At AIR, I work for, predominantly, for the Texas Comprehensive Center.
Through that role part of what we do is provide
technical assistance in the service of
capacity building with our state agencies.
I work more exclusively around school improvement.
When you look at Texas and what we talk a lot about,
the green dots and the red dots, and for us
these were two groups of schools.
one group, or the red dots, and these are
schools that under the state
accountability system were considered to be
improvement required so these are the
focus and priority schools. That included
both traditional public schools, which
are the red circles, and charter schools
which are the red squares. We also
wanted to be able to see Title 1 schools that have been high performing
and high growth over time. So we wanted to
see who are the people that are, based on
demographics, maybe should not be
doing as well as they are, but are.
(describing image) So we've depicted those on our maps as green dots.
Those are green dots and green squares so
you have traditional schools and charter
schools. One of the first things that
jumped out to us was that we have these
very large pockets of high-performing
schools in the Rio Grande Valley, which
is the border between Texas and Mexico.
So there's a lot of interest from
the school improvement division and so
we've got a cross-functional team
sitting around a table and everybody's
asking the question, "What's going on in
the Rio Grande Valley?", to where we have
some of the highest concentrations of
poverty, some of the most homogenous
low-income Latino Tejano
communities in the state, and they're
completely knocking it out in the park.
So there was something to learn
and what's I think lovely about that is
that your eye is drawn quickly to a
place and then it begs more questions,
"What is it that would be helpful to the
families and the leaders in the Rio
Grande Valley that they would want to
learn, to help them continue that
improvement?" So it's been very
interesting the ways that the kind of
quantitative data represented spatially,
prompts an action towards a qualitative response.
That was a really positive story.
There's others that were more
troubling and also had some layers of
complexity we didn't understand. One in
particular is there's a cluster of
districts that all run along in West
Texas, kind of from the middle of the
Panhandle over to the very tip of Texas,
where El Paso sits. These are places over
the last several years that have been
kind of the heart of the Texas oil boom,
and because of that, there's been massive
influx of workers, the property values
have soared and those cities have
actually really struggled to keep
teachers because of affordability issues.
It's unavoidable once you've depicted it
spatially, to see that there's a really
high concentration of low-performing schools.
Based on that work, we have real
questions about recruiting and retaining
great teachers and leaders in that place
but it's really prompted this next step,
which is, "What do we need to go learn more
about to be able to be effective as an
agency, and to make sure ,from the
stakeholders perspective, that the
resources we are providing are the right
resources?" So there's several other
contexts to where that's really important.
I think particularly in your big urban
areas, where racial and economic
segregation is most striking, there's a
real imperative for a kind of renewed, if
not an entirely new way of thinking
about how to interface with large urban
districts. It also just illustrates
really the complexity of how things
intersect in places. Going into
neighborhoods to where you say,
"How do we intervene in these four zip
codes that are almost exclusively
predominantly black and poor?"
Houston is an example. Improving whole systems,
that has to include the whole system, and
that includes state and federal agencies
as well as elementary school classrooms.
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