, and a pungent lingering scent of sulfur and something else that she can only describe as “rotten” has settled into her neighborhood. She fears what might happen to her 4-year-old grandson, who lives with her and attends Mother’s Heart Learning Center.

“I can’t project and trace what all is going to affect him and all those that live around there and all those that are around these sites,” she said. “It’s very hard to project what’s going to happen, how many people are going to have increased cancer risk, respiratory disease, cardiac disease — all the things that go along with being premature or having congenital heart disease that affect you the rest of your life.”

Her grandson — who was born in Arlington with a congenital heart disease — has had to undergo intermittent nebulizer treatment since he began attending Mother’s Heart in 2024, a treatment typically reserved for those who have lung complications. He had no prior respiratory complications, Kelley said. Kelley won’t open windows at home, fearing contaminated air from nearby fracking sites will seep in.

“We’re like one big science experiment here,” said Kelley who, in 2016, became involved with . She is now on the board.

Edgar Bunton, who is in his 60s, moved to his home in southwest Arlington six years ago and lives less than 600 feet from more than a dozen wells. His wife began to experience frequent and unexplained migraines. Two of his grandchildren who live near these gas wells have respiratory complications, which Bunton attributes to the wells.

“I really got on board because of my grandbabies,” he said.

The adverse health effects of hydraulic fracturing on children have been studied over the decades.

“This is a cumulative risk issue, because this is not just one chemical at a time people are being exposed to,” said Meagan Weisner, a senior health scientist at Environmental Defense Fund and a former public health epidemiologist who has studied health impacts related to oil and gas development in Colorado. “This is dozens of chemicals coming from more than just one site because they’re already near other wells.”

According to Weisner, the contaminants released are dangerous to nearby residents not only during the drilling phase, which emits numerous toxic chemicals, but also after.

“There were a lot of parents that were reporting their children were feeling ill during the pre-production phase,” Weisner said, which encompasses drilling. “So it would not surprise me at all if these residents in Texas that are close to these 10 wells experienced adverse health impacts because of their proximity.”

Children in particular are uniquely susceptible to harm. “We saw health impacts in children extended out to two miles from the pad,” she said. “I don’t know if that would be the exact same in Texas, but we saw adults had reported significant adverse symptoms within a one-mile radius but, for children, it was within a two-mile radius, and that does track along the lines of children are just much more vulnerable.”

The 19th reached out to the City of Arlington for comment. In an emailed response, the city only said that the drill site was approved because “it met the 600-foot spacing requirement from protected uses, as outlined in the City’s Gas Drilling and Production ordinance.”

TotalEnergies did not respond to questions from The 19th.

Before energy companies descended on Arlington, the sprawling land behind Phil Kabbakoff’s house was decorated with oak trees. When the company Chesapeake Energy arrived in his neighborhood, they were leveled and reduced to kindling. Now, a towering drill rig owned by TotalEnergies looms behind the 84-year-old’s home in their place.

Kabbakoff resides in the Glen Springs subdivision of southwest Arlington, the same neighborhood where Bunton’s grandchildren developed respiratory illnesses.

“A lot of these houses now are leased, and so people come and go, and we don’t know who they are,” he said. “We used to know everybody on the street.”

Like other residents, he was upset that more gas wells were installed by Mother’s Heart. “We were up in arms about it all the way around,” he said.

While Kabbakoff would like to see sustained changes made to fracking practices in the city, he believes that Arlington elected officials will only continue to value the interests of gas companies despite protest.

“They’re never going to change, not this council,” he said. “They don’t know anything about it. Nobody’s researched it. They could care less. They know they make money from it, and that’s all they’re worried about.”

‘Sacrifice zones are safe spaces for polluters’

In 2005, landmen arrived to secure land for mineral ownership and drilling rights from Arlington residents. Ranjana Bhandari, founder of Liveable Arlington, was approached and ultimately declined.

“This is almost 20 years ago,” she said. “Because I was a mother — I had a young child — I didn’t think that it made any sense to have that kind of pollution around our children.”

At the onset of the fracking boom in Arlington, Bhandari spent hours poring over reports from other regions that experienced similar fracking booms, hoping for a glimpse of what this new development might mean for her city.

“Very quickly, they built 56 drill sites here, and they were spread out all over the city,” she said. “There’s literally one everywhere you see, one every few minutes.”

She read studies about cancerous pollutants linked to childhood leukemia coming out of states like Colorado. In the neighboring city of Fort Worth, she saw reports that air quality was slowly deteriorating because of drilling-related emissions of benzene, .

“Benzene is a serious, serious cat,” she said. “It’s a category one carcinogen. There’s no safe amount of it.”

Bhandari recalled a particular moment when she and her family stopped at a red light directly across from one now-defunct drill site around 2011. Within minutes, she said, they began to feel sick. “That was my first inkling that we weren’t just looking at climate harm.”

The discovery was bleak to Bhandari. By 2015, families in Arlington found themselves overwhelmed by the drill sites’ noxious fumes and the effects of fracking that rippled throughout the city — so much so that they decided to intervene. She created Liveable Arlington the same year.

“We were a mothers’ organization — mothers and grandmothers concerned about children’s health — and, through our campaigns and over the years, started learning many new things,” Bhandari said.

“We focused on the science. We focused on the community,” she continued. “I started it as a concerned parent. We were much more focused on fracking near children, fracking near day cares and schools, and so some of our most successful campaigns and most of our advocacy was to stop expansion of fracking around eight sites in Arlington, which are right next to day cares.”

Now 61 years old, she has seen the very problems she once read about penetrate her own community. And the repercussions have been more consequential for some communities than others. More often than not, Bhandari said, they’ve settled disproportionately in majority Black and Latinx neighborhoods, like the one where Mother’s Heart is located.

“The burdens of fracking were so unequally distributed,” she said. “The other bigger picture that people seem to miss when they say, ‘It’s OK to put it somewhere else, just not near me,’ is that you always will preserve a safe place. Sacrifice zones are safe spaces for polluters.”

The students’ home districts — Agua Dulce, Premont, Brooks County, Freer and Benavides — used to operate separately. They had a shrinking student population, were unable to provide much career and technical education, and struggled with low achievement. But seven years ago, a handshake between the superintendents of the Premont and Freer independent school districts gave rise to what would become the .

Today, the consortium, created to stave off consolidation threats and improve student outcomes, is being lauded as a . And the Texas legislature has encouraged other districts to follow its lead.

The five districts, located 45 to 90 minutes southwest of Corpus Christi and serving a student population that is at least 75% Hispanic, share six academies: Early College, for credit toward an associate degree; Grow Your Own, for future teachers; Ignite Technical Institute, focusing on welding; Next Generation Medical Academy, offering nursing and pharmacy education; Willa Zelaya STEM Discovery Zone, featuring computer technology, drone aviation and robotics; and Trade Winds Academy, for HVAC, construction and electrical.

Students wishing to participate in an academy choose the program they want in eighth grade. They take traditional core classes at their home high school and travel to the academies twice a week and every other Friday — about 10 times a month. 

Sophomore Juliana Farias catches a 6:45 a.m. van, driven by school staff and internet-equipped, at her high school in Agua Dulce for the 45-minute trip to the Grow Your Own Academy. Her friend Emmerson Perez, also a sophomore, does the same in the small town of Freer, nearly an hour west. 

They meet up at Premont Collegiate High School around 7:30 a.m. and walk to a nearby elementary to begin their day as teacher interns. The two won’t be in Premont long. They’ll return to their respective high schools by midday to continue their regular classes. 

Mylan Pena, a junior at Falfurrias High School in Brooks County Independent School District, chose the welding academy because it offers the chance to earn a free associate degree as well as industry credentials. When Pena was a child, his uncle and grandfather worked as oil pipeline welders, leaving home for weeks at a time. It’s a job he wants to pursue after he graduates.

“I’m blessed to even have this opportunity,” he said. “My mom is a single mother. I know she wouldn’t have the funds to provide this for me. Getting the opportunity to take college (classes) for free and learning to weld for free means a lot.”

Pathways like these are more commonly found in larger, wealthier metropolitan school districts. Texas has more schools in rural areas than any other state — about . As families flock to more densely populated communities, rural schools are left with scarce resources and sometimes merge as they struggle to serve isolated towns. 

That was the situation in 2019, when the Rural Schools Innovation Zone officially launched. 

The districts had to find something innovative to keep the doors open, said Michael Gonzalez, Rural Schools Innovation Zone director. “We had no opportunities for kids,” he said. “We needed to do something about it.”

The Premont and Freer districts obtained grant funding and partnered with Brooks County Independent School District to form the consortium. It expanded to include the Agua Dulce and Benavides districts in 2023. The five districts together have about 3,250 students.

Last year, 424 students were enrolled in the academies. Now, there are nearly 600. Gonzalez said 680 are projected to participate in the 2026-27 school year.

It “was phenomenal” how the Rural Schools Innovation Zone turned trends around for the communities in south Texas, Gonzalez said. He’s been the consortium’s director since it was created and was the sole employee for five years, before recently hiring a liaison to help coordinate between the districts and their college partners.

Premont, which had the worst of the partner school districts, increased its student population from 570 students in 2012 to in 2024. From 2018-19 to 2023-24, the school districts the percentage of their graduating students who pass the state’s in both math and reading from 30% to 51%. The percentage of seniors with dual credit jumped from 16% to 50%, while those with industry certifications increased from 8% to 38%.

Based on the program’s success, Texas legislators in 2023 to create a that funds similar collaborations among rural districts. The Rural Schools Innovation Zone is such partnerships across Texas. Last year, lawmakers for career technical and education programs, including the rural collaborations, and promoted them as a key strategy for economic growth in the state. 

Here’s a look inside some of the academies, and what their students have to say about their experiences.

Grow Your Own Educator Academy 

Farias chose the Grow Your Own Educator Academy at Premont Collegiate High School to fulfill dreams she’s had since she was a little girl.

“My mom was an aide for special education students and some of my best friends are autistic, and as a little kid, you don’t realize the differences until you grow up,” she said. “I get a lot of, ‘You don’t want to do special education. It’s a hard place to be and it’s a lot of work.’ But that’s what I want to do, so looking into the program, I was like, ‘I need to be in this. It’s something I want to do and I get to start early on in my life.’”

It was initially intimidating for Farias to travel to Premont, because she was the only Agua Dulce High School student in the teaching academy. But soon she met Perez, from Freer High School, and Ava Gutierrez, a Premont senior.

“They’ve made it so much more than just the program, and I think that’s what keeps our programs going — because we all have relationships within the program that make it so much more than just college hours,” Perez said. “It’s cool because we’re from different districts, but we’re still friends.”

The trio assist classes at Premont’s elementary school and day care before taking college courses at the high school. Premont High School staff teach some of the classes, while others are in person at colleges closer to Corpus Christi, like Texas A&M University’s campus in Kingsville, about 30 miles away.

“On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I was traveling to Kingsville, and then on Monday, Wednesdays and every other Friday, I was in the classroom in Premont,” Gutierrez said. “It was pretty overwhelming for a while, having to travel back and forth, but you get used to it. After a while, it just kind of starts becoming part of your routine.”

Will Zelaya STEM Discovery Zone 

Andrew Herrera, 16, is a junior firefighter for a Brooks County volunteer fire department. He has been known to stay up until 5 a.m. at the station fixing equipment and changing the oil in the fire trucks.

His dad, the department chief, encouraged the Premont sophomore to enroll in the school’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics academy because of his passion for drones and fire truck mechanics. The program offers instruction in computer technology, engineering, oil and gas drilling, robotics and drone aviation. 

Herrera is pursuing a drone pilot license to assist with fire department calls. 

“I want to do it because nowadays it’s been getting a lot more difficult for ranch (owners), since they’re building so many houses and stuff like that,” he said. “If there’s ever a fire, I’ll be able to fly (the drone) up and I can do 3D mapping or I can find better routes for the trucks to take.”

Haven Farias, a Premont senior, earned his drone pilot license this year. He said he’s also proud of his work building a life-size robot in one of his academy classes. The two passions are something he wants to continue to follow when he pursues a mechanical engineering degree in the fall at Schreiner University in Kerrville, Texas.

“I’m licensed to fly, so I’ll have more opportunities with jobs and everything for the drone side,” Farias said. “I think it’s a great opportunity. Even though I’m in, like, 10,000 sports, and I’m doing five college classes, and then I have to do all my high school classes, it’s not really difficult. It’s all about time management.”

Ignite Technical Institute 

For Amber Garcia, a commitment to achieving an associate degree is what’s kept her going at Ignite Technical Institute, the welding pathway at Falfurrias High School in Brooks County Independent School District. 

The Premont senior works two part-time jobs — sometimes overnight until 6 a.m. — while taking her regular classes, pursuing pathway courses and gaining college credit. Garcia was in the foster system when she was introduced to the Rural Schools Innovation Zone. Now she’s one of the best welders in the program, Gonzalez said, and one of the few female students.

“In my eighth grade year, my older brothers were doing it, and I was kind of inspired by it, but they didn’t like it,” she said. “I wanted to do it. I fell in love with it.”

Garcia said it’s sometimes hard to get up in the mornings and make it to school, but she always attends her welding classes. Gonzalez said he calls her on days she doesn’t travel to Falfurrias to make sure she’s still going to Premont High School. The work has paid off, she said, because soon she’ll go straight into the workforce as a welder.

“A lot of kids are lazy, and our generation is horrible, but you just have to want it,” she said. “You’ve got to push yourself. You have to say, ‘I’m going to do it.’ And no matter how frustrated you get, you just have to keep going. It’s just the growth mindset, but a lot of people don’t have that.”

Next Generation Medical Academy

Mary Alice Cantu was admiring neighborhood Christmas lights with her children and Freer High School’s curriculum director in 2016 when she heard the school had landed a grant to build a health science pathway. She was the school nurse at the time.

“I said, ‘I really would love to do that,’ ” Cantu said. “(My co-worker) turns around and goes, ‘You’re running it.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m what?’ So I went from the school nurse to this, which was a totally different hat that I wasn’t expecting, but I’ve loved it ever since.”

Cantu began teaching classes at what would become the Next Generation Academy without an education degree. She soon pursued a master’s program to have the credentials under her belt and entered her district’s new teacher academy. 

“I realized it’s one thing to be a teacher and another to be a nurse,” she said. “There’s behavior management, pedagogy — all these terms. I was like, ‘You want me to do a lesson plan?’ It’s like a patient care plan, but it’s for your class.”

The nearest college program and hospital is close to an hour away, so it’s important that the medical academy be equipped as closely to a professional setting as possible, Cantu said. The high school’s home economics kitchen was into a model hospital, complete with a reception desk, patient beds, drug administration carts, IV stands and dummy patients. 

Students wear blue scrubs, clock into class with timecards and poke needles into silicone arms to draw synthetic blood before they practice on each other. There are multiple 7-foot-long touchscreen tables with digital replicas of bodies donated to science. Cantu can peel back layers of the cadavers and simulate health conditions for her anatomy or physiology classes.

Students can earn certifications in phlebotomy, electrocardiogram testing, patient care and medical assistance that can be used in the workplace. The academy got so popular that Freer’s next school nurse was hired as a second educator.

“It’s a good problem to have that we’re going to have so many students with certifications, and I don’t mind it, the numbers are growing, and we’ll just figure it out,” Cantu said. “There’s just so much opportunity for these students, whether they decide to go into nursing or not, they’re going to have the confidence and the people skills to be able to step into any setting and succeed.”

This growing enrollment is a double-edged sword, Gonzalez said. As more students join academies like Next Generation, teachers have to play a game of Tetris with class schedules and schools have to consider hiring more staff in a remote area that’s hard to recruit for. 

Student attendance can also be tricky. Gonzalez said some teachers and coaches value athletics or extracurriculars over their academy programs, and students may miss a class they get only twice a week if their team has to travel for a game or conference. 

The number of educators who were present during the zone’s creation is also dwindling. The partner districts have gone through five superintendents in the past three years together, meaning more people are coming in who are unfamiliar with the model and how it works, Gonzalez said.

A couple of districts have the traditional eight class periods, while the others have block schedules, making it difficult to coordinate transportation between schools. And then there are the students who switch academies or decide to leave a program altogether. The STEM academy has the lowest retention rate, at 86%. Next Generation Medical Academy retains more than 96% of its students.

“It’s crucial that we have ‘kid magnets,’ or teachers who have a relationship with these youngsters,” Gonzalez said. “They keep them in there, right? I’m not going to lie — we lose kids all the time.”

Gonzalez’s own job keeps him working all hours of the day. That dedication earned him a from South by Southwest last year.

“I didn’t realize the magnitude of it,” he said. “It’s pretty neat. You know, I just try to stay the course, try to stay on it. I use the word ‘grinder’ a lot because that’s just the way I was raised.”

Gonzalez said the Rural Schools Innovation Zone allows the remote, small districts of south Texas to remain operating and, in turn, keep their communities alive. 

Each town can still gather under bright stadium lights on autumn Fridays to cheer on its football team. Students can continue to walk to their neighborhood school. And families stay because their children can still get big-city opportunities, he said.

“Why do kids pick schools? Usually for programs. They don’t go because they have the best English teacher, right?” he said. “They have the best nursing program, the best baseball program, the best football program. They go for programming and then the ‘kid magnet’ teachers running the program. So if I can allow you to be involved with the best program in the world and you don’t have to leave your school district, it’s a no-brainer. That’s what we did.”

“These support systems are what students really rely on,” one girl told the board. “As someone who struggles a lot with being overwhelmed and anxious, sometimes I just need someone to talk to.”

The layoffs will help reduce an $8.6 million budget deficit, due in part to the loss of 350 students. 

Sarah Neville, a board member in the Boston-area district, knows one reason enrollment is down. Under federal law, districts can’t ask whether students are U.S. citizens, but almost 90% of the 5,700-students are Latino and 47% are English learners. The state education agency estimates that the population of English learners in Massachusetts schools has since 2024. Officials from Chelsea and other metro-area districts say as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducted raids in last fall.

“We’re low hanging fruit for ICE because so many of our folks are undocumented,” Neville said. “When they say, ‘We’re going to go target Boston,’ you find the vans actually hanging out in Chelsea.”

The district is among several across the country now confronting the financial impact of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts. Whether students are absent from school, families have been detained, or they’ve left the district or the country on their own, the empty desks add up.

Districts no longer have federal COVID relief funds to fall back on, and many already saw steep enrollment declines during the pandemic. The Chelsea board is one of asking the legislature for one-time grants to help address the shortfall. With fixed costs like payroll and contracts with vendors, a sharp drop in enrollment “creates chaos,” Neville said.

In Texas, officials from , and several districts in the are among those who say the immigration crackdown has contributed to further enrollment loss and, with it, potential drops in state funding. 

Districts’ heightened concerns over finances come as conservatives increasingly argue that American taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill to educate undocumented students in the first place. 

During a heated , members of a House judiciary subcommittee argued that the U.S. Supreme Court should overturn , a landmark 1982 ruling in a Texas case that guaranteed children a right to a public education, regardless of citizenship status.

“The financial costs of Plyler are undoubtedly staggering, clearly representing a significant burden on localities,” said Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy, who chaired the hearing. “But it isn’t just fiscal costs we should be worried about. Our nation’s classrooms routinely deal with illegal alien students, many of whom know little to no English and may struggle with other learning disabilities.”

Pointing to Census Bureau figures, a from the subcommittee estimated that educating non-citizen students in U.S. schools costs about $68 billion a year. But during the hearing, Democrats highlighted of providing students access to education, like $633 billion paid in state and local income taxes and contributions to the U.S. economy worth more than $2.7 trillion.

The witnesses included James Rogers, senior counselor with the conservative America First Legal Foundation, who called the Plyler opinion ”egregiously wrong from the start” and an example of judicial overreach. He predicted that the current conservative majority on the court would overturn it if given the opportunity. Republicans in like have proposed legislation to collect students’ immigration status. If one of those bills passes, opponents are expected to challenge it in court.

But Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, said that excluding undocumented students from school or charging tuition would mean “only certain classes of children whose parents can afford to pay are entitled to the blessings of liberty and the hope of a better future.” 

Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, warned that at a time when chronic absenteeism remains above pre-pandemic levels, non-citizen children wouldn’t be the only ones out of school if the court overturned Plyler.

“It will extend beyond the families to peers and ultimately it will be impossible to enforce truancy laws,” he said. “Any child who doesn’t want to be in school will know to simply say ‘I’m undocumented.’ ”

The ‘bottom line’

For now, most Texas districts want to hang on to as many students as possible.

“When you’re a rural school district, every kid has a big impact on your bottom line,” said Kevin Brown, executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators. “When you lose five or 10 kids, you have to cut programming. You can’t cut teachers, so you have to start looking for other ways to do it.”

He expects to see a request during next year’s legislative session to allow for some “transition period” before funding drops, but “whether something passes is another question.”

In California, where state funding is based on districts’ average daily attendance, Gov. Gavin Newsom last October that would have added immigration enforcement as one of the emergencies that triggers a waiver of the funding rule. The change was unnecessary, he said.

In Minnesota, districts are still hoping for some relief. On their behalf, a national nonprofit to temporarily suspend a state law that requires districts to drop students from the rolls if they’ve been absent for 15 straight days. The legislation allows exemptions for emergencies.

, in which the Trump administration deployed roughly 4,000 ICE agents to the Minneapolis area, “no doubt qualifies as a calamity that would trigger application of the exemption,” leaders of the National Center for Youth Law wrote to state House and Senate leaders last month. 

Fridley Public Schools, outside Minneapolis, has lost 20 students because of the 15-day rule.��

“Some of our children have been in an apartment for 14 weeks and haven’t been able to leave,” Superintendent Brenda Lewis said on a recent webinar. 

Roughly 100 more have left since the surge, possibly taking advantage of the state’s open enrollment policy to relocate to other districts. The loss means a $1 million hit to the district’s $51 million budget. The district also missed out on $131,000 in meal reimbursements from the federal government because low-income students weren’t in school to eat breakfast and lunch, Lewis said. 

Fridley’s enrollment would have been down another 400 students if the district hadn’t quickly implemented a virtual learning program, Lewis said. But federal agents used the device distribution process to apprehend those they suspected to be undocumented, she said. 

“We had ICE agents arresting people because they knew they were coming for the Chromebooks,” said Lewis, whose district is part of against the Trump administration over its policy of allowing immigration enforcement near schools and other “sensitive” locations. “ICE agents will board your buses. They’ll board your vans. They’ll pull the vehicle over and start interviewing children about immigration status. By interviewing, I mean interrogating.”

‘In-your-face presence’

The Trump administration recently such actions in an effort to end a government shutdown affecting the Department of Homeland Security. Julie Sugarman, who studies immigration policy affecting K-12 schools at the Migration Policy Institute, said a “less-aggressive” approach near school grounds would likely lead some missing students to return. 

“The in-your-face presence absolutely is causing people to stay home,” she said.

The Chicago Public Schools last fall saw steep declines in attendance that coincided with , according to by Kids First Chicago, an advocacy group, and the Coalition for Authentic Community Engagement, representing multiple nonprofits. On Sept. 29, the Monday after enforcement activity began, nearly 14,000 students at schools serving high percentages of Latino students were absent, the report showed. 

The district uses enrollment counts from the early part of the school year to make budget and staffing decisions. If students missed school on those days, or if the district eventually dropped students out for extended periods, those absences could affect funding, explained Hal Woods, chief of policy at Kids First Chicago.

District leaders can only estimate how many undocumented students are entering, or leaving, their schools, and that’s a problem, Mandy Drogin, a senior fellow at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, said in testimony before the House subcommittee. She blamed that warned districts against asking for students’ or parents’ citizenship status for enrollment purposes. 

While many English learners are U.S. citizens, she called out districts under state takeover, like and nearby , which have English learner populations above 30%, according to the state. “Illegal students,” she said, are impacting schools as a whole. 

“Teachers are being forced to … do Google Translate on their phones,” she said. “All of these things obviously impact the total education system, and the taxpayers are left holding the bag.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, said immigration enforcement affects all students. He pointed to Willmar, Minnesota, about 150 miles west of the Twin Cities and the site of a Jennie-O turkey plant that employs many . It’s the town where ICE agents in a Mexican restaurant and then returned to detain the owners and a dishwasher. 

In December, as rumors of an ICE raid spread, hundreds of kids, including white students, stayed out of school, Superintendent Bill Adams . 

“I remember walking in the hallways going, ‘Holy God, where are all the kids?’” said a district employee who declined to speak for attribution due to the sensitivity of the topic. “It was eerie.”

In October, Adams said enrollment in the 4,400-student district was down by over 170 students, amounting to a loss of more than $4 million. To make up for some of that gap, the district is it used to teach independent living skills, like cooking and doing the laundry, to older students with disabilities. 

“It’s just hit our community really bad,” the employee said.  

A Floridian who briefly led one of the nation’s largest school districts will captain Fort Worth ISD while it is under state control.

Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath appointed longtime Florida educator Peter B. Licata as FWISD’s new leader. Licata, who served as Broward County Public Schools superintendent for less than a year, is now charged with driving rapid academic gains for FWISD’s nearly 68,000 students.

He is Fort Worth’s fourth superintendent in as many years and comes to a district facing similar challenges he faced in Florida.

Alongside the new superintendent, Morath named nine managers who essentially replaced the district’s locally elected trustees. The managers assume governing authority over the district’s nearly $1 billion budget, buildings and what children learn.

Licata served as superintendent of the 236,263-student Broward County Public Schools for 10 months starting in 2023. He resigned and stepped away from day-to-day leadership over health concerns.

Licata spent nearly three decades working in Florida schools, primarily in Palm Beach County, where he rose from classroom teacher and coach to principal and district leader.

After taking the Broward job, he described his approach to equal opportunity as ensuring students receive additional support without lowering academic expectations.

“You can’t raise the floor by lowering the ceiling,” he said in .

Broward students saw modest increases in proficiency rates during Licata’s tenure during the 2023-24 school year. His superintendency occurred alongside  that measures progress at the beginning, middle and end of the year.

Palm Beach saw its proficiency rates stay relatively flat between 2015 and 2023 — the time he was in central administration, according to data from the Florida Department of Education.

He served as that district’s regional superintendent overseeing dozens of schools and was part of the leadership focused on improving academic outcomes across a large, diverse student population. Palm Beach County Schools serves roughly 185,000 students.

Hispanic students make up 38.5% of Palm Beach’s enrollment, while Black students make up 28.1% and white students 27%.

Broward County’s enrollment was nearly 40% Latino, 38% Black and 15% white.

Nearly two-thirds of Fort Worth ISD students are Latino, with Black students at 18.6% and white students at 11.3%.

English language learners comprise 18.2% of the Palm Beach district and 14% in Broward. In Fort Worth, they account for 42% of students.

Nearly 4 in 5 FWISD students are from low-income families. Just over half of Broward students are low income, while Palm Beach has 66%.

Licata emphasized student achievement in public statements throughout his career, often pointing to measurable goals — such as improving district academic accountability ratings and expanding access to advanced coursework.

Fort Worth ISD has been on a downward academic trajectory since 2016, when 57% of students were proficient across all subjects — and within striking distance of the state’s rate. In 2025, 34% of students were proficient across all subjects, a 4 percentage-point gain from the previous year.

Licata holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Miami, a master’s degree from Barry University and a doctorate in global leadership from Lynn University.

His tenure in Broward County was short and unfolded in a district already dealing with instability.

The Broward School Board hired him in summer 2023 after a national search, looking for steadier leadership in a district that had cycled through superintendents and public conflict in the years before his arrival.

Board members approved a three-year contract with a $350,000 base salary and up to $20,000 in performance bonuses tied to academics and progress on the school system’s long-delayed bond program.

His contract negotiations drew public debate. Broward board members rejected Licata’s request for a higher bar to remove him without cause, kept the termination threshold at a simple majority and required him to move from Palm Beach County into Broward.

Licata took over the nation’s sixth-largest school district promising to help Broward regain an A rating from the state and bring steadier leadership to the system.

Less than a year later, in April 2024, he announced his retirement, citing health reasons. He said he reached the decision after discussions with his doctors, his wife and his four adult children.

After Licata announced his plans, the Broward trustees voted the same day to replace him immediately with a deputy superintendent. The speed of that transition drew scrutiny in South Florida as some felt the move was staged and others criticized the lack of transparency, .

Trustees ultimately rejected a consulting arrangement with Licata and reduced his salary for his final weeks before his employment ended July 1, 2024.

His exit came as Broward was dealing with possible campus closures tied to long-term enrollment declines, charter school funding disputes and broader questions about district governance and finances, .

His appointment in Fort Worth comes at a similar moment of transition.

Morath ordered the takeover of Fort Worth ISD in October after one campus received five consecutive failing academic ratings under the state’s accountability system.

As superintendent, Licata will lead the district under state oversight, working alongside the managers and conservator appointed by the commissioner.

That role carries significant authority — and pressure.

The new superintendent is tasked with improving academic outcomes across Fort Worth schools, where reading and math performance have lagged behind state averages for years.

Licata steps into a district where roughly one-third of students read on grade level and slightly more than a quarter meet expectations in math, according to recent state testing data.

Fort Worth ISD faces much uncertainty as parents, teachers and community leaders raise concerns over potential employee turnover, changes to instruction and the loss of local control as the state assumes authority over the district.

At the same time, some education and business leaders say the state intervention could bring needed urgency and focus to improving student outcomes.

Licata has not previously worked in Texas schools.

Jacob Sanchez is education editor for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at jacob.sanchez@fortworthreport.org or .

Matthew Sgroi is an education reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at matthew.sgroi@fortworthreport.org or .

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Texas to extend the application deadline for private school vouchers until March 31 due to the state’s exclusion of Islamic schools from the program. 

The extension comes after four Muslim parents and three Islamic private schools earlier this month, arguing state leaders discriminated against their religion by excluding them from the program. 

from U.S. District Judge Alfred Bennett prevents the state from considering which families will receive school voucher funding until after the new deadline. It also requires the state to update its voucher application website to reflect the new deadline and provide the schools that filed the lawsuit an opportunity to register for the program. It does not require the state to add them to the list of approved schools. 

The lawyers representing Islamic schools and families want the judge to extend the temporary order until the next hearing in late April, when they plan to argue for further relief. Bennett cannot extend the order until the current one expires. 

Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock — �ձ�油��’ chief financial officer who manages the voucher program — has prevented Islamic schools from participating in the program over claims that some are associated with foreign terrorist organizations. 

Hancock has said schools accredited by the company Cognia hosted events organized by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group that Gov. Greg Abbott recently designated a terrorist organization. CAIR has sued Abbott over the label, calling it defamatory and false. The U.S. State Department has not designated the organization a terrorist group.

Another Cognia school, , “may be owned or controlled” by a group linked to the Chinese communist government. Hancock did not cite evidence supporting his suspicion. 

Before the court order, the application window for �ձ�油��’ school voucher program was set to close at 11:59 p.m. Tuesday for families who want to use public funds to pay for private school or home-school during the 2026-27 academic year. 

The comptroller’s office confirmed Tuesday that it received the order and updated the website to reflect the new deadline. 

“This two-week extension will give families an additional opportunity to apply for the first year of school choice in Texas,” Hancock said in a statement. “We look forward to building on the record-setting demand for educational options that we have seen over the first six weeks.”

As of Tuesday, families had submitted applications for more than 229,000 students, more than what $1 billion in available state funding can pay for. More than have opted in to accept voucher students, according to the comptroller’s office. 

So far, at least 71% of Texas voucher applicants come from families whose children attended a private school or home-school during the 2024-25 academic year, according to data released earlier this month and confirmed Monday by the comptroller. 

The comptroller in late February denied a public records request from The Texas Tribune asking how many applicants currently attend private school or home-school, saying the office did not collect that data during the application period.

Most participating families with children in private schools will receive about $10,500 annually. Home-schoolers can receive up to $2,000 per year. Children with disabilities qualify for up to $30,000 — an amount based on what it would cost to educate that child in a public school.

The comptroller will use a lottery system to determine how the state will divide $1 billion among eligible students. Applicants will be considered in this order: 

• Students with disabilities in families with an annual income at or below 500% of the federal poverty level, which includes a four-person household earning less than roughly $165,000 a year.��
• Families at or below 200% of the poverty level, which includes a four-person household earning less than roughly $66,000.��
• Families between 200% and 500% of the poverty level.��
• Families at or above 500% of the poverty level; these families can receive up to $200 million of the program’s total budget.��

Families must still find private schools — which are generally not required to make special education accommodations — to accept their children. Parents do not have to have their children enrolled in a school until July 15. Private schools will then confirm enrollment with the state by July 31.

from the comptroller shows 35% of students come from households that make at or below $66,000 per year for a family of four. Thirty-seven percent make between $66,000 and $165,000 per year. Students in households making more than $165,000 annually comprise 28% of the application pool. 

The data also shows:

• Nearly 80% of applicants plan to attend a private school next year, while the remaining applicants say they plan to home-school.
• Most families applied to receive , though do not meet the eligibility criteria.��
• Most applicants reside in the Houston region, followed by the Richardson, Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin regions.��

Before Tuesday’s court order, the comptroller’s office said it planned to release finalized data from the application pool later this week. 

In court filings, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office argued the comptroller has not “denied” any private schools from participating. Cognia-accredited schools require independent review, the state argued, due to the company “erroneously” listing schools as accredited without completing final steps. The Islamic schools suing the state, the lawyers noted, are accredited by Cognia. 

The comptroller’s office cannot reject schools, the attorneys said, until it decides their eligibility by July 15 — the deadline for parents to select a school. The state also argued “it would be fundamentally unfair” to extend the application deadline and “disrupt” the educational plans of hundreds of thousands of parents.

The families that sued argued the state’s decision to exclude Islamic schools forced parents to decide whether to apply for voucher benefits without their preferred schools listed, “abandon the religious educational choices they would otherwise make for their children, or to forgo applying for the benefits of the Program altogether.” 

“Without emergency relief, the Program’s initial implementation will proceed while Islamic schools remain excluded,” the lawsuit said. “Once the March 17, 2026 application deadline passes and participation decisions are made, the effects of Defendants’ unlawful exclusion will be fixed in the Program’s first year before this Court can determine the legality of Defendants’ actions.”

The voucher program’s first year has also been marked by on funding for children with disabilities. Some families did not know they needed a special education evaluation from a public school to qualify for additional voucher money. Obtaining legal documentation proving a child received the evaluation can take months, while the original voucher application window lasted only 41 calendar days. 

The comptroller recently of the voucher law, saying it believes families of students with disabilities can still apply for the funding boost next year. 

This first appeared on .

“It’s something that the students are very, very proud of,” said librarian Annelise Rodriguez, who created and manages the Millionaires Club. “We’ve had kids come in when they take tours and say, ‘I’m going to be up there some day.’ Some kids get it in 45 books, and for others, it’s taken 360 books.”

The project was created three years ago to motivate and recognize young avid readers in the of roughly 600 students. Just a few weeks ago, a grandmother who didn’t speak English bowed her head to thank Rodriguez after her grandchild’s photo finally made the display. 

Last year, Windsor Park students read 400 million words as part of the Millionaires Club. They are on track to beat that record, with over 315 million words read by the end of February. It’s one of the ways the school has attained its high reading proficiency rates, an achievement that earned its ranking on The 74’s Bright Spots list. The highlighted schools have third grade literacy scores that are much higher than might be expected, based on the schools’ poverty rates. 

With its 29% poverty level, nearly two-thirds of Windsor Park third graders were projected to be proficient in reading in 2024, but its actual score was 96%. That rate jumped to 99% last year. Nearly 50% of students are Hispanic, 29% are white and 15% are Asian. 

Windsor Park is a magnet school for gifted and talented children. Texas schools to screen their students, and all children in the Corpus Christi Independent School District who score in the top 3% receive an invitation to transfer to Windsor Park, said Principal Kimberly Bissell. Transportation is provided. 

The consists of multiple tests that grade students’ achievement in reading and math, as well as problem-solving and critical thinking abilities. Students can transfer in any grade to Corpus Christi’s gifted and talented schools.  

Windsor Park is also the district’s only elementary school. The worldwide educational program allows teachers to write their own curriculum and offer rigorous instruction along with inquiry-based learning.

“We have kids who are in first grade reading at a middle school or high school level,” Bissell said. “Those things have always been true, but the initiative behind their personal achievement has certainly ramped up in the last few years with our new approaches.”

The Millionaires Club, which is expanding to other schools in the 33,000-student district, is one of them. The number of words children read are tracked through Accelerated Reader, an online program that records finished books and comprehension. 

Windsor Park also recently launched a called “thinking classrooms.” Originally created for math education, it students working in small groups, solving problems while standing up at whiteboards and building on pieces of knowledge as they go. But Bissell said Windsor Park implemented this approach across all its classes. 

It especially improved students’ writing skills because the children use the whiteboards to organize text and story structure, she said. 

In Hanna Patton-Elliott’s third grade classroom on a recent morning, students became “doctors,” pulling on blue medical gloves before separating into groups of two or three. Each group had to assess a passage of text on a whiteboard — the “patient” — by finding the main idea. The children then diagnosed their “patients” by writing a conclusion for what the passage was about.

Patton-Elliott said that at the end of the class, students rotate and evaluate one another’s work as “attending doctors” — the staff who oversee the work of a medical team. 

“I’m going to give them an opportunity to write the conclusions for other people’s work, but then also go back and look at it as the first attending doctor,” she said. “So we’ve got lots of things going on. We’ve got some reading skills, we’ve got the main idea, we’ve got organization, but then also we’ve got some creative writing, too. The metaphor seems to be working for breaking this down and organizing it.”

The activity is part of the curricular materials written by Windsor Park teachers under the International Baccalaureate program. Teachers create their grade-level curriculum together to ensure that the same lessons — such as finding the main idea of a story — are taught in each classroom, even if the activities may be different. Because Windsor Park classes are interdisciplinary, teachers try to connect the same ideas in all academic subjects, so what the children learn in reading, for example, is referenced in math class.

Much of Windsor Park’s instruction uses standards from the Texas Education Agency, but infuses it with student-led learning and group collaboration. The curriculum also allows children to make decisions and manage their own instruction, such as choosing the grading rubrics for an activity. 

“We find not just for gifted learners, but as a best practice, this idea of choice and student agency really builds writing, as well as reading and everything that English Language arts envelopes,” Bissell said. “When you offer choice with expectations, they do a lot better.”

They include Tabitha Sue James, whose son has been following an online curriculum at home since 2020. 

“I applied the first day,” she said. “I’ve paid thousands of dollars in property taxes to schools. Why shouldn’t we be able to have … homeschool choice?

While families won’t know until early April whether they have received funding, she could be among the nearly two-thirds of homeschooling families who say they use public dollars to educate their children, according to from the Rand Corp., shared exclusively with The 74.  

Of those who live in a state without education savings accounts or tax credits for private education, more than 70% said they would use public funds to offset homeschooling costs if they could, the data show. 

RAND’s American Life Panel on homeschool ESA use of parents who homeschool at least one child:

The similarity between the two figures is significant, said Angela Watson, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University and director of the Homeschool Research Lab.

“That gives some confidence that these responses are accurate,” she said. “Sometimes people will say they might do something when in reality, they wouldn’t actually do it. But here we see that people say and do things at the same rates.”

The lab commissioned Rand to ask the questions as part of its American Life Panel, a nationally representative sample of more than 2,400 parents with K-12 students. While homeschoolers only represented about 10% of the respondents, the data are among the first to independently measure their views on ESAs. The results follow from the ​​Arkansas Department of Education and the University of Arkansas showing that about a quarter of students who used that state’s ESA program last school year were homeschoolers. 

Most existing data come from advocates who private school choice, an issue that still sharply divides homeschoolers. Some remain strongly opposed to ESA programs and warn that they threaten parents’ rights to educate their children as they see fit. “Government cheese always comes in a trap,” one parent posted in the Texans for Homeschool Freedom Facebook group. 

On the topic of ESAs “there are not a lot of indifferent people,” said Kevin Boden, director of legal and legislative advocacy for the Home School Legal Defense Association. “They either think it’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened in education, or they think that it’s the thing to be most feared.”

James, for one, is grateful for the financial support. She wants to add music lessons and buy materials for STEM projects. The Texas program “makes those opportunities possible for us.”

Under the program, she’s eligible to receive $2,000 annually. But parents who choose an accredited private school will receive $10,474 or up to $30,000 for a child with a disability. 

While James prefers the “low-stress” environment of homeschooling, that funding gap is enough of an incentive to make some homeschoolers rethink their educational model.

“Maybe the family has always wanted to get into an accredited private school and now they can,” said Jeremy Newman, vice president of policy and engagement with the Texas Homeschool Coalition, which supports the state’s new program. “There are other families who say ‘Homeschooling is what would have been best for my child but we can’t afford what the child needs, so we’re going to have to go to this other option.’ ” 

Erin Flynn, lead instructor at , an Austin-area microschool for seventh through 12th graders, said she’s received several calls over the past few months from homeschooling families inquiring whether she will be accepting Education Freedom Accounts for tuition. 

Operating out of a converted house with a large porch, she offers a twice-a-week option for $600 per month and a full-time program for $950. She described the curriculum, which focuses on humanities, STEM and art, as “self-directed.” 

“We want to put the power back in students’ hands so that they aren’t just learning the canon; they’re learning how to identify what it is that they love,” said Flynn, a former English teacher. She was the principal of a charter school until she founded Hedge during the pandemic.

Microschools, she said, can be “a bridge” between homeschooling and traditional private school because they often allow students to attend part time. 

‘So many options’

According to Travis Pillow, spokesman for the Texas comptroller’s office, which runs the program, there’s no “seat time requirement.” As long as students are enrolled in a on the state’s list and take an annual assessment, they qualify as a private school student. 

To Pillow, who previously worked for the nonprofit running Florida’s school choice program, the different funding levels in Texas have been an adjustment. Florida’s program doesn’t differentiate between homeschoolers and private school students.

“I saw a lot of virtue in that idea because there are just so many options that don’t necessarily fit in a traditional box anymore,” he said. It’s hard in some cases, he said, to draw “a bright line” between schooling and homeschooling.

Some applicants educating their kids at home, he said, will likely enroll in approved online schools, which would qualify them for the larger award. But Newman, with the Coalition, also expects homeschoolers to pressure lawmakers to increase the amount for their children’s educational expenses. He thinks the proportion of homeschool applicants would be “dramatically higher” if the funds weren’t capped at $2,000.

“Many families homeschool because they have special needs children,” he said. Some types of therapy, “can very quickly surpass $2,000.” 

‘Out of necessity’

Texas isn’t the only state that offers different amounts for private school students and homeschoolers. Alabama’s awards $7,000 per student toward private school tuition and $2,000 for a “home education program.” Homeschooling families are capped at $4,000 even if they have more than two school-age children.

Texas and Alabama are “incentivizing people to go to private school and not to homeschool,” said Watson, with Johns Hopkins. But that could be a challenge for families living in rural areas without a lot of private school options, she said.

Like Florida, Arizona took a different approach when it passed the nation’s first universal ESA program in 2022. The base funding amount, which typically ranges between $7,000 and $8,000, is the same whether parents choose homeschooling or private school. Arizona parent Kathy Visser, whose son has disabilities, said $2,000 wouldn’t cover a month of his tutoring costs. In total, he receives about $40,000. Her daughter, formerly homeschooled, is now in a private school and receives $9,000.

“For families who choose to homeschool out of personal preference, I am sure the $2,000 is welcome,” she said. “For families like mine who homeschool out of necessity, because we could not find any traditional school that came close to meeting either of our kids’ needs, it wouldn’t go far.”

Arizona, however, is the state ESA critics most often point to for examples of a lack of guardrails on spending. A of expenditures turned up a number of “unallowable” items, like diamond jewelry, expensive gaming consoles and designer purses. State Superintendent Tom Horne of the program, but his methods for determining whether purchases violate the letter, or at least the spirit, of the law. 

Pillow said Texas limited homeschool awards to $2,000 because those families don’t have the “big ticket expense” of tuition. But another reason was to avoid “politically hard-to-explain purchases.” Parents also have to shop for supplies and materials within a “closed marketplace.” 

“Legos are legitimate educational items,” he said, noting purchases that have in Arizona. “But are we going to curate that marketplace with the latest and greatest collectors’ item? The $500 Harry Potter set is not necessarily going to be available.” 

Newman, with the Texas Homeschool Coalition, added that there’s much less “administrative weight” on the program when parents primarily spend the money on tuition. But both he and Pillow agreed that the state is likely to revisit the issue.

Don Huffines, who won the Republican nomination for comptroller, and is expected to easily win the general election in November, has said he the program. 

But the staunch conservative is also a . Newman said he hopes that means Huffines’ will be open to addressing the “disparities.”

“People have this idea of what they think homeschooling is,” he said. “It’s the people who have done it who really understand.” 

A Muslim parent has sued Texas leaders for excluding Islamic private schools from participating in the state’s private school voucher program.

The , filed March 1 by a parent acting on behalf of two children who attend a Houston private school, asks the court to block the voucher program from discriminating on the basis of religion. The suit names Texas Attorney General , Acting Comptroller and Education Commissioner Mike Morath as defendants.

Here’s what to know.

Background: Gov. signed into law in 2025, which authorized the creation of a statewide program that allows families to use public funds to pay for their children’s private school or home-school education.

Between Feb. 4 and March 17, virtually any family with school-age children in Texas to participate. Private schools interested in joining the program can apply on a rolling basis, as long as they have existed for at least two years and received accreditation.

More than 143,000 students have applied, while more than 2,100 private schools have been accepted.

Hancock — �ձ�油��’ chief financial officer who manages the voucher program — in late 2025 from Paxton, asking if he could exclude schools from the voucher program based on their connections to groups designated as foreign terrorist organizations or foreign adversaries.

Hancock said schools associated with the accreditation company Cognia had hosted events organized by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group that Gov. Greg Abbott recently designated a terrorist organization. CAIR has sued Abbott over the label, calling it defamatory and false. The U.S. State Department has not designated the organization a terrorist group.

Texas Republicans have made anti-Muslim rhetoric a during primary election season. Hancock, appointed by the governor on an interim basis, is running to serve a full term as comptroller.

Hancock shut hundreds of Cognia-accredited schools out of the voucher program, including those that primarily serve Muslim students, Christian students and children with disabilities, which the Houston Chronicle .

Paxton released in January stating his belief that Hancock has the authority to block certain schools from participating in the program if they are “illegally tied to terrorists or foreign adversaries.” To date, no Islamic schools are known to have been accepted into the state voucher program.

The comptroller’s office said it began inviting groups of Cognia schools that it considers in compliance with the law to participate, though it is unclear what that review entails.

In mid-February, Texas Senate Democrats Hancock to administer the program in a manner “neutral, transparent and consistent with the law and to immediately cease discriminatory and exclusionary practices that single out certain communities without lawful justification.”

Why the parent sued: Mehdi Cherkaoui, a Muslim father of two children and lawyer representing himself in the lawsuit, argued that state leaders “have systematically targeted Islamic schools for exclusion.”

The Islamic schools blocked from joining the program meet the voucher program’s eligibility requirements and “have no actual connection to terrorism or unlawful activity,” the lawsuit states. That includes Houston Qur’an Academy Spring, a private school attended by Cherkaoui’s two children.

Cherkaoui pays almost $18,000 per year in tuition for his children at the Houston private school and wants to apply for the nearly $10,500 per child in voucher funding to offset those costs, according to the lawsuit. But with Islamic schools blocked from participating in the program, the suit says, Cherkaoui cannot complete the application.

“The exclusion is not based on individualized findings of unlawful conduct by any specific school, but rather on categorical presumptions that Islamic schools are suspect and potentially linked to terrorism by virtue of their religious identity and community associations,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit names Hancock, the comptroller, because of his role overseeing the program; Paxton, the attorney general, because of his legal opinion backing Hancock; and Morath, the education commissioner, because his agency works with the comptroller’s office on certain program conditions.

Morath does not oversee private schools in Texas, but schools in the voucher program must receive accreditation from organizations recognized by his agency or the Texas Private School Accreditation Commission.

Before the voucher program’s March 17 deadline for family applications, the lawsuit asks that the court require the state to accept all Islamic schools that meet program requirements and prevent the state from delaying or denying approval based on schools’ religious identity, alleged “Islamic ties,” or “generalized associations with Islamic civil-rights or community organizations absent individualized, adjudicated findings of unlawful conduct.”

Hancock, Paxton and Morath did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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Roxanne Martinez moved back to her neighborhood in Fort Worth so her kids could attend the same schools she did.

The mother of two was on the booster club. And on a walk one day with students to a polling location — she’s always encouraged civic involvement — one asked her why she hadn’t run for school board. That question sparked a campaign, and she was elected in 2021.

But the board seat Martinez won in the Fort Worth Independent School District may not come with any power for very much longer. Texas education officials announced in October that they would take control of the district and replace locally elected board members with a board hand-picked by the state, a move triggered by the academic failures at a school that has since closed.

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“I take parent calls almost every night, almost every day, and so to lose that local voice, removing the voice of my constituents, of our voters, is just deeply concerning to me,” she said.

State takeovers are having a moment. For decades, state officials have taken over school districts, citing academic and financial calamity. In some cases, the calamity was real: School districts were bankrupt. Very small fractions of students read at grade level. But while those reasons are still the most commonly cited, officials’ rhetoric to justify the tactic has become more overtly political as the country’s political divides have deepened, according to those who study the phenomenon.

In Texas, the state has seized control over seven school districts since 2023, four of those announced in the past six months. Nationwide, Chalkbeat tracked at least 21 new school district takeovers in the past three years, with additional takeovers threatened. These come after what some experts said was a lull in the practice. This year already, �ձ�油��’ schools chief , while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took a swipe at unions while .

“At this point, states don’t really care about having to justify this action,” said Domingo Morel, a professor at New York University. “Back in the 1980s, 1990s, early 2000s, states really went out of their way to make it look like they really wanted to come in to improve the district.”

Conservative governors and education commissioners have said they’re taking a hard line on academics, targeting entire districts over a few schools, or progress they say is not fast enough.

Some argue that outside intervention is the only way to break up entrenched political interests that stagnate learning. Researchers also say the revival of takeovers in some states may reflect alarm over flagging academic achievement and financial distress in COVID’s wake.

“People are really concerned, especially post-pandemic, about student achievement,” said Josh Bleiberg, an education professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “I do think there’s an emergency mindset aspect of here like, ‘well, we’ve got to do something.’”

There are examples of takeovers that , but they are the minority, according to research. More often, research shows the loss of control disproportionately affects communities of color in exchange for meager and short-term gains in academic achievement.

Some welcome change in the Fort Worth district, where . For others, like Martinez, the takeover is a flex of Republican political power over a district in , and in a school district that primarily serves Hispanic and Black students. To them, the entity that will come out ahead could be the state’s new private school choice program, not public schools.

And for a third set — people like Ale Checka, a longtime teacher in Fort Worth — two things can be true.

Yes, Fort Worth’s schools deserved to be taken over, Checka said. But that doesn’t mean she likes it: “God, I wish we could get taken over by literally anybody else.”

State takeovers gaining momentum in Republican-led states

States run by Democrats have , in several instances for financial reasons. But Republican-led states are leading the charge on recent takeovers, although the strategy looks different from state to state.

In Tennessee, Republican lawmakers want to install a state-appointed oversight board in Memphis-Shelby County Schools, the largest school district in the state, .

Tennessee Republicans argue a state-appointed oversight board could better turn around lagging academic achievement than the current school board. Opponents of the GOP plan say Memphis schools are not only improving, they’re

has taken over two school districts in the past year, after a lull since 2021. The state has had broader authority since 2024, when lawmakers removed a requirement for the governor to first declare a state of emergency in a school district to initiate a takeover.

GOP leaders in and are pushing takeovers for more state control over local districts.

Not all recent state interventions in local school districts amount to a direct takeover. Indiana GOP lawmakers have , but the board’s members would be picked by the mayor, who’s currently a Democrat.

But the state that’s arguably become the clearest blueprint for the current crop of takeovers is Texas.

In Texas, just one school in a district can trigger state intervention for that district. In Houston, the trigger was Wheatley High School where more than 90% of Wheatley’s students are Latino or Black and many are from low-income backgrounds.

Wheatley was deemed unacceptable in the state’s rating system for seven straight school years, which state schools chief Mike Morath , along with languishing achievement in other Houston schools, which educate about 180,000 students and constitute the state’s largest district.

In 2023, Morath was necessary in part because the district had allowed chronic low achievement in multiple schools for far too long.

“Parents, teachers have high expectations for kids,” Morath said at the time. “It’s important for me to maintain high expectations for school boards. So this is ultimately about an intervention action for the school board.” (The Texas Education Agency did not respond to requests for an interview with Morath for this story.)

State officials put Mike Miles — a longtime lightning rod in education — in charge of Houston as superintendent and replaced the elected board with an appointed one. Miles, the former Dallas superintendent who also founded a charter school network, made school hours longer, , , and .

The results have been a mixed bag. Houston now has fewer struggling schools, under �ձ�油��’ school rating system. But the number of students enrolled . And the share of teachers remaining on their campuses between school years fell from 70% before the takeover to 58.6% from the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 school years, according to .

Still, Houston has produced enticing results. “People from all over the country, including Alaska, are calling us to ask how we’re doing this,” Miles told The 74 last year, touting the district’s academic gains. “Boldness is what’s called for, and people are starting to have some hope that big turnarounds can be done.”

Republicans in Tennessee of Memphis’ district, critical of flagging academics and school board dysfunction.

Parents and teachers in Fort Worth, a district of roughly 70,000 students and the 10th-largest in the state, have eyed the changes in Houston closely.

, according to the Fort Worth Report. Two middle schools , just shy of the state intervention threshold.

Trenace Dorsey-Hollins is a Fort Worth mother of two and founder of Parent Shield, a grassroots group pushing the message that Fort Worth’s kids deserve a high-quality education.

Despite the political undertones of the takeover in Houston, the new management is “changing the trajectory for a lot of kids” there, she said, and Fort Worth is in need of some “true momentum.”

The truth is, many schools across Texas are failing, and they’ve been failing kids for a long time, she said.

Checka acknowledged that Fort Worth is in a literacy crisis that warrants outside intervention, she said. But she’s watched Houston eliminate school librarian positions with horror.

“The moves that the state is making are not moves that are for literacy,” Checka said. While Houston has improved reading scores, educators have been critical of.

Martinez, the board member, notes that the district already adopted higher-quality instructional materials and added teacher training. Just this month, .

“If the state had some magic bullet that was going to just come in and significantly improve schools, one: why haven’t they already shared it?” she asked. “Two: why are they not partnering with us?”

Political rhetoric around school district takeovers has changed

As students walked out earlier this year to protest federal immigration policy, Texas Education Agency officials warned that .

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott called for investigations into multiple districts, implying that protests were taking kids away from academics.

Texas hasn’t initiated any takeovers since Abbott’s comments. But the state did place the Austin district under investigation. Austin was , and several middle schools are one failing grade away from triggering intervention.

Morel, who studies state takeovers, said he believed the country would witness a decline in the practice nearly a decade ago.

Yet Houston marked an “outright political power play on the part of the state,” given that the state used a single school’s shortcomings as the reason for intervention, even when the district itself was not failing in the state’s rating system.

“You can anticipate that if this type of trajectory continues, that it’s really not about improving schools, that it’s about undermining the political power of these communities,” he said.

There’s inherent political friction in a takeover, said Johnny Key, a former Republican Arkansas schools chief who oversaw the state intervention in the Little Rock School District from 2015 to 2021. Key acknowledges the takeover wasn’t a “smashing success” but said it stabilized leadership and helped the district plan for the end of desegregation aid, a major funding source.

Key said any takeover is inherently political, because the state is claiming responsibility for something typically controlled locally. But that doesn’t mean takeovers aren’t necessary, or that state officials are simply dismissing communities.

“To paint state takeover with any type of broad brush ignores the nuance and the differences in the communities that are affected,” he said.

But ultimately state takeovers must be sensitive to politics and get support from key groups, including teachers, to ensure changes can endure, said Ashley Jochim, a political scientist with the Center on Reinventing Public Education.

“You go in and do a bunch of stuff that’s super controversial, even if it benefits kids, if it doesn’t have political support, it’s not going to be sustained over time,” she said.

Recent controversy over Texas education policy isn’t confined to state takeovers. In conversations about the pending Fort Worth takeover, Martinez and others raised �ձ�油��’ .

There’s no evidence to suggest Texas is somehow using state intervention as a way to promote vouchers. But critics like Martinez are skeptical of a government touting a , while also claiming it’s trying to raise achievement for already-stretched public schools.

“The reasoning behind the strong interventions has less to do about student outcomes and more about shifting of power,” Martinez said.

For Checka, the state’s motivation for taking over Fort Worth Schools matters. The idea that students will learn more every day is what gets her up in the morning. She wishes she felt confident Texas officials had the same motivations.

“The things that are important to me are my students being able to read and write … my students being able to access opportunities after high school and go to college,” she said. “It is just not important to them.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Given an opportunity by the Texas Legislature to set aside time each day for students and staff to pray, most school districts appear to have declined the offer.

required Texas school boards to decide by March 1 whether to provide a daily devotional period, which students could attend during noninstructional hours to pray and read the Bible or other religious text, likely before school.

But one of the key lawmakers who guided the bill through the Legislature has identified only 15 school districts that have opted into the prayer period. Many other urban, suburban and rural districts voted against it.

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“I respect their opinion. They know their communities,” said Rep. , R-Jacksboro. “That’s not to say that they can’t come back and revisit it. But this is not a mandate. I’ve said very clearly from the start, this is not a mandate bill. The only thing that’s mandated is if they consider it. They don’t have to adopt it.”

SB 11 is part of a slate of bills approved in recent legislative sessions that aim to promote a conservative brand of Christianity in public education and test the legal limits of church-state separation.

The Texas Legislature has passed laws requiring schools to in classrooms, allowing unlicensed chaplains to offer to students and setting the foundation for an optional filled with references to Christianity.

SB 11 requires school districts that establish the prayer period to obtain signed consent forms from interested families, which waive parents’ right to sue the district for alleged violations of state or federal law and acknowledge that students have a choice to attend the religious gathering.

The law prohibits schools from reading religious texts over a public address system, and school leaders must ensure the prayer period does not take place in the physical presence or within earshot of students who lack parental consent.

More than 160 Texas faith leaders , noting the administrative burden, students’ existing rights to practice their religion and the potential harm to children who decide not to participate. Civil rights advocates also argued the law .

Texas Attorney General suggested otherwise, not only encouraging students to take advantage of prayer time but also suggesting they engage with

But many of �ձ�油��’ roughly 1,200 districts and charters, including those in politically conservative communities, declined.

They questioned how schools would manage the parental consent requirements. Some opposed what they saw as state leaders promoting a conservative vision of Christianity. Others pointed to federal, state and school policies that already allow students to organize religious clubs and prayer periods.

“In reality, there was no need for it,” said Alex Kotara, vice president of the Karnes City school district board, which is located in a conservative town southeast of San Antonio.

“It passes the buck to local school districts to make that decision, but it also does it in a way that requires them to also opt out — not just opt in — which then, from an elected official standpoint, puts you in a position where, when they boil down a convoluted, kind of contradictory bill to a sound bite, it’s going to be that we did not allow prayer in school,” Kotara said.

Spiller, the bill sponsor, acknowledged that federal and state laws already protect students’ ability to practice their religion at school. But he believes SB 11 builds on existing protections by requiring participating schools to allow time for prayer each day.

“It’s not a gotcha bill,” Spiller said. “But I think if boards just vote this down without forethought, consideration and seeking the will of their public, do I think that they will hear from it? Yes, I do. I think their constituents will let them know that they don’t appreciate them, in many instances, blocking a right that they have when it costs the school nothing.”

The Aledo school district in North Texas opted in, but board members didn’t necessarily vote in favor of the period because they felt it expanded students’ rights, said school board President Forrest Collins.

“Basically, the state Legislature forced us to vote on something schools already support, and our vote was really just to reaffirm the constitutional rights of students,” Collins said. “I felt like, personally, the bill was kind of a waste of time.”

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The Texas Education Agency received final approval Wednesday evening for roughly 4,200 corrections and changes to its elementary and secondary school curriculum.

Voting 9-6, the State Board of Education approved the changes to Bluebonnet Learning after in January. Members had said they needed more time to review copyright concerns, formatting errors and typos.

On Wednesday, some board members questioned whether the errors indicated a need to change �ձ�油��’ for learning materials, while others asked the education agency to provide an estimate of the corrections’ cost to taxpayers. Texans will bear the financial burden of the corrections because the education agency developed the materials using state funding.

“I think that when we have mistakes, that kind of undercuts the trust that we’re building with our local trustees and our local administrators,” said Republican board member Brandon Hall, who supported the corrections.

Colin Dempsey, a Texas Education Agency official who helps organize the instructional material review process, said the agency planned to calculate the costs after the State Board of Education voted on the changes.

Dempsey also said the agency has increased the number of people who review publishing materials since Bluebonnet in November 2024, expressing optimism that the increase would help the state catch errors earlier in the process. State Board of Education rules, Dempsey added, do not specify accountability measures when the board finds errors in state publishing materials.

“Clearly it’s something that we need to address,” he said.

Several board members who voted against the changes Wednesday have long opposed Bluebonnet. The reading and language arts curriculum attracted national attention in 2024 for its references to the Bible and Christianity.

The education agency has said the make up only a fraction of the overall product, which includes reading and math. have found that the reading curriculum skews heavily in favor of Christianity compared to other religions. Parents and historians have also about the materials downplaying America’s history of racism and slavery.

Roughly have indicated that they’re using at least some portions of the reading curriculum, covering about 400,000 students. The materials come with a $60 per-student incentive for districts.

Some board members requested Wednesday to hear from education agency officials who worked on Bluebonnet. Other board members said the Bluebonnet developers reached out to them directly and offered to address concerns or questions about the 4,200 errors prior to the meeting. Republican Aaron Kinsey, the board chair, said he could not force the publishers to testify if they were unwilling.

Dempsey advised against having the individuals testify, saying the agency preferred to keep dialogue between its staff overseeing the review process and board members.

Texas Education Agency spokesperson Jake Kobersky said in a statement that 4,200 represents the number of changes to Bluebonnet, not all of them errors.

“Some updates are simply improvements based on teacher feedback,” Kobersky said. “Every change and/or edit made to the product must be submitted individually for SBOE approval, regardless of the nature of the change, hence the large number. “

Dempsey said earlier this year that the 4,200 edits span more than 2,100 components of Bluebonnet. The curriculum, he noted, also has more components than other publishers.

For comparison, four other publishers that submitted correction requests reported a combined 16 edits.

Before the initial vote, board members acknowledged the trivial nature of some errors identified in Bluebonnet, while standing firm on concerns about what Republican Pam Little described as “sloppy publishing.”

“We are basically putting content out there that has not met the legislative request of us to remove, to review materials for quality and suitability,” Little said.

Democratic board member Tiffany Clark said the board and the education agency harmed students by allowing schools to teach flawed materials.

“If this is a product they’ve been using because they believe it was a high-quality instructional material, again, we have failed our students this school year,” Clark said.

The education agency will update the online version of the materials within 30 days and begin replacing physical books and teacher guides.

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As Texas pushes more high schoolers to get ready for college and the workforce, new research suggests that some of the ways schools count students as ready don’t equally set them up for success after graduation.

The state rewards Texas school districts for preparing students for life after graduation, tying college and career readiness to more school funding and a higher school performance rating.

The Texas Education Agency has been increasingly strict on districts about college readiness. In the 2022-23 school year, state education officials raised the benchmark for schools to qualify for an A grade in the category of college and career readiness: Schools needed to get 88% of graduates ready for life after high school, up from 60% in prior years.

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Researchers from four Texas universities nearly 1 million Texas high school students across eight graduating classes from 2016-23 to see how they fared after high school, including the wages they earned as well as whether they enrolled in college and completed their degree.

While English and math college prep courses have seen a boom in enrollment, the researchers found students in those courses were 5% less likely to earn a college degree or certification within six years of high school graduation than students who were not considered college ready. They were also 18% less likely to get a degree or certification than their dual credit peers. The results of the study, , suggest college prep courses offer a false signal of preparedness.

“We could be potentially setting students up for failure because we’re saying, ‘OK, you’re college ready.’ But you actually get into college and you’re immediately taking developmental coursework,” said Jacob Kirksey, lead researcher on the study and professor at Texas Tech University. “And maybe you’ve racked up, you know, loans as a result of that process.”

Meanwhile, students who earned a credential in high school — be it an associate’s degree or a certificate — earned 15% to 20% more in wages later in life than students who were not college ready. Dual credit was also shown to predict a likelihood to enroll in and complete college.

The TEA has started a process to. To date, only a handful of English prep courses have received a . No math college prep courses have.

Kirksey has also called for Texas lawmakers and state education officials to rethink how college and career readiness is incentivized, offering public schools bigger rewards for higher-quality pathways like dual credit, and smaller rewards for lower-quality pathways like college prep classes. His previous research on the impact of teacher certification on student achievement led the state to in core classes.

“College, career and military readiness should not be treated as a black and white checkbox for students and districts,” Kirksey said. “We think by making that distinction … districts will have all the incentives they need to, again, be celebrating these better pathways.”

The rise in popularity in college prep courses were a result of schools trying to respond to the stricter standards for college readiness despite limited resources, said Gabriela Sánchez-Soto, a researcher with the Houston Education Research Consortium who studies college, career and military readiness. Prep courses were appealing because school districts were able to offer them without a massive overhaul to their curricula, Sánchez-Soto said.

“You can’t blame the players for playing the game,”�� Sánchez-Soto said. “But we need to always assess how well whatever thing we’re asking students to do is actually accomplishing. … If a requirement is not fulfilling its promise, we need to do something about it.”

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Nebraska lawmakers approved a Feb. 27 allowing schools to for violent behavior. Schools will be required to provide a plan to parents whose young children are suspended that describes available resources and how the student’s behavior will be handled in the future. Gov. Jim Pillen said he intends to sign the bill into law.

In the rural Nebraska panhandle, elementary teachers at Kimball Public Schools have watched students as young as 5 throw furniture, bite staff and attack classmates. 

Until a few years ago, in- and out-of-school suspensions were one way that Nebraska schools dealt with this type of behavior. But in 2023, state lawmakers for students in prekindergarten through second grade unless they brought a weapon to school. 

It was billed as a move to protect children with disabilities and prevent the disproportionate suspension of students of color. But now, Nebraska lawmakers are trying to reverse the ban. Educators say suspensions are needed to stop severe or violent behavior — which has gotten worse since the pandemic — and to get parents’ attention about how their children are acting in school. 

“We will have a student physically assault another student, or fight staff members. And then it happens repeatedly. The parents’ support is not there. What are we going to do in Kimball, Nebraska?” asked Superintendent Trevor Anderson. “The only solution that we really have is that they’re still in the building and now it’s essentially one of the staff members babysitting all day long, because (the student) is not able to handle being in the regular classroom setting.”

Nebraska is one of a handful of states, including Minnesota and Texas, that have sought to repeal suspension bans in the last year. At least 18 states prohibit suspensions for students in prekindergarten through second or third grade, according to the most recent published in 2020.

A rise in student misbehavior post-COVID, combined with inadequate funding for special education, has left districts struggling with how to address behaviors — sometimes violent — in the classroom. But research that suspensions disproportionately impact students of color and children with disabilities or from marginalized backgrounds, including those in early grades. 

While Black children made up 18% of U.S. preschoolers during the 2021-22 school year, they represented 38% of students who received at least one out-of-school suspension, according to the latest federal . About 23% of U.S. preschoolers received services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) during that time and represented 41% of those who were suspended.

One found that “receiving a suspension serves as a key turning point toward increased odds of incarceration” for students later in life.

“I don’t … think it works to suspend pre-K students (through) second grade‬ students at all. I was‬ ‭suspended at that age and, quite frankly, I don’t believe it helped. I went home and watched cartoons. I don’t think that changed my behavior‬ ‭at all,” said Nebraska state Sen. Terrell McKinney when he in 2023. “I believe it prepares‬ kids — especially kids that look like me — for the juvenile justice system, the child welfare system and then the‬ ‭criminal justice system.”

Discipline that might be appropriate for older students can be harmful for young children’s development, said Luis Rodriguez, a New York University professor who school discipline. 

“Young children are still learning. They probably are still developing social skills — especially when we’re talking about kindergarten, first grade — and it might be the first time that some of these children are around other children and away from home,” he said. “Exclusionary disciplines such as suspensions at that age can interrupt foundational learning.”

Since the pandemic, some policymakers have focused on ways to combat in schools to protect teacher and student safety, while others have tried to reduce disparities in school discipline and ensure children don’t miss out on learning, said Zeke Perez, assistant director of the nonprofit . 

Maryland was one of the first states to for early grades, in 2017. It prohibited the practice for students in prekindergarten through second grade unless there was an “imminent threat” to staff or students.

A published in 2024 found that the law reduced the probability of K-2 suspensions from 1.9% in 2017 to 0.8% in 2018, while rates remained steady around 3% for grades 3 to 5 following the ban. But disparities still remained in suspension rates for students who were Black, low-income or had disabilities.

Paul Lemle, president of the Maryland State Education Association, said the law has been beneficial for schools.

“We’re always trying to avoid removal from school, especially for our youngest students,” he said. “Everywhere there’s challenging behavior. It comes with the territory. This hasn’t made the job more difficult. It’s the right thing to do for these really young kids.”

While Maryland’s law allows suspensions for violent behavior, Nebraska’s only exception is for bringing a weapon to school. Some educators and lawmakers said revisions are needed to expand the exceptions to protect students and teachers.

Nebraska state Sen. Dave Murman, who proposed in January, said he’s heard from school districts that the same students act out repeatedly and can’t be removed from the classroom. 

“I don’t believe this law is working. Suspension should never be the first option, but what happens when a student behaves in a violent manner and students or staff get hurt?” he said at a Jan. 27 . “I’ve heard stories from teachers and administrators about students biting, hitting, throwing desks and chairs, stabbing with pencils and even kicking the stomach of a pregnant teacher. How can children learn in that environment?”

Murman said suspensions might be the only way administrators can get a parent’s attention to address their child’s behavior. He said some schools aren’t able to make contact with families until they have to physically remove their child from school after a suspension.

These challenges have become more common for Kimball Public Schools since the pandemic, said Anderson. The district is located near the Wyoming and Colorado borders and serves nearly 400 students. About half are enrolled in elementary grades.

Anderson said he had never seen the level of aggression and violent behavior from young elementary students in his eight years as an administrator until recently. He said classroom management has been more difficult since the suspension ban went into effect in 2023.

Small, remote districts like Kimball don’t receive the same resources as metropolitan schools that provide , such as behavioral supports or trauma-informed interventions. A licensed mental health practitioner visits the district once a week. Anderson said he recently filled a behavior specialist position that had been open for a year and a half.

Before the ban, Omaha Public Schools used suspensions in kindergarten through second grade on rare occasions to get a behavior plan in place for a struggling student, said Kathy Poehling, president of the Omaha Education Association. 

“We’re not forced to suspend preschoolers or kindergartners. But if that’s what we need to do in order to get people together, to put a plan in place, sometimes you need 24 hours to do that,” she said. “I don’t really support the idea of repealing the entire ban, because I think then we’re not really looking at the situation and saying, ‘What does the child need?’ We don’t want to suspend just to suspend.”

Omaha’s Education Rights Counsel, a legal advocacy nonprofit, supported the ban because children between the ages of 4 and 7 were being sent home multiple times a year, said Director Lauren Micek Vargas. 

Some students might be exhibiting behaviors because of a disability or possible trauma at home, she said. 

“With our most young, vulnerable children, oftentimes that behavior actually is a form of communication of something else,” she said. “If you punish something without trying to figure out what is happening underneath the surface … we’re missing out on an opportunity to really connect with the child and also see other things that are going on.”

But under IDEA, some legal procedures that could help students get access to special education services are triggered only by suspensions, said Robyn Linscott, director of family and education policy at The Arc of the United States.

Under IDEA, schools are required to hold a meeting with specialists, teachers and the family of any student who has been suspended for 10 or more days during a school year. These sessions determine whether the behavior that led to the suspensions is the result of a disability.

“If that is the case, then the school has to make sure that all these other supports are in place before they can be suspended again, before they can be expelled,” Linscott said. “They often look back to functional behavior assessments and their (individualized education program) to see if it was actually being followed. This is a really important protection and procedural point for students with disabilities.”

Even without suspensions, schools can informally remove students with disabilities by asking their parents to take them home. But that doesn’t count toward the federal 10-day limit.

Last year, Minnesota lawmakers initiated bills to reinstate suspensions and other exclusionary discipline only two years after passing a ban. State Sen. Jim Abeler, one of the bill authors, said the suspension ban had been implemented with good intentions, but “it’s been a disaster.”

“There’s no chance to intervene,” he said. “The kids see no consequences and don’t ever get a chance to get on track with a plan. Superintendents came (to the legislature) and begged for a way to work around this.”

A 2017 in Texas was revised last year to expand the reasons for sending a student in prekindergarten through second grade home. Before the change, young students could be suspended only if they brought a gun to school. Now, include repeated or significant disruption to the classroom or a threat to the health and safety of other students.

In Nebraska, lawmakers like state Sen. Ashlei Spivey are working on a that would allow more exceptions, like chronic disruptive behavior or violence. The legislation, which is separate from the bill to repeal the ban and more likely to pass, is in the second debate and voting stage in the legislature. 

Spivey said that while sending students home might be a tool for discipline, alternative interventions are key to preventing disproportionate suspensions and keeping young children in the classroom.

“If you feel like a 7-year-old should not be in a classroom, my thought is that you cannot throw them away, but you ask, ‘What are they navigating? What type of support do they need?’ ” she said. “There also needs to be clearly defined expectations of what escalates to a suspension and how you are defining that, and how it is being applied to all student populations.”

Nivens’ commitment to leadership, communication, professionalism and community involvement helped him achieve the on Thursday at The School Superintendent Association’s national conference in Nashville.

The organization selected Nivens from three other finalists in Maine, Kentucky and Maryland. He’s led a district of nearly 50,000 students west of Houston since 2021, part of his 30 years of education experience that began with teacher and principal roles in Dallas.

“If you’re smart, you realize you don’t get here by yourself,” he said. “It’s a lot of people — 49,000 kids back home, 6,500 staff are working right now doing a phenomenal job. But it’s a tremendous honor.”

Nivens spoke with The 74’s Lauren Wagner on Friday at the conference. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What initiatives and developments are you most proud of during your tenure at Lamar Consolidated?

We are opening an in-district charter school for kids with autism spectrum disorder. The traditional setting works for some, but not for all. So what can we do to support a group of students who want that support? I sat with a parent back in November, and they were paying $40,000 a year to get their child support outside of school. So we want to try to support kids and families. That’s our purpose. It’s opening in August, but we’ve been planning this for two years.

I would also say we’ve increased the number of students who are thinking about post-secondary [plans]. I secured private funding for a college superintendent trip. So I take two juniors from every high school — 14 kids who are first-time college goers — and I take them out of state. It’s fully funded by private donors. Those kids haven’t even been out of the county. We’ve done it three years in a row now. The first year was Louisiana, last year was Arizona and then North Carolina.

We’re opening a brand new career technical education center in August. Lamar didn’t have a CTE center when I got there — we were partnering with different colleges. I don’t believe kids should have to decide what they’re going to do so early. The system is built where you have to say, ‘Okay, child, you have to choose advanced academics or advanced band or athletics. Pick and choose.’ Give them options. You know, they’re 14 years old. We wanted to make sure everybody had options on what they wanted to do. 

Your district has rapidly grown since you started your role in 2021. What challenges have you dealt with to keep up?

We’ve added about 14,000 kids. There are 49,000 now and when I got there, there were around 36,000. I’ve opened 15 schools in five years, and that takes planning. My chief operations officer and his team do a great job helping me and bringing me data, and we think about where schools would go and when they need to go. 

Another challenge is that since we’re growing so fast, we have to rezone schools. We’ve had a lot of resistance from parents. Finally, I publicly intervened, because we may take students out of one historic school and put them in a brand new campus, and parents are like, ‘No, I went to that school.’ But that’s not fair. I was like, ‘Just because you went there 50 years ago doesn’t mean these kids should still be in that school.’ Our first bond issue in 2022 was $1.5 billion, and the one in 2025 was $1.9 billion. And the community supported it. 

What’s your favorite part about your job?

Definitely campus visits. I love listening to our babies. I taught elementary school and didn’t like it because they were too small — I was a high school guy. But now when I have a tough day, I go to a campus and go see some pre-K babies, some kindergarten babies. They’re the sweetest. And they don’t judge anything. One kid was like, ‘You’re as big as a truck!’ And I said, ‘That’s the laugh I needed today, man.’ By far, that’s my best part of my job.

Did you want to become a superintendent when you first began teaching?

No. I didn’t want to. I wanted to be a head football coach. That was it. I worked with a lot of great people, but I worked with a few who were not good with kids. I would have my [students] call me and say, ‘Coach, I don’t have a ride.’ Or, you know, ‘My mama’s high.’ All kinds of stuff. And I would go pick them up or whatever I needed to do. After school, I would take them home, and I would buy them food. And I didn’t see [some teachers] doing that. And I was like, ‘Why are you in this job if you’re not doing that?’ They always would talk bad about the job and I was like, ‘Do you hate kids?’ So I would go home and talk to my wife about it, and she would say, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m their peer. I can’t do anything about it.’ She said, ‘Yeah, you can. Become a principal.’

So as a principal, I did all the hiring, and if you didn’t know how to teach math, that was fine. If you’re a good person and you love kids, we could teach you how to teach math, right? Then I started working with other principals who I thought weren’t doing as much as they could for their campuses. So it was kind of the same mindset — you know what, I’ll become a superintendent.

What keeps you up at night right now as a superintendent?

In general it’s the contrast between COVID and now. When COVID hit, all the parents had to teach their own kids and their teachers were heroes, right? Now it’s like the world has forgotten that, and the reverence for the job and for the profession is gone. You know, give teachers an opportunity. It’s an automatic, ‘My son said this.’ And, ‘Why did you do that? I’m going to get you fired.’ It’s a cancel culture. So I talk a lot in my community about grace. We’re all human. The teacher might have done something wrong, and I’m not saying we’re always right, but let’s have a conversation about it. I don’t think anybody has bad intentions, right? But let’s have some grace with each other. Let’s be more kind to each other.

Texas families can begin applying for private school vouchers Wednesday, the most significant step yet in a state program set to launch next school year.

Texans have until March 17 to apply for the program, which allows families to receive taxpayer dollars to send children to private school or educate them at home.

If the number of applicants exceeds the $1 billion lawmakers set aside for the program, the state will prioritize students based on family income and whether they have a disability — though neither guarantee access.

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The program, overseen by the comptroller, , will launch at the beginning of the 2026-27 school year.

As of Wednesday night, more than 35,000 families submitted applications, according to the comptroller’s office.

The state can spend no more than $1 billion on the program during the current two-year budget cycle, which ends Aug. 31, 2027. It is unclear how much the program’s costs could rise — lawmakers will make that determination in future legislative sessions — but state budget experts the tab could escalate to roughly $4.8 billion by 2030.

Here’s what to know about the applications.

Most Texas families with school-age children can apply.

That includes students already attending private school or in home schooling. Families with children in a public school must plan to unenroll them if they want to participate. Parents must also submit proof of their child’s U.S. citizenship or evidence the child lawfully resides in the country.

If public demand for the program exceeds available funding, the state will prioritize the following applicants:

• Students with disabilities in families with an annual income at or below 500% of the federal poverty level, which includes a four-person household earning less than roughly $165,000 a year.
• Families at or below 200% of the poverty level, which includes any four-person household earning less than roughly $66,000.
• Families between 200% and 500% of the poverty level.
• Families at or above 500% of the poverty level; these families can receive up to $200 million of the program’s total budget.

The priority system does not guarantee access to the program, as students must still find a private school to accept them. No state or federal laws require private schools to make learning accommodations for students with disabilities.

In with large-scale voucher programs, participation has skewed toward more affluent and white families with children already in private school.

Families must have several documents prepared.

That Social Security numbers for the parent and child; an IRS Form 1040 for 2024 or 2025; and a Texas identification card or utility bill, lease agreement, mortgage statement or voter registration certificate if the state cannot verify a Texas ID number.

Families can also prove their child’s U.S. citizenship or lawful resident status by submitting documents like birth certificates or certificates of naturalization or citizenship.

For , children must be at least 3 years old and meet at least one of the state criteria for public pre-K. That criteria includes being eligible to participate in the free or reduced-price lunch program, being unable to speak or understand English, or being in foster care. Families with children in foster care must submit proof, such as a court order, adoption documents or a placement order.

Some families could receive up to $30,000 each year.

Most participating families with children in private schools will receive about $10,500 annually. Home-schoolers can receive up to $2,000 per year. Children with disabilities can receive up to $30,000 — an amount based on what it would cost to educate that child in a public school.

To apply for the voucher program, families can submit a Social Security determination letter or a physician’s note as proof their child has a disability.

But to qualify for the higher tier of funding, families must submit an Individualized Education Program, a legal document specifying that a child needs special education services. If families do not have that documentation, they can request it from their local public school. Public schools must complete those requests within 45 days of a parent consenting to the evaluation.

Families will receive the money through education savings accounts. Managed by the , the digital accounts will let families pay tuition and make education-related expenses, like private tutoring, transportation and school meals.

Students must also find private schools to accept them.

During the application process, families must signal their intent to enroll their child in a private school.

But they do not have to officially have their children enrolled until June 1, nearly three months after the application period closes. If parents cannot find a school by the initial deadline, the state will give them until July 15. Private schools will then confirm enrollment between June 15 and July 31.

Private schools, on a rolling basis, can apply to join the program if they have operated a campus for at least two years and received accreditation. They must also administer a nationally recognized exam of their choosing in grades 3-12. The schools are not required to administer the same standardized tests issued to public school kids each year — currently the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR.

More than have opted in thus far, with most located in the Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth areas.

Texas Attorney General stating his belief that the comptroller can block certain schools from participating in the program if they’re “illegally tied to terrorists or foreign adversaries.”

The opinion came after Acting Comptroller from Paxton, saying schools associated with the accreditation company Cognia had hosted events organized by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group that Gov. recently designated a terrorist organization.

CAIR has over the label, calling it defamatory and false. The U.S. State Department has the organization a terrorist group.

As by the Houston Chronicle, hundreds of Cognia schools have been shut out of the program, including those that primarily serve Muslim students, Christian students and children with disabilities. The comptroller’s office has said it is now inviting groups of Cognia schools that it considers in compliance with the law to participate.

Families will start receiving notifications in April.

Those notifications will let parents know they will receive funding — contingent upon enrolling their children in a private school by either the June 1 or July 15 deadline.

The first portion of state funding will become available in families’ education savings accounts between July 1 and mid-August.

This first appeared on .

The Texas Education Agency last year launched plans to take over four school districts due to low academic performance, confiscating decision-making power from elected leaders based on state-issued F grades at six campuses.

All six trigger schools share notable similarities.

Between 80% and 97% of their students live in low-income households, far above the state average of 60%.

Black and Hispanic children make up the dominant majority of the student populations, from 88% at Marilyn Miller Language Academy near Lake Worth to almost every child at Fehl-Price Elementary School in Beaumont.

And nearly half of students at each school are on the fringes of dropping out — including 64% to 92% of kids on five of the six campuses.

�ձ�油��’ places a momentous decision in the hands of the state’s education commissioner. When at least one school receives an F for five years in a row, the commissioner must order the campus closed or initiate a state takeover of the entire district, replacing elected school board members with leaders of the education chief’s choosing.

Commissioner Mike Morath, in his decade as leader of the Texas Education Agency, has ordered two campuses closed: Snyder Junior High and Travis Elementary, both in West Texas. Snyder Junior High, located in the Snyder Independent School District, has since using a new academic framework. The Midland Independent School District with a charter school operator to overhaul Travis Elementary.

Over the same 10-year span, Morath ordered seven district takeovers based on academic performance, concluding that school leaders consistently demonstrated an inability to govern effectively and stood in the way of kids reaching their full potential.

But critics of the accountability system say state takeovers penalize districts based on factors beyond their control. Schools alone cannot solve inequality tied to race and poverty. Yet that inequality, critics say, helps explain why many of the takeover trigger schools in Texas share nearly identical characteristics.

“Not everybody gets a hot breakfast and Mom taking them to school or putting them on the bus and giving them a kiss on the cheek,” said Jill Bottelberghe, superintendent of the Connally Independent School District.

Morath last year announced his intention to appoint superintendents and replace the school boards of the Fort Worth, Beaumont, Connally, and Lake Worth districts due to five consecutive F grades at . The Beaumont and Connally districts each had two schools that met the takeover threshold.

Morath said the districts’ inability “to implement effective changes to improve the performance of students” justified his decision. He also cited elevated percentages of children not meeting grade-level expectations across each district, not just at the trigger campuses.

In Fort Worth’s case — the second-largest takeover in state history, — Morath pointed out that districts of similar size and demographics had found ways to produce stronger academic results.

�ձ�油��’ accountability system measures school performance on an A-F scale. Based largely on the state’s standardized exam, ratings are intended to measure how well students learn, how students progress academically through the school year, and how schools perform compared to campuses with similar percentages of low-income students.

An F means at least 65% of children at the school tested below grade level.

“Getting an F is really, really hard to do in our system,” said Iris Tian, deputy commissioner of analytics, assessment and reporting for the Texas Education Agency. “For a campus to have gotten an F five years in a row, it is a disaster — it is truly an emergency.”

Low-income schools, including those educating mostly Black and Hispanic students, can thrive in Texas’ A-F system. In the most recent ratings, 382 out of 3,203 high-poverty campuses, or 12%, earned an A, according to a Texas Tribune analysis.

But those campuses were the exception. Schools with high poverty were the least likely to earn an A and the most likely to receive Ds and Fs. Compared to low-poverty schools, those campuses were more than 30 times as likely to receive a D or F.

Similar disparities exist when factoring in race and ethnicity. Majority-Black schools were more than four times as likely as majority-white schools to receive a D or F, while majority-Hispanic schools were more than twice as likely.

Critics of the system argue that the state punishes schools without holding itself accountable, particularly when it comes to providing resources for a public education system that serves 5.5 million children — most of whom are Hispanic and Black and come from low-income households.

Research points to several strategies for improving outcomes for Black and Hispanic children, including , , and .

In Texas, however, schools spent six years without an increase in the state money they typically devote to salaries and operations, before the Legislature passed in 2025. The state has made it easier for schools to . Districts can no longer . And teachers are in how they can talk about race and gender in the classroom.

Texas also fails to address educational inequality when it focuses attention on testing outcomes at the expense of other in-school factors that impede the academic progress of Black and Hispanic students, said Andrew Hairston, a civil rights attorney who directs the Education Justice Project at Texas Appleseed, an advocacy organization.

Students of color, for example, have faced discipline because their . Some have sat through lessons that . Others have

“What good is it to have moderately improved reading levels that come from a state takeover when the children are being called the N-word every day and cannot have a peaceful environment in which they learn and seek to grow?” Hairston said.

Hairston expressed frustration that the accountability system also does not consider the lingering effects of residential segregation, community resistance to integration, or cuts to federal and state resources. That means, he said, Texas is not adequately measuring schools’ ability to deliver holistic educational services to the students who need them most.

The best school leaders and education reform efforts take those societal factors into account, said Bob Sanborn, president and CEO of Children at Risk, a research and advocacy organization focused on poverty and inequality.

When that doesn’t happen, he said, students in need of the most help can end up worse off.

“If we want our children to be successful in Texas, we have to pay attention to those districts where parents aren’t making as much money, where there’s lower levels of educational attainment,” Sanborn said. “That often translates into immigrant communities, Black and brown communities, and I think people don’t like to talk about that in Texas.”

“Meeting the needs of all students”

The Texas Education Agency insists the A-F system helps districts improve outcomes by “accurately and fairly evaluating school performance.”

“Inequality cannot be addressed by hiding outcomes, but instead, must be addressed by improving them,” agency spokesperson Jake Kobersky said in a statement. “Our state’s legal framework ensures that school leaders remain focused on meeting the needs of all students, regardless of their background.”

In recent letters to school leaders announcing the state’s intention to intervene in their districts, Morath said unacceptable performance in a single year represents a “significant academic weakness.” When it continues for multiple years, he wrote, “the children in those campuses develop significant academic gaps.”

“We clearly have a school system that has prevented children from getting the education to which they are morally entitled,” Morath said last year at the University of Texas, where he spoke about the academic takeover in Fort Worth. “What do you do when you have a situation where our locally elected school board has, for really over a decade, been sort of incapable, for whatever reason — sins of omission, sins of commission — of giving kids a shot at success in America?”

Bottelberghe, superintendent of the Connally school district, understands why the commissioner often attributes school struggles to governance, saying district leaders in her community did not adequately respond to students’ academic shortcomings prior to her appointment in 2023. 

But Bottelberghe also feels state leaders do not fully understand how factors outside of school can hinder academic performance. The state’s accountability system gives schools some grace by taking into account socioeconomic makeup and measuring academic growth beyond just kids’ mastery of content, but she doesn’t think the system goes far enough.

Bottelberghe’s Waco-area district includes students who have to wake themselves up in the morning because their parents cannot, athletes who rely on coaches for rides because buses don’t run early enough, and children who don’t always know where they’re going to lay their head at night.

“It’s very unfortunate that we have so many kids that are in that situation,” Bottelberghe said. “I think people lose sight.”

Tian of the Texas Education Agency acknowledges that academics are not the only important factor in education.

But one of the primary goals of the accountability system, she said, is to direct attention to where children need academic support. Schools can have strong internal cultures and positive relationships with their communities, but if they lack rigorous quality instruction, Tian said, “kids are not going to be where they need to be.”

“Really, all the intervention is, is like, ‘Let’s try something new because what we’ve been doing for the past few years has not been working.’ These kids are not getting what they deserve. And we have to do something different,” Tian said.

“We felt alone”

State takeovers can severely disrupt community morale, said Kevin Jackson, who provides behavioral support to children at the Disciplinary Alternative Education Program in Beaumont.

More than a decade before the state announced plans to replace its school leaders for academic reasons, the Beaumont district was taken over due to concerns about its financial practices. Jackson, a 25-year veteran of the district and president of the Beaumont Teachers Association, said the previous intervention left educators and students feeling punished for acts they weren’t responsible for.

“We felt alone,” Jackson said. “We felt like we were put on an island out there by ourselves, because you remove the people that we elected to work with us and protect us and help us create a better district. You removed all of the board and everyone from their positions, and you brought in your own people. And as a result, that didn’t look well, because the people that you brought in weren’t familiar with this area. I don’t believe you were really tuned in to what was really going on here in Beaumont.”

The education agency and supporters of the accountability system often cite the Houston Independent School District as an example of what takeovers can accomplish. �ձ�油��’ largest school district educates a population of mostly Black and Hispanic children, while roughly 80% of students come from low-income households.

Since the state takeover in 2023, the Houston school district has seen in test scores. Last school year, it had — down significantly from before the intervention.

But critics say the takeover also serves as an example of what can happen when leaders emphasize testing metrics over the broader school climate.

Teachers and students have . District leaders have struggled to earn trust, as evidenced by 58% of 450,000 voters aimed at improving school infrastructure. Some Houston residents are skeptical about whether short-term academic success on standardized exams will lead to sustained progress in the years to come.

Education research on offers a wider glimpse at the potential impact on students:

• Takeovers across the U.S. are more likely to occur in districts where students of color and low-income children constitute a majority of the schools’ populations.
• Takeovers tend to increase per-student spending and some measures of schools’ financial health.
• Takeovers have demonstrated more positive academic effects on districts with large concentrations of Hispanic students but have affected Black students more neutrally or even negatively.
• Takeovers, on average, do not improve test scores.

The Texas Education Agency says comparing academic performance before and after takeovers shows improved governance and higher test scores in nearly all state-operated districts, defying the national trend.

Beth Schueler, an education professor and researcher at Stanford University, said it’s also important to evaluate simultaneous trends in similarly sized districts not under state control, providing a more reliable measure of a takeover’s impact.

Still, Schueler noted, conversations about how to best serve the most vulnerable children are common nationwide, with broad agreement that education must focus on what’s best for children before opinions differ on which policies can best make that happen.

The presence of so many societal constraints leaves an important question for state leaders and local educators: What are reasonable expectations for schools?

“I don’t think we want to lose sight of the fact that the demographic composition of a school system is the thing that’s going to be the most predictive of variation in performance and outcomes,” Schueler said.

“But I do think there’s room for education systems to make a difference, because we’ve seen that they can make a difference,” she added. “There’s limits to what they can do, and I think that’s important context. But it’s not as though we should give up, I think, on trying to make more effective education policy.”

Alex Nguyen and Rob Reid contributed to this story.

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

This first appeared on .

The Texas State Board of Education on Wednesday delayed an initial vote on a proposed required reading list that includes several Bible passages, including some featured in the controversial, state-approved Bluebonnet reading program that some districts have adopted.

Members of the public who spoke on the issue were overwhelmingly opposed to the state’s proposed list, citing a lack of diverse authors and the religious texts among the reasons.

“What I see is an overemphasis on the Christian tradition without providing the kind of contextualization and analysis that religious texts require,” said Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

In April, the board will discuss both Commissioner Mike Morath’s��proposed��list and an alternative, shorter list offered by Board Member Will Hickman. His list also includes some biblical texts, including the Good Samaritan, the parable of the Prodigal Son and the story of the tower of Babel.

“These are common stories that are, what I would say, part of cultural literacy,” he said.

When Texas approved a new reading curriculum that features Bible stories in 2024, education Commissioner Mike Morath told districts they could adopt it, reject it or even adapt it to their own local needs.

But a proposed statewide reading list, which relies on some of the same biblical lessons, would not be optional.

The selections, part of a longer list that also features scripture passages for and students, include Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son for first graders and a third grade text on the Apostle Paul’s conversion to Christianity. Those are among the stories that the agency published from the Bluebonnet reading curriculum, a spokesman said.

The proposed reading list, which includes classics from Shakespeare and Poe and the writings of historical figures, is scheduled for a preliminary vote by the Texas State Board of Education Wednesday.

One of the criticisms of the religious lessons in Bluebonnet is that they largely present an evangelical Christian perspective — an attribute the reading list shares, said David Brockman, a religion and public policy scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

“As with the Bluebonnet curriculum, this one-sided focus on the Bible conveys, intentionally or unintentionally, the message that the biblical tradition is more important and more worthy of attention than other religions,” he said. “This message in turn threatens to turn students, parents, and teachers who are not Christians or Jews into outsiders in their own public schools.” 

The state board narrowly approved the reading program in late 2024 after months of debate between Christian conservatives and those who argue that it emphasizes Christianity over other religions and could be used to proselytize elementary school children. The curriculum is one of several ways the state has tried to heighten students’ exposure to the Bible, knowledge that Morath says will improve overall reading performance. Bluebonnet, and now the reading list, have received praise from those advocating for a classical curriculum focused on Western culture. 

“This is the revolution America needs,” Jeremy Wayne Tate, founder of the Classical Learning Test, an SAT and ACT alternative, . 

Because of student mobility, there is a need for a “common literary canon,” according to . “When students switch schools, they will often read the same text twice or skip a text entirely due to local grade level selection differences.”

A requirement that the state include “religious literature,” in the curriculum has been for years. Some districts met that standard by offering standalone elective courses on the Old and New Testaments in high school. In last fall, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the state board could also comply by integrating religious topics into other subjects, like language arts. 

The reading list would include a kindergarten passage on the Golden Rule, which emphasizes Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, where he instructed followers to “do unto others as you would have done unto you.” After a backlash, the state added references to similar lessons from other faiths. In first grade, there’s a book on America’s symbols, which also highlights connections to scripture.

‘Parents have every right’ 

Most districts in the state didn’t rush to adopt the curriculum, despite incentives from the state of up to $60 per student. A state database last summer showed that fewer than 200 of the state’s more than 1,200 districts and charters had ordered the reading materials, many of them smaller districts. Others adopted the program but discarded the religion-related lessons. 

In a , the Texas Freedom Network, which has been critical of including Bible lessons in the curriculum, showed that just 17 of the state’s 100 largest districts adopted it and were often slow to order the materials. The Fort Worth schools, now under state takeover, will begin implementing it this fall. 

Since last fall, the 72,000-student Conroe district, near Houston, has been fielding requests from parents to opt their children out of some of the biblical material. Parents are required to submit a request in writing to a teacher or school administrator, but officials told The 74 that they’re not keeping track of how many requests they’ve received. Last fall, one parent told board members that creating alternate lessons is adding to teachers’ workload. 

“Parents have every right to opt their children out of this,” Destinee Milton, who has a second grader and a fifth grader in the district, . Because the religious material is part of the same book as the rest of the lessons, “teachers are now required to spend their planning time” pasting in alternate content.

Mark Brooks, whose third grader attends Colin Powell Elementary in Conroe, asked that she be excused from lessons on Christianity and its influence on the Roman Empire. 

“I don’t think religion belongs in public schools,” he said. But the school seemed unprepared for how to handle the request. The district didn’t reply to a request for comment.

“We asked the teacher; the teacher didn’t really know. We talked to the principal; the principal didn’t really know,” he said. They eventually relocated his daughter to a separate room where she worked on a lesson about the roads that led to Rome, also part of Bluebonnet. 

Brooks said his daughter liked the alternate lesson because she finished it quickly and had more time for independent reading. He’s not opposed, he said, to brief mentions of religion in school, but described a passage on the Christian emperor Constantine crediting God with his success as a ruler as “way over the top.”

Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said that if the board approves the reading list, it’s “only a matter of time before parents begin to opt their children out of these lessons” in districts statewide. He cited a Supreme Court ruling last year that upheld parents’ rights to keep their children from participating in lessons focused on LGBTQ-related story books for religious reasons. He expects parents to exercise those same rights when it comes to religious material. 

“It’s going to be classroom chaos,” he said. 

Supporters of the program argue that the Bible is a foundational document that should be taught in public schools and is necessary to understand historical references and works of literature. The Supreme Court, they say, erred in 1963 when it that mandated prayer and Bible readings violated the First Amendment.

“It will be impossible for Texas students to understand settlement in America, the Revolution, the Constitution, or the rest of American and World history, let alone literature, without knowledge of the Bible,” said Matthew McCormick, education director for the , a conservative think tank. “Many schools are countering what they see as favor to Christianity with what looks a lot like anti-Christian bias, but this is a disservice to the education of their students.”

Survey responses from teachers, collected through a link in a Bluebonnet Facebook group, show that educators remain divided on the religious components after several months of teaching the program. 

“I am a non-Christian being forced to give sermons in class,” one teacher wrote. “No consideration was given to the rights of teachers and students of various backgrounds with this curriculum.”

But another said there’s a way to teach the material without trying to influence what students think.

“If I present something as, ‘This is what this group of people believe and your family can discuss what you believe at home,’ it’s OK,” the teacher explained. “I wasn’t thrilled with the additions, but I had to put myself in the mindset of ‘It’s a story from a religion. I’m not teaching it as fact.’ ”

The finalists were asked about top education issues and trends in a Jan. 8 online discussion. Here’s some of what they had to say.

Roosevelt Nivens

Nivens has led Lamar Consolidated Independent School District in south Texas since 2021. The district, which has roughly 49,000 students, has been fast-growing, with 15 schools opening during Nivens’ tenure. 

As an educator with 30 years of experience, Nivens serves on the Texas Association of School Administrators. He has received top superintendent awards in recent years from the National Association of State Boards of Education and the Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents. Before his current role, Nivens was a teacher and assistant principal in Dallas. He holds degrees from Liberty University and Texas A&M-Commerce.

When asked about artificial intelligence use in schools, Nivens said AI helps teachers “get back to the human side of teaching.” His district is creating policies so educators can utilize AI tools for administrative tasks like lesson planning. 

“We want to help students use it responsibly,” he added. “It’s our job, so they will know exactly what it is and what they should and should not use it for.”

Family engagement is also a popular topic in Nivens’ district. He said Lamar Consolidated not only hosts parent workshops, but the district organizes events at places like apartment complexes to cater to families at their homes

Heather Perry

It’s been a decade since Perry became superintendent of Gorham School District, which serves 2,800 students in southern Maine. Over the past 30 years, she has worked her way up from educational technician, middle school social studies teacher and building principal.

Perry serves on the executive board of the Maine School Superintendents Association. She’s the first district leader in her state to be named a national finalist for Superintendent of the Year. She received degrees from the University of Southern Maine and the University of Maine.

Perry said her district began highlighting post-graduate options besides college roughly eight years ago. She helped create , a K-12 program that exposes students to career pathways. Kindergartners learn about future career goals, while middle schoolers get hands-on experiences in fields like health care, business and technology through community partnerships. High schoolers venture outside the school building to get a head start on their careers with local businesses.

Perry said she would rather see  juniors and seniors traveling to early college classes, internships, apprenticeships and “doing real-life career experiences” than sitting in school.

The program began with 35 students and now is at capacity, with 140. It has grown from five business partners to 90.

“There used to be a stigma attached to students who attended (career technical education) schools,” Perry said. “That stigma is gone now. Students who want to go to MIT or engineering schools see the value of going into a (career technical education) program. We’ve done a nice job in Gorham.”

Demetrus Liggins

Liggins is superintendent of Fayette County Public Schools in Lexington, Kentucky, the state’s second-largest district with more than 42,000 students. He’s been in the education field for 25 years, serving in roles from a dual-language teacher to building principal. He was previously a superintendent of two Texas school districts.

In 2020, Liggins was recognized as a superintendent to watch by the National School Public Relations Association. He holds degrees from the University of Texas, Stephen F. Austin University and California State University.

Liggin’s tenure at Fayette County Public Schools has also been the focus of scrutiny over finances. In September, two Kentucky lawmakers over what they described as budget inconsistencies and . He was also by his budget director, prompting an by the school board. 

While Liggins hasn’t publicly responded to the investigation, he in November that budget inconsistencies were the result of miscommunication.

When it comes to funding, Liggins said, cuts made by the Trump administration have cost the district at least one federal grant, and extra money for Title I, II and III grants is at risk. He’s turning to state legislators to help fill future funding gaps.

With budget shortfalls a top concern, Liggins said he’s increasing his involvement in his own district’s finances. Administrators used to report on the district budget to his deputy superintendent but now come to him directly. He said he’s also attending conferences with his business office to learn more.

“That understanding is very helpful when you go to speak to legislators about the (funding) formula,” he said. “Background knowledge has been very helpful.”

Sonja Santelises

This is Santelises’ 10th year as chief executive officer of Baltimore City Schools, which serves 77,000 students. She was previously the district’s chief academic officer and has held leadership positions in Boston Public Schools, was a lecturer at Harvard University and served as a vice president at The Education Trust.

Santelises is a Carnegie Foundation board member and chair of the Council of the Great City Schools and has been recognized for her leadership at the and levels. Santelises earned degrees from Harvard University and Columbia University.

Baltimore City Schools has been accused of and during Santelises’ tenure. 

The key to attracting talent and preventing teacher burnout is to have high-quality principals, she said. Teachers in Baltimore City tend to stay if they’re placed in schools where their principal understands how to support them. 

“Making sure we’re keeping salaries and benefits competitive (is important) because teaching is hard work,” she said. “Everybody wants to know they are being recognized.”

Santelises said her district also prevents turnover by allowing teachers to use a career ladder to change their roles so they spend less time in the classroom and more time coaching other staff.

The AI-fueled program claims its students grow academically more than twice as fast as the national average, with only two hours of learning per day. Initially, I was skeptical. But after I read a parent and a of school founder Mackenzie Price and principal Joe Liemandt, and listened to on , I was intrigued both as a parent and as an education policy wonk. 

Alpha started as a small private school in Austin, Texas, in 2014 but now operates a growing network of 18 locations. Its AI tools are also in use in specialized gifted and talented programs, sports academies and a Montessori-like elementary school. As the network grew, it drew the attention of Liemandt, an Austin tech billionaire, who not only decided to send his kids there but stepped away from the industry, became the school’s leader and now says he plans to spend $1 billion to transform education. 

How? Mainly through its technology-enabled, personalized “” model. Alpha points to NWEA MAP Growth gains that are, on average, 2.6 times as large as other similarly scoring students make. In 2024-25 for , the main Alpha campus had, depending on the grade level, 67% to 90% of students meeting their growth targets in math and 65% to 100% of students meeting their targets in English. 

These rates are high, but I find them plausible. like i-Ready, DreamBox, Khan Academy, IXL and Zearn produce strong academic gains by combining, to varying degrees, the best of homeschooling (personalization) with instruction that leads kids’ through harder and harder content. They also incorporate lessons from the   field, which has found that quizzes and practice that’s spaced out over time help students gradually store new content in their long-term memory.  

Alpha uses artificial intelligence to tailor learning experiences for each student. For example, the school has catalogued the specific lessons a student would need to master, say, sixth grade math. Then, the AI uses a child’s test scores or past work to determine what remaining lessons need to be completed. Eventually, the goal is to personalize the content, giving students who are interested in, say, baseball or fashion lessons about fractions or algebra that use examples from those subjects. 

The trick is to get kids to actually with the apps and persevere. Not many students can do that on their own.

Alpha takes this insight and supercharges it. It essentially promises that if kids buckle down each morning and get through their academic lessons, they can have their afternoons free to pursue their own interests and other . The contours of its “” model vary by student and location. Some will practice chess or play sports, but schools also use the afternoon to work on public speaking, entrepreneurship or outdoor education — real-world activities, not stuff you might learn in a book.

This approach — not chatbots — is what Alpha School means when it boasts that its students can complete their core academic subjects in just two hours a day. In fact, Liemandt has quite negative things to say about chatbots and warns that they lead kids to cheat, get distracted or outsource their thinking to the computers. He also hinted on a recent that the school’s AI tools struggle with errors and hallucinations.

The ultimate goal is mastery of the subject matter. And when Liemandt talks about mastery, he literally wants kids to know 100% of the material in each course sequence. 

In fact, he believes this lack of mastery is a key failing of the current educational system. Kids get passed along if they know 70% or 80% of the material in a given grade. But, Liemandt argues, if kids don’t know the other 20% to 30% — or don’t know it well enough — this deficit builds up over time and leaves students struggling as they get into harder material. This might explain why math proficiency rates as kids get older.  

When new students enter Alpha, Liemandt offers them a deal: They can earn $100 if they can ace the state math test. Sounds impossible, but the deal applies to any tested grade, from third on up. So, for example, those who enter Alpha as seventh graders are encouraged to go back and take the earlier-grade math tests. If they can ace those, they get the $100. By offering the monetary reward in this way, Liemandt tries to trick kids into filling any knowledge gaps. 

Alpha’s goal is to have kids who love school so much that they might even prefer it over vacation. That’s a super high bar (!), but Liemandt swears that a lot of Alpha students ask to keep going over the summer or holidays.

To keep kids on track, Alpha gives each a set of personalized daily goals. These are based on the lessons students need to master, not the time it might take to complete them. Kids also earn “Alpha bucks” that they can use to buy treats. And because most people can’t focus for hours on end, Alpha uses the “” time management technique to push kids to focus for 25 minutes before taking a break. 

Who is doing all the motivating? It’s not traditionally licensed teachers. Instead, Alpha employs one “guide” — a sort of coach or assistant — for every . The typical guide is a young college graduate who may be a former athlete or cheerleader — they’re good with children and high-energy, but their primary job is more about support and encouragement than delivering pedagogy. 

The original Alpha School in Austin charges $40,000 in tuition per year. An Alpha School opening near me in is going to charge $65,000 annually. The network is expanding rapidly and will be extending its model into public charter schools and much lower-cost private schools, including one in , Texas, that costs “only” $10,000 per year.

What do they use the money for? The AI costs are high, and Alpha has nice buildings, small classes and well-paid staff. It also uses the money to do things a typical school couldn’t afford, like offering financial incentives for acing exams and on a field trip to Poland. 

The families who can afford Alpha’s lofty fees are not exactly your run-of-the-mill public school parents. It’s worth a healthy dose of skepticism to question whether Alpha’s results will hold up to scrutiny or work as well as it claims for less advantaged students. Alpha has suggesting that its model also works well for lower-performing students, but the sample size is small.

Still, it’s worth understanding which parts of the Alpha model are the most important and most replicable. Similar AI/ technology components, such as and , are already being incorporated in schools to varying degrees. 

Implementing an Alpha-style mastery approach would require schools to put students in classes based on ability level rather than age. That would be hard to do, given how most schools are organized. Still, have made to apply the same .

Some of the motivation aspects are worth trying, although perhaps not at the same scale or boldness as what Liemandt is able to do. For example, research has found from paying students to show up to school and complete their homework on time. Many teachers already run their own mini-rewards systems, which they could focus on academics both in the classroom and at home. 

Mostly, I appreciate that Alpha School is pushing the frontier of what makes for a good school. No matter what else it accomplishes, its experiments with technology, student motivation and content mastery are good for the world. 

*Disclosure: The author is a policy adviser for NWEA, the makers of the MAP Growth assessments mentioned in the piece.