Regina Wilken

The mission of the Fort Worth Education Partnership is to support, invest in, and coordinate opportunities that increase access to a high-quality education for Fort Worth children.

As we go about this work, one of the words that comes up often is “advocacy.”

After you do this work for a while, you begin to realize that it is not enough to provide funding to worthwhile programs, organizations, and schools (although that is a lot). You also have to advocate for these opportunities for families and children. And, even more importantly, you begin to realize that you have to empower those same families and children to themselves be advocates for these opportunities.

That is why the word “advocacy” comes up so often in our work.

It wasn’t until recently that I thought about the word “advocacy” itself. The word “advocate” actually comes from the courtroom. Its root is the Latin word vocare, which means “voice” or “calling.” It’s where we get our word “vocation,” which is the idea that we are all called to something in our lives; our vocation is our calling.

The “ad” at the beginning of the word “advocate” means “in the direction of” or “in addition to.” So an advocate is some who “adds” a “voice.” To advocate is to add a voice to a cause or a person. An advocate is anyone who adds that voice by representing another person in court, or by supporting or working toward a particular course of action.

So, in that sense, what a sacred privilege it is to “add a voice” to the voices of children and families in Fort Worth who are in need of and who are seeking the life-transforming opportunity of a high-quality education.

The unfortunate reality right now is that many, many children in our public school systems are struggling, for all kinds of complex social and systemic reasons, and they are not prepared for academic success beyond high school. Fewer than 10% of economically disadvantaged kids in Fort Worth are earning a two or four year degree within six years of graduating from high school.

There are parents and families in Fort Worth who are seeking something different and better, and rightfully so. They are working for it and speaking up for it. They are calling for the opportunity that each child in our city deserves. Some of these parents combined their voices into advocacy organizations, such as Parent Shield and Fort Worth Families Forward.

Count me in as an advocate for Fort Worth children and families. In fact, I when I think about what my vocation is these days, I believe it is to do what I am able to “add a voice” to theirs. I hope you will add your voice, as well, so that it becomes a rising chorus calling for opportunities for all to receive a great and life-changing education.

High up in the Winchester Cathedral in England sits a stained glass window that is extremely unusual for the time in which it was created — the 17th century. It doesn’t represent a scene from the Bible. It doesn’t memorialize a saint.

It’s a kaleidoscope of colors, a very contemporary looking stained glass window. It’s as if someone from the 20th century traveled back in time to the 1600s and designed it.

This window is a relic from a destructive time. Troops from Oliver Cromwell’s army used iron bars to shatter the Winchester Cathedral’s ancient windows and break up all the statues. The troops left the ground outside the cathedral littered with fragments of glass.

What was for so long a unified whole was fragmented into many separate pieces.

The public education landscape looks a lot different today than it did when I was growing up in north Dallas in the late 70s and 80s. When I started kindergarten, I walked a couple of blocks over to my neighborhood elementary school with my best friend, Jon, who lived a few houses down. And then, as the years went by, Jon and I progressed automatically from there to our assigned junior high and high schools. There weren’t any other options to consider, other than private school, as far as we knew.

Consider, now, the patchwork quilt that is public education today. What was once a unified whole is now fragmented into many separate pieces. There is opportunity, though, in the pieces. There are a number of different avenues in Fort Worth by which our children and their families are seeking out a quality education:

• neighborhood schools like the ones I went to and that my kids went to
• district schools of choice like the I.M. Terrell, a school for vocal and performing arts and STEM, or the Applied Learning Academy
• single gender district schools like the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Leadership Academies
• district charter schools like the Leadership Academy Network, which is a partnership between FWISD and Texas Wesleyan University
• special programs of choice within neighborhood district schools
• early college high schools, which are partnerships between district schools and Tarrant County College where kids can graduate high school and receive and associate’s degree at the same time
• a growing number of public charter schools.

The uniform education system of the past has evolved into a dynamic and diverse tapestry—an intricate quilt of many pieces, each contributing to a whole greater than the sum of its parts. This shift, while not without its challenges, has also created meaningful opportunities for growth and innovation.

To build on these opportunities, Fort Worth Education Partnership is dedicated to supporting and expanding this mix of quality schools, ensuring every child in Fort Worth has greater access to the best possible public education.

The unfortunate reality right now is that many children in our public school system are struggling for all kinds of complex social and systemic reasons and are not prepared for academic success beyond high school. Most Fort Worth third graders are not reading at grade level, and studies show that 75% of children who struggle with reading in third grade never catch up and are four times more likely to drop out before graduating.

Thousands of Fort Worth children are mired in generations of poverty, inadequate education, and lack of opportunity. Still, in some of the city’s most underserved areas, schools are achieving remarkable success in providing vulnerable students with access to a high-quality education. Some kids are getting a great public education in Fort Worth. But too many are not.

This is why I am grateful for the patchwork quilt that is public education today—neighborhood schools, district schools of choice, district-charter partnerships, early college high schools, and public charter schools. These options, accessible to all families, help expand opportunities beyond the constraints of a child’s ZIP code.

At our best in Fort Worth we are able to see public education not as a disjointed jumble of adults’ competing interests but as that beautiful patchwork quilt, working together every way possible with the best interests of Fort Worth kids at heart.

The truth is, when we weave our communities together, it is almost always stronger and more beautiful.

The people of Winchester in England were devastated that they lost their beautiful, ancient stained glass windows when Oliver Cromwell’s troops destroyed their cathedral in the 17^th century. It was all they had ever known. What they did in response was gather and save all the fragmented pieces of stained glass that littered the ground.

Years later, when this violent time had passed, one cathedral worker volunteered for the difficult task of re-installing the windows. High on a scaffold, he assembled all those broken pieces into an abstraction of color.

It resembled nothing in Europe at that time, and even today it stands out. And no one can deny that those windows of reconstructed bits of glass are a work of great beauty, a work of art. The light from the sun filters through to illumine the cathedral with a constantly changing mosaic of colors.

Even when the unified social fabric we used to know comes apart, new life and beauty can come from the pieces when they are put back together. The pieces can become raw material for the creation of something new and beautiful — something that establishes connection, builds relationships, offers care, creates trust, educates all our children, and makes our communities better places for all.

And that is beautiful.

Learning to Swim

In the summer of 1995, I was 23 years old, newly married, and preparing to start seminary at Baylor University. I wanted to be a pastor, felt called to it, actually, but I had absolutely no experience doing anything of the sort. I put the word out that I was seeking an opportunity to preach in one of the many small churches in the Central Texas area, and I got a call from Cego Baptist Church.

Cego is a suburb of Bruceville-Eddy, which is a suburb of Lorena, which is a suburb of Hewitt, which is a suburb of Waco.

Cego is actually an old farming community—except by 1995 there wasn’t much left of the farming or the community. But there was a little church, and I got a call on a Wednesday that I was to preach on the following Sunday morning. And teach Sunday School. And lead the music. I had never done any of these things before in my life, and I scrambled over the next few days to figure out how to prepare a sermon.

I preached there all through the summer of 1995—except for one Sunday we didn’t have church because there was a tractor show in Temple. And then, from there, I moved to another small church where I served as the pastor for the next three years while I was a seminary student.

This is the “throw the non-swimmer into the deep end of the pool” approach to preparing for a new vocation. I wish I could say I excelled immediately, but the truth is that it took me a couple of years of regular practice to become at least decently proficient at it.

The same is true for any profession, including teachers. My daughter experienced a full year of student teaching her senior year at Baylor before she got her own classroom, but many new teachers experience more of the thrown-into-the-deep-end approach. Most new teachers in Fort Worth enter their first day of school with little to no meaningful in-class experience. And if, like me, it takes them a few years to get good at it, that is understandable. But it can be a problem for those children who will only be in that grade once.

That’s why FWEP, led by Natalie Jacobs, our Director of Talent, is making a serious commitment to teacher residency programs in Fort Worth.

These residency programs have become the “gold standard” for training new teachers, and for good reason^(1,2):

• Real Classroom Experience: Residents spend a full school year working in real classrooms, side-by-side with skilled mentors, five days a week. They get hands-on training, ongoing feedback, and valuable development sessions that prepare them to confidently step into their classrooms.
• Strong Mentorship: Each resident is paired with an experienced teacher who acts as a mentor. These mentors guide their residents through co-teaching, gradually handing over more teaching responsibility, all while observing and offering feedback along the way.
• Better Student Outcomes: Teachers trained through these programs get up to speed faster and often help students progress at a higher rate.
• Higher Retention Rates: Residents tend to stick around longer, which makes for more stable classrooms and school communities.

FWEP is doubling down to grow this approach, transforming local educator programs at the University of North Texas and Texas Wesleyan University into high-quality, year-long residencies through US PREP. Last year alone, these programs certified over 450 teachers.

Beyond that, we’re teaming up with Texas Tech and Tarleton State University to help them recruit and retain more future teachers for their local districts. With teacher interest on the decline, increasing access to quality residency programs—and making them attainable—is more critical than ever.

If that weren’t convincing enough, residency programs also allow schools to be creative with staffing. For instance, a district can take a vacancy, pair a resident with a mentor teacher in a slightly larger class, and use the savings from that vacancy to pay the mentor and resident. This way, more students benefit from excellent teaching, the mentor teacher gains a leadership role, and retention goes up.

FWEP is supporting Comprehensive Strategic Staffing in Fort Worth ISD to strengthen teacher retention and keep the residency programs going strong. US PREP is partnering with FWISD to help create a strategic teacher recruitment and development plan. The pilot will focus on four middle schools: Riverside, Rosemont, Meacham, and Wedgwood, where we hope to set up structures that support teachers and grow their impact.

By investing in teacher residencies, we are ensuring that every student has access to the high-quality education they deserve and avoids the experience of those poor souls at Cego Baptist Church in the summer of 1995 who had to experience me practicing preaching on them every Sunday morning. It probably looked a lot like flailing around trying not to drown.

No wonder they canceled church that one Sunday and went to the tractor show instead.

September is National Literacy Month, a time to foster dialogue about literacy in the United States.

According to a report that we at Fort Worth Education Partnership released a couple of weeks ago, only 43% of kids who attend school in the City of Fort Worth are performing at grade level on state reading assessments.

It is not uncommon for us to hear local education leaders respond to low academic achievement numbers by pointing out how many of our students live in poverty—implying that we shouldn’t expect schools with large numbers of children from low-income families to achieve academic excellence.

I find the “but our kids are living in poverty” justification for low levels of student achievement discouraging and alarming—especially when it comes from our education leaders. As Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker has said recently: “We cannot allow poverty to be the determining factor in a child’s success academically.”

This is one of the reasons Mayor Parker did something extraordinary and unusual on August 27. She attended a Fort Worth ISD board meeting and addressed the board during public comment. She brought with her a letter signed by a large and diverse group of community leaders.

As the letter states, “A great city demands a great public education system, and our future depends on it.” Unfortunately, Fort Worth lags far behind most other large cities in Texas on educational outcomes, including cities with almost identical levels of poverty and emerging bilingual students. Mayor Parker’s letter speaks strongly about what this means: “These results are unacceptable. For our city’s children, these results can significantly narrow their ability to access the life and the opportunities that they want and deserve. And for our city, there are significant long-term consequences in the areas of workforce, economic development, poverty, public health, and much more.”

No one would deny that in a large urban environment with high levels of poverty, educational achievement can be extremely difficult to obtain. Students experiencing poverty have many significant challenges to overcome. I would never minimize how difficult it is to support high academic achievement in high poverty schools.

However, having low expectations for students is also a highly significant barrier to academic achievement.

The “Pygmalion effect” describes situations where someone’s high expectations improve our behavior and therefore our performance in a given area. It suggests that we do better when more is expected of us.

Many studies over the years have shown how adults’ expectations greatly influence students’ academic performance. In 1964, Harvard professor Robert Rosenthal conducted a famous study that demonstrated that when students are labeled “high IQ” at random, adults’ expectations of those students lead to higher test scores.

My colleague Leila Santillan points out recent research that has repeatedly uncovered the link between high expectations and student achievement outcomes.^[1] In fact, TNTP’s The Opportunity Myth found that no resource was more impactful on student achievement than high expectations and a belief that students could meet grade-level standards. In fact, when high expectations were present, students gained more than four months of additional learning progress.^[2]

Further, the effect of high expectations was even stronger when students started off the year behind, like many of our kids in Fort Worth are.  It makes sense intuitively; when we believe students can meet the bar set by grade-level standards, we offer stronger assignments and instruction. In classrooms where students started the year behind their peers – students with adults who held high expectations and a belief that they could meet grade-level standards saw an additional eight months of achievement growth.

We do better when more is expected of us. That is why it is so important that our educational and city systems and, particularly, the leaders of those systems, operate with the belief that all kids can and should succeed. Many of our kids in Fort Worth are experiencing poverty, and they can learn and achieve at high levels.

It is National Literacy Month, and we recognize that only 43% of Fort Worth kids are reading at grade level. And those numbers are much lower in certain parts of our city. But we cannot allow poverty, zip code, or family situation to be the determining factors in a child’s success academically.

Writer and activist Jim Wallis likes to say, “Hope means believing in spite of the evidence and then watching the evidence change.”

The numbers can be discouraging. But let’s have hope for Fort Worth kids.

Believe in them, and watch the numbers change!

[1] https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/high-expectations-drive-student-success

[2] https://tntp.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TNTP_The-Opportunity-Myth_Web.pdf