There’s one question that motivates all of my research on the teaching profession. How do we shake up this system so that motivated people will choose teaching as a career? I think the answer starts with economics.

It’s not like the average starting salary for teachers is bad. In 2024-25, the average first-year Texas teacher made about $55,700. The typical 2023 graduate of a Texas public university made about $51,200 the next year.

_{Median 2024 wages of 2023 bachelor’s graduates of Texas public universities, by major, and the average first-year Texas teacher salary, 2024-25. Sources: Texas CREWS; Texas Education Agency.}

But getting there cost a very different amount of time and money depending on the route. The university path usually means a semester or a full year of unpaid student teaching. A fully online certification program costs about $6,000, and you’re teaching on a full-time salary while you finish certification. And as we’ve seen in the headlines, you could also just start teaching with no certification at all.

Until this year, all three got you to roughly the same starting salary. The person who gave up a semester or year of income for clinical training earns the same as the person who was teaching and earning a salary that entire time. If you compared the paycheck to the uncertified teacher’s down the hall, you could say there was not a return on investment.

We never ask humans to act against their economic well-being. Why do we assume we can ask that of future teachers? Unfortunately, we have done that for a long time. But now, future teachers have started to act in their rational economic best interest. In 2016-17, the affordable, fast-track online teacher preparation programs surpassed universities in the share of new teacher hires. Through the 2015 District of Innovation law, most districts began waiving teacher certification requirements altogether following the pandemic. A decade later, this is what we have become used to as the three most common pathways into the teaching profession.

_{Share of new Texas teacher hires by route, 2013-14 to 2025-26. Source: Author’s analysis of Texas Education Agency data.}

What Texas got right

With Texas House Bill 2, the state recognized that preparation, compensation and retention are all part of the same equation.

On the preparation side, the new PREP allotment pays districts to host teacher residents, who have to be paid at least $20,000 for the year, and pays their preparation program once they’re certified and have taught a year in the district. We are paying people to choose high-quality preparation, so that the fast track isn’t the only economically viable option that people have.

On the compensation side, districts now have to start first-year teachers who hold a standard certificate, or the enhanced certificate residents earn, at a higher salary than first-year teachers without one. The law says districts must pay teachers $3,000 more if they have a standard certificate and $6,000 more if they have an Enhanced Standard Teaching Certificate. And the Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA), which pays teachers for being effective, was expanded so that a teacher can make as much as $36,000 in additional compensation annually, guaranteed for a minimum of five years. So we’re moving from a place of just average raises based on years of experience to rewarding preparation and effectiveness.

Does preparation pay off?

In a statewide study covering 2014 to 2023, I found that students of teachers from fully online programs did worse in reading and math than students of new teachers from traditional university programs, and teachers from the online programs were more likely to leave the profession. In my most recent study of uncertified teachers, a single year with an uncertified teacher, rather than a new teacher from a traditional university program, cost students between one and four months of learning.

On the other end of the spectrum, a teacher residency stretches student teaching into a full school year, with the future teacher working alongside an experienced mentor teacher. At Texas Tech, Tech Teach is the residency for traditional undergraduates, and Tech Teach Across Texas (TTAT) extends that model statewide, with coursework online and the residency in a district in the candidate’s own region. The University of Texas El Paso (UTEP) puts every candidate through its Miner Teacher Residency.

For all three, I compared residency graduates with new teachers from traditional university programs at the same campuses. Students of Tech Teach and TTAT teachers gained roughly 0.7 and 1.3 additional months of learning, and students of UTEP’s residents finished the year about four and a half months ahead in math and five and a half months ahead in reading.

I should be clear: Not all alternative certification programs are bad, and I do not believe that universities should be the only organizations that prepare people to become teachers. There are a lot of great programs outside colleges of education. That’s the beauty of having the diverse teacher preparation landscape that we do in Texas.

_{Residency results compare teachers at the same campuses, and Texas Tech’s results average all STAAR-tested grades and subjects. Statewide results come from studies of fully online programs and of uncertified teachers (grades 4 through 8).}

Being more effective is exactly what TIA pays for, and residency graduates are much more likely to get TIA by their third year in the classroom. In TIA districts, TTAT teachers were about four times as likely to hold a designation as new teachers from traditional university programs at the same campuses, and UTEP’s residents were about 50% more likely.

_{Difference in the likelihood of holding a TIA designation, new teachers in TIA districts, compared with new teachers from traditional university programs at the same campuses.}

Again, the starting salary is not bad. Ten years after graduation, though, the typical Texas graduate made about $79,100 in 2024. Texas teachers with 6 to 10 years of experience averaged about $62,600.

TIA is closing that longstanding difference in pay. An average TIA designation paid about $11,800 a year in 2024-25, which covers more than two-thirds of that gap, and a Master designation paid about $20,900, which covers the gap entirely.

A teacher 6 to 10 years in with a Master payout made about $83,500, more than the typical Texas graduate ten years out and more than the average teacher with over 30 years in the classroom.

_{Average Texas teacher salary by years of experience, 2024-25. The last bar adds the average Master TIA payout to the average salary for 6 to 10 years. Source: Texas Education Agency.}

In my research on TIA, districts that adopted it saw their most effective teachers become about 20% less likely to leave. Compared to new, traditional university-prepared teachers at the same campuses, UTEP’s residents were about 16% more likely to still be teaching in Texas three years later, and TTAT teachers were about 11% more likely to remain in Texas classrooms each year.

So good preparation leads to TIA, and TIA keeps teachers. That’s the selling point for convincing someone why they should choose a high-quality teacher preparation program.

The story colleges of education can tell

In 2025-26, fewer teachers were entering classrooms without certification, but the share entering through fast-track, online programs went up. That’s what keeps me up at night. I worry we are seeing people opt for the fast track when the state has made a significant investment in high-quality teacher preparation programs.

House Bill 2 phases out uncertified teachers in core subjects by 2029-30, and those people won’t stop wanting to teach. In 2025-26, about 12,100 first-time hires were uncertified. This fall, about 1,500 people are in a paid residency through the PREP allotment.

Are we going to revert back to the mid-2010s, when online programs passed university programs, or are we going to tell a convincing story that motivates future teachers to pursue the best preparation available to them?

This is part of how colleges of education can begin marketing their programs. We should not expect candidates to find and choose us when there are cheaper alternatives that get them to the same starting salary more quickly.

The choice to become a well-prepared teacher should not be made without the consideration of immediate and future costs. From decades of research, we know one of the biggest reasons people go into teaching is that they want to make a difference. Caring is great, but while caring may get teachers into the classroom, it is not enough to make them stay. What keeps teachers is that they feel they are prepared, they are making a difference for kids, and they are being paid for it. That is the return on investment that has long been absent from the teaching profession.

We can start telling the story now.

Notes

_{I work at Texas Tech but don’t hold an appointment in its preparation programs. I also consult with districts on their TIA designation systems, and my university does the state’s TIA data validation. I convert test-score differences to months of learning by counting a quarter of a standard deviation as about nine months. The conclusions of this research do not necessarily reflect the opinions or official position of the Texas Education Agency, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, the Texas Workforce Commission, or the State of Texas.}

Austin ISD headquarters. Photo by Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

After my post on how the Houston ISD takeover changed which teachers left and which kids had access to effective teachers, a reader wrote in with a theory about Austin ISD. Their hunch was that since COVID, Austin ISD has had a hard time putting certified and experienced teachers in its most struggling schools, and that the district stopped being a place teachers wanted to work.

According to the latest data, the reader is half right. Austin’s teachers aren’t leaving at unusual rates, but new hires started to look very different compared to previous years, especially teachers who ended up in the schools that were already struggling.

Burnet and Webb middle schools received a preliminary fifth straight failing rating in August, while the district as a whole earned a B. Under state law, five straight failing ratings mean the commissioner has to close the campus or replace Austin’s elected school board. Although, this has gotten a bit complicated with the latest efforts to petition to close the two middle schools. TEA will finalize the ratings by Dec. 11, and we will know the fate of the district as early as January.

The drama over Burnet and Webb has been about who should be in charge, the state or Austin’s elected board. But whoever runs those schools in January should pay attention to the teachers currently in the building and how the district has historically staffed the campuses. While questions about who will run the district linger, I’d argue the better question is who is teaching these middle schoolers, and who should be.

Who Austin hired for its struggling schools

Using statewide data, I ranked Texas teachers of tested grades and subjects using a value-added measure, which compares how much their students grew on state tests with the growth of similar students elsewhere in Texas.1 Since 2022-23, almost two in three of the new teachers hired at Austin’s lowest-performing campuses ranked in the bottom quarter of Texas teachers. At its highest-performing campuses, it was about one in three.

Austin’s struggling campuses were getting weaker hires before COVID too, when about half of their new hires ranked in the bottom quarter. Now it’s almost two in three, and a lot of those new hires weren’t certified to teach.

In 2021-22, fewer than 1% of Austin’s teachers were uncertified. In 2024-25, it was 11%, above the roughly 8% in traditional Texas districts and the 7% in the suburban districts that hire from the same Central Texas job market.2 The change came from who the district hired as brand-new teachers. In 2023-24, more than half of the first-year teachers Austin hired were uncertified.

That same year, Austin’s share of uncertified teachers matched Houston’s. Houston was in its first year under state control, and about a quarter of its teachers were new to the district. Austin hired uncertified teachers at the same rate, despite having lower turnover and none of the upheaval of a state takeover.

Share of uncertified teachers, 2015-16 to 2024-25. Shading marks Houston’s years under state control.

Those teachers weren’t hired evenly across the district’s campuses. At Austin’s lowest- and middle-performing campuses, about one in six teachers were uncertified in 2024-25. At its highest-performing campuses, it was less than half that.

Share of uncertified Austin ISD teachers, by campus performance before COVID, 2021-22 and 2024-25.

Those top campuses are also the district’s wealthiest. About one in four of their students comes from a low-income family, compared with about nine in ten at the lowest-performing campuses. So the students with the fewest resources at home were the most likely to have an uncertified teacher, which my own research shows costs students months of learning.

What that looks like at Burnet, Webb, and Dobie

Burnet, Webb, and Dobie, the three middle schools that went into this year with four straight failing ratings, are where you can see these unfortunate patterns most clearly. Since 2022-23, about three in four of their new hires ranked in the bottom quarter of Texas teachers. No teacher ranked in the top quarter. In 2023-24, one in five of their teachers were uncertified, about double the rest of the district. And after 2024-25, more than half of their teachers left their campus.

Before COVID, about one in eleven students at Burnet, Webb, and Dobie had a teacher from the top quarter of Texas teachers, about the same as at Austin’s highest-performing campuses. By 2024-25, it was fewer than one in forty. At the top campuses, it actually went up.

Share of Austin ISD students taught by a teacher in the top quarter of Texas teachers by value-added, 2018-19 and 2024-25. The lowest-performing third excludes Burnet, Webb, and Dobie.

A failing rating reflects more than who is teaching, and my value-added measure only covers teachers of tested grades and subjects, about a third of Austin’s teachers. But I can’t think of a fair reading of these numbers where the kids at Burnet, Webb, and Dobie got the teachers they needed.

Austin has the teachers

The reader was absolutely correct that under-performing campuses are staffed with more uncertified and less effective teachers. But it’s not because Austin is losing its teachers. Its turnover has been around 15% since 2022-23, a little lower than in the surrounding suburban districts. And it isn’t losing its best teachers either. After 2024-25, about one in five of Austin’s least effective teachers left the district, compared with about one in ten of its most effective.

Was Austin ever a destination district? Not in any recent data. But its effective teachers are staying, just not at the schools that need them most. That’s the part that frustrates me.

Houston showed that can change. Its New Education System made every employee at its struggling campuses reapply for their job, paid rehired teachers substantially more, and moved grading and other non-instructional work to aides. The share of students on those campuses taught by one of the district’s most effective teachers roughly doubled.

Austin doesn’t have to copy Houston to do something about this. But it is worth asking: How many of the district’s most effective teachers will be teaching at Burnet and Webb next fall? How can we support their uncertified and novice teachers?

Two more Austin schools, Linder and Pecan Springs, are one bad year from where Burnet and Webb are now. Petitions and closing buildings won’t solve the reality that Austin ISD has two tiers of schools, and the gap between them has been growing. The district can close schools, or the state can take them over, but either way those kids still need a good teacher in August.

Starting an ed policy Substack with a likely controversial take is probably not best practice. But here we go.

Tomorrow, the Texas Education Agency releases this year’s accountability ratings. Austin ISD has been the focal point of state and local media, as three of its middle schools, Burnet, Dobie, and Webb, each carry four consecutive failing ratings. A fifth failing grade at any one of them triggers a state law requiring Commissioner Mike Morath to either order the campus closed or replace Austin’s elected school board with appointed managers.

Austin spent the last year trying to avoid that outcome. It voted to close ten campuses in November 2025. It asked the state to let a nonprofit operator run the three middle schools, and the state turned the application down in May. It closed a fourth middle school weeks before this school year began.

The argument in Austin has taken the shape these arguments always take, local democracy on one side and state authority on the other. That argument matters, but it stops short. A district is not just a school board. It is the adults a child sees every day, and everyone in this fight, on both sides of it, wants an effective teacher standing in front of every child in August.

If a state-appointed board takes control of Austin ISD, there will be the usual coverage of the adults this affects. Parents will talk about leaving the district. School leadership will change. Some families, teachers, and community groups will oppose the new board before it has done anything at all.

Teachers will leave too, as we have seen before. Fort Worth ISD has had over a thousand teachers resign or retire since its state-appointed leadership arrived in March 2026, the district’s largest exodus in nine years. Beaumont ISD eliminated 300 teaching positions and additional teachers left following state intervention in 2014. This is a cause for concern, because teachers are the most important in-school factor in how much students learn.

Still, not all turnover is bad turnover. Whether a district is better or worse off depends on who left, who replaced them, and whether students end up having more effective teachers. Houston ISD's takeover is perhaps the most contentious to date, and it is one case worth a closer look to learn what may result from future takeovers

Two stories out of Houston

Houston ISD serves roughly 175,000 students across 250-plus campuses, making it the largest district to experience a state takeover in American history. Houston ISD’s turnover jumped to 32 percent in 2024-25, about 1.7 times the statewide rate. Even after the post-pandemic surge of teachers leaving the classroom, that is a shocking number. A district that loses a third of its teachers is one with a concerning potential for long-term instability.

But the results from the takeover point to real improvement for students. In last year’s ratings, no Houston ISD campus received an F for the first time since Texas began issuing letter grades, down from 56 two years earlier, and the state extended the intervention through 2027 while citing the improvement. Skeptics should rightfully note that these ratings reflect TEA’s grading of its own intervention, which is fair. That is why this post will focus on the teacher workforce that underpins the ratings.

Two things are worth reconciling with a fuller picture of the data. A district that loses a struggling teacher and a district that loses an excellent one both have turnover. But for the children in those two classrooms, it does not produce the same result. The question worth asking about Houston ISD is not how many teachers left. It is which ones.

What the data show

Using statewide data, I followed every Houston ISD teacher over a decade and compared Houston ISD’s teacher workforce before and after the takeover with similar districts that were not taken over. I determined a teacher’s effectiveness by how much their students gained on state tests over a year, relative to what similar students gained elsewhere in Texas. For my data nerds, see my note on how I measured effectiveness at the end of the article.

There are three findings that help make sense of why students in Houston ISD performed better academically post-takeover.

The first is about which teachers left. In 2024, 33.4 percent of Houston’s least effective teachers left the district compared to 23.9 percent of its most effective. In the figure below, the red line tracks turnover among the district’s least effective teachers and the gold line tracks its most effective. Before the pandemic, Houston reliably lost its weakest teachers faster than its strongest. Hurricane Harvey in 2017-18 and the pandemic in 2020 erased that gap. From 2020 through 2022 the two groups left at nearly the same rate, meaning the district was losing its best teachers just as fast as its weakest.

The two years under state control brought the gap back to an extent not seen since 2016. And in 2023, the most effective teachers left at the lowest rate in the data. In 2024, the gap between the two groups reached 9.5 points, even as turnover increased across the board. What Houston ISD has now is a workforce where the most effective teachers are staying in the classroom, and the least effective teachers are leaving. That is a good thing for kids.

The second finding is about where the strong teachers who stayed taught the next two years. The 85 campuses Houston ISD put into the first wave of its New Education System (NES) serve some of the poorest children in Texas. NES redesigned staffing and instruction at those campuses by making every employee reapply for their job, paying rehired teachers substantially more, and shifting non-instructional work like grading to aides so teachers focus on instruction. For years, those campuses disproportionately employed the least effective teachers in the district. By 2024, those campuses had a much larger percentage of the best teachers in the district. The share of students on those campuses taught by one of the district’s most effective teachers had roughly doubled.

The third finding concerns which teachers replaced those who left. New teachers hired in 2024 were about as effective as the average Texas teacher, a significant jump in effectiveness compared to prior new teacher cohorts in the district. While I cannot observe specific supports teachers receive in the data, this suggests the district is likely providing better induction support and/or hiring better teachers to start with.

Remaining risks of takeovers for the teacher workforce

These data do not support the idea that significant disruption to a school district results in only positive outcomes. A district that loses thousands of teachers at once fills the gaps with whoever is available in July, which comes with a real risk. My own work on uncertified teachers in Texas finds their students lose months of learning and these teachers do not stay in the classroom. The newest data from Houston ISD show the first sign of that cost. Houston’s 2024 brand-new hires were as effective as the average teacher in Texas. But the 2025 hires, half of whom were uncertified, were below the state average, and we will not know the implications of these hires on student achievement for another year or two. Turnover cuts both ways, and who replaces the teachers who leave will drive the outcomes for kids.

Whatever the case may be, we must treat stability as part of the work rather than something that sorts itself out years down the road. Future state takeovers should consider questions that have answers supported by the data. Who mentors the teachers who stay? What does a first-year teacher get in their first ninety days besides a standardized curriculum? How does a campus rebuild what it had with families who left alongside the staff? None of that shows up in an accountability rating, which is why it tends to get improvised. Districts can plan for this instead.

In fact, the simple question of how we expand the reach and impact of effective teachers is one all districts can seek to answer now. It should not take the threat of state intervention to develop strategies to ensure we are maximizing students’ chance of having a teacher who is ready for the job, especially students who are not adequately being served today.

What this means for Austin and future takeovers

I am not arguing either for or against district takeovers. My argument is that a takeover should be judged by whether the children who waited longest ended up with better teachers. If the state intervenes in Austin ISD, there will be headlines about hundreds of teachers leaving, but that number alone will not tell anyone what the takeover means for kids. Without proper scrutiny, the turnover rate will overshadow which teachers left, who replaced them, and whether the students who have been waiting the longest ended up with better teachers, as appears to have been the case for Houston ISD thus far.

The other honest thing to say is that what sits underneath those headlines is already serious. No one can dispute that students at these campuses have been underserved for years. The law that forces the commissioner’s hand exists because Texas decided no child should spend years of their schooling in a place we already know is not serving them. People can disagree in good faith about whether a board of managers is the right remedy, and many thoughtful people in Austin do. It is harder to argue that a campus with a fifth failing year is acceptable.

So the thing worth asking for, in public and before anything is settled in the spring, is not a promise that turnover will stay low. It will not. It is a plan for the adults who stay: how the district intends to support the effective teachers already in those buildings, how it keeps them in the classrooms where they are needed most, and how it gives everyone who cares about Austin ISD and its students a reason to keep showing up.

And the most useful thing in the Houston data has almost nothing to do with takeovers. The largest single change was not who left. It was which children ended up with the district’s best teachers. No state law is required to do that. It is the one thing in this story that any district in Texas, under intervention or not, could take up this year.

A note on measurement. When I describe a teacher as among the most or least effective, I mean how much their students gained on state tests over a year compared with what similar students gained elsewhere in Texas, averaged across their career and adjusted for the imprecision of any single year of scores. The district comparison uses a staggered difference-in-differences estimator (Callaway and Sant’Anna, 2021), which compares Houston’s before-and-after change with the change in districts that were not taken over. Full detail is in the policy brief (link to come).

Why I’m writing Article VII

In ninth grade, I was reading at a third-grade level. I grew up in Lubbock, Texas, and I’m lucky that my career eventually brought me back to work in my hometown. Statistically, nothing about my trajectory pointed to going to college, much less a career spent studying schools. But a teacher decided I was worth the trouble. Knowing my competitive spirit, they told me to join speech and debate to help with my reading and writing, referred me to an intensive and free SAT test prep workshop, and built the kind of positive teacher-student relationship that research consistently identifies as one of the strongest levers schools have. I won’t overdramatize my experience. It was one adult, paying attention, changing what I believed I could do. I work with statistics for a living now, so I know better than most just how close I came to a very different life.

When I got to college, I chose to major in economics (because obviously I wanted to go to law school, run for president…you know the type…). I took one education course and, motivated by my own experience, changed career paths to pursue my teaching certification. I loved teaching. I loved the idea of being that teacher who helped me. That changed after just one conversation. One class away from finishing my certification, I asked my university supervisor back in 2014, “Is there any way I could eventually make close to $80,000 as a teacher?” The answer was no.

As is rational when considering any career, my biggest priority was having a career that afforded financial stability. I grew up broke and could only afford college through financial aid, at an expensive school where most students paid full tuition and skied on the weekends. Needless to say, I have always been blunt about money. And despite changing paths, I have always believed you can take every professional experience you’ve had and use that story as a springboard into what’s next.

I went to grad school with a keen interest in figuring out how to actually change the teaching profession, so that someone like me, an optimist who still believes education can be a common denominator for students, would go into teaching as a true career, not a stopgap. Today, I’m so fortunate to be a professor. I get to dedicate my days to studying the systems I navigated with some luck and stubborn refusal to let where I started decide where I ended up.

Study after study, I find myself asking: What do our education systems actually reward, and are those rewards working for students?

That question is bigger than the teaching profession, though teachers are where it shows up first. I think about the high school junior left with little guidance from family trying to decide whether to take a dual credit course. I think about the district choosing what resources to reallocate or what systems to overhaul to ensure schools are staffed with high-quality educators. I think about a high school graduate who doesn’t go to college deciding whether to spend the time and money to pursue a workforce credential. Every one of those choices is somebody quietly doing the math, the sum of which amounts to whether a kid in Texas ends up with a real shot at economic opportunity. That is what I study, and this newsletter is a place for me to write down my hot takes, supported by data.

Why “Article VII”

Established in 1876, Article VII of the Texas Constitution says the general diffusion of knowledge is essential to preserving Texans’ liberties and rights, and it tasks the Legislature to provide “an efficient system of public free schools.” The same article goes on to establish the funds that built our state’s universities. The article tasks the state with supporting Texans from the pre-kindergarten classroom through college with an implicit goal of every Texan to earn a living and take part in public life.

So the name is a standard more than a brand, for me and the state. Every legislative session, agency rulemaking, and district hiring decision is, one way or another, an attempt at keeping that 150-year-old commitment. That commitment is personal for me. I have seen up close what access to a high-quality education can do.

Why now

Texas is not a sleepy place to study education policy. Our state runs the largest teacher merit pay system in the country, implemented the largest school district takeover in American history, spent a decade running the nation’s biggest experiment in deregulated teacher hiring, and then, last year, reversed it. From decades of policymaking, we see that when Texas gets something right, other states copy it. When Texas gets something wrong, we put a lot of kids at risk.

Much of this work gets done in the background, but quite a bit also gets covered by a lot of noise. Headlines, press releases, advocacy one direction and outrage the other. I’ve always been interested in how each is armed with a statistic or two that sounds decisive but usually has a lot more nuance. Much of my research uses the state’s massive longitudinal data system, which maintains information on students, teachers, and schools for decades. It allows you to connect students from their time in early childhood to college and/or the workforce. We can follow what happens after little and big policies and decisions are made. My policy briefs are where I summarize what I learn. This newsletter is where I tell you what I think it all means.

What to expect

I will write roughly twice a month, or whenever I feel like saying something. Most posts will run about a thousand words, unless the issue warrants more. I can offer you a few promises if you decide to read. I will do my best to not hit you over the head with a bunch of data. I’ll cut through the technical jargon and tell you what the statistics mean. And (sorry nerds), I will never present a regression table with stars and p-values, but usually there will be a note at the end and/or a policy brief with that information. When I am giving you my opinion, I will label it as mine. If a finding cuts against something I have argued before, it goes in the piece anyway.

The first three essays are already on the way. The first takes a look at state takeovers with a focus on Houston ISD, and what districts can learn from it. The second asks why Texas’s teacher merit system is delivering results and what makes it different. And the third is an open letter to my own corner of the world, Colleges of Education, about the second chance the Legislature just handed us and what it will take not to waste it.

Texas first, always, but I hope the lessons will travel. If you are a parent, a teacher, a principal, a legislative staffer with five minutes, or a researcher who wants to see the Texas data put to honest use, this is meant for you.

The ask

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Somewhere in Texas today, there is a ninth grader reading years behind grade level, and a young adult doing the math on whether a life in the education profession adds up. The Texas Constitution promises one of them an efficient system of public free schools. It cannot keep that promise without the other. I write this newsletter to keep track of our commitments to Texans. Thanks for reading.