Fort Worth Education Partnership

Committed to High Quality Public Education in Fort Worth

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Great Expectations: Is education a path out of poverty or not?

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The dream that lies behind my organization, Fort Worth Education Partnership, is that all children in Fort Worth, regardless of where they live or how much money their family has, will have access to a high-quality public education.

Why do we aspire to such a thing? It’s not just because of the inherent value of learning, although I do believe a good education has deep value in and of itself. The main reason, though, for our aspiration for Fort Worth kids is that we believe a good education can be something that can change a person’s life. Education can open closed doors and be a path out of poverty for many children. A good public education can have a life transforming power.

That’s why I was so taken aback at something a speaker said at a recent Fort Worth ISD Board of Managers meeting. In public comment, this speaker said that “students are only able to be as successful in the classroom as what their experiences and circumstances outside the classroom permit.” In other words, the circumstances a child lives in place a cap on his or her ability to achieve academically. I had to back up the YouTube livestream to listen to it again and make sure I heard it correctly. I did.

Of course it’s not true that people cannot succeed academically beyond the level of their existing circumstances and experiences. All of us can quickly think of numerous examples from history of individuals who were able to be successful in the classroom well beyond the level of their extremely difficult life circumstances in their formative years: Nelson Mandela, Oprah Winfrey, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Viola Davis, George Washington Carver, Sonia Sotomayor, Clifford Davis, Bill Clinton, and Ruth Simmons, just to name a few well-known ones. And besides famous people, we all know friends, family, or colleagues who grew up in difficult circumstances but used education as a vehicle to create opportunity in their own lives.

Besides being false, the speaker’s statement that places limits on what kids in poverty can do is also paternalistic and offensive. Imagine the audacity of a well-educated, relatively affluent white person of privilege to speak on behalf of families living in poverty, predominately communities of color, and tell the rest of us what they are capable of.

There is something else, though, about the comment that is, I think, even more important to address, because it gets at the heart of the work in which we are engaged.

As we at Fort Worth Education Partnership have reported on academic performance across schools in twelve Independent School Districts and thirteen charter networks operating in Fort Worth, this claim comes up year after year: that school performance is simply a function of poverty.

Certainly, the percentage of economically disadvantaged students a school serves has historically been strongly correlated with student proficiency, a pattern often referred to as the Achievement Gap or, more recently, the Opportunity Gap.

However, it’s equally true that even among schools serving similar student populations, we see a wide variation in outcomes, including right here in Fort Worth. For example, currently in Fort Worth there are two schools with the same grade levels served, each with fewer than 10% economically disadvantaged students, that differ by nearly 30 percentage points in the number of students meeting grade-level math standards. Likewise, among two Fort Worth schools where more than 90% of students are economically disadvantaged, there is a gap of more than 40 percentage points.

If students’ academic performance were solely a function of economic status, how do we explain these large differences between schools with such similar demographics?

I would encourage you to read Fort Worth Education Partnership’s 2025 report, Cultivating Hope: Fort Worth Bright Spot Schools, to learn more about schools in Fort Worth that are right now proving what is possible with students who live in low-income environments.

I believe this is a fundamental issue for all of us in Fort Worth who are concerned about children who live in poverty and the opportunities they will have: Is education a path out of poverty? Or is poverty destiny when it comes to learning?

This question is fundamental, because if educational outcomes are predetermined by poverty, why try to improve public education at all?

As my colleague Leila Santillan has written:

None of us is blind to the real, structural, and societal inequities that face kids in poverty and black and brown children. We should work to solve them. That isn’t the point we are debating. We are debating whether or not public education exists precisely because circumstances are unequal. My belief is that it’s a democratic intervention designed to disrupt and offset the predetermination of circumstances.

Are public schools more like hospitals, where sick people go to get well, or hospice, where dying people go to be made as comfortable as possible while facing the inevitable?

No rational person would ever 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. We as individuals and as a state and nation should be doing more to address those challenges. I believe our government should be investing far more in addressing the causes and problems of poverty.

However, for me and many others in Fort Worth, the answer is not to give up on education as a means of change for individual students until we eradicate poverty. In fact, our hope and expectations for Fort Worth students are crucial ingredients in the change we seek.

Recent research 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 8 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 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.

Only 37% of Fort Worth ISD kids are reading at grade level. And those numbers are much lower in schools in certain parts of our city. But we cannot allow poverty or zip code or family situation to be the determining factor in a child’s success academically and the future opportunity that success can provide. Surely most of us can agree on this.

Let’s debate how to best educate economically disadvantaged students—not if we can educate them.

There is a famous George Washington Carver quote about education and opportunity. He did not say “The door to education is locked for those who live in difficult circumstances.” Carver’s life proved otherwise. What he said was this: “Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.”

May it be so for Fort Worth’s children.

[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

Why I’m Paying Attention (and Asking You To, Too)

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I know what you’ve been thinking: I hope someone else starts another podcast!

That may not be what you’ve been thinking, but nevertheless… I’m starting a podcast.

The first episode came out today.

The name of the podcast is Paying Attention.

The title comes from a Mary Oliver poem that includes this passage:

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

Pay attention. Be present. Notice. Be awake.

Be astonished. The world is full of wonder. And so are the people in it. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” So, let’s be curious. Let’s be astonished by what we see.

Tell about it. Don’t just keep what you see and feel inside. Tell about it. Share. Express. Write. Talk.

That’s what we are going to do on this podcast:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

The podcast is oriented towards education and education related topics in Fort Worth. But broader than that, I want us to pay attention to interesting Fort Worth people who are doing interesting and good things in the world. Upcoming episodes will include conversations with Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, leader of Parent Shield, FWISD Superintendent Karen Molinar, Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker, and Pete Geren, President of the Sid W. Richardson Foundation.

Our first episode is being released today and features a conversation with my colleague Leila Santillán in which we talk about FWEP’s latest report: High School and Beyond. For the past five years, we at FWEP have used state test results measuring the number of students meeting grade level to inform parents and the public about how students are doing in school. With the High School and Beyond report, we take it a step further. We look beyond the test to measure real-life outcomes—whether students graduate high school, enroll in higher education, and ultimately earn a degree.

As I often say, it’s not about the test. It’s about what the test tells us about students’ lives. And we know that a young adult who does not earn a two-or four-year degree has only a 12% chance of earning a living wage.

This new report and the conversation Leila and I have on the podcast about it add a new perspective to our community’s conversation about public education, and we hope it helps leaders, educators, and families better understand the challenges and opportunities facing our students.

I hope you’ll listen to the first episode of Paying Attention. You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Like and subscribe to our YouTube channel by to watch the podcast and follow along.

Together, let’s pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it.

 

The Right to Know: Making State Test Results Truly Accessible for Parents

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A few weeks ago, I walked into the Texas Capitol for the first time in my life—not as a tourist or a parent chaperone for a school visit but as a witness. I was there to testify before the House Public Education Committee on a deceptively simple bill: House Bill 5263, filed by Representative Charlie Geren. The bill aimed to require that every parent in Texas be able to access their child’s state assessment results with a single click.

On its face, it seems like a small administrative tweak. But I testified because it’s more than that. It’s about a parent’s right and need to know.

TEA has built an excellent tool in texasassessment.gov. It breaks down each child’s STAAR scores in a clear, easy-to-understand way. You can see exactly where they’re strong and where they’re struggling. It even recommends targeted resources for learning support. It’s the kind of transparency that is so important in public education.

But here’s the problem: most parents never see it.

I know, because I’m one of them. As a public-school parent, I tried to log in to the website and spent hours chasing down the information, calling my child’s school, then the district, then trying again. I was asked for things like a “unique access code” and a PEIMS ID. When I finally got the code, it didn’t even work. It was the wrong one.

It shouldn’t be this hard.

If parents are partners with the school in their child’s education, we need to equip parents with the most basic, critical information: Is my child on grade level?

Right now, most don’t know. When the Go Beyond Grades campaign was launched in Fort Worth last spring, parents were surveyed across Tarrant County. 96% of them believed their children were reading on grade level. The reality? Only about 50% were.

That’s what we call the perception gap—and it’s one of the most urgent problems we face.

House Bill 5263 was designed to close that gap by making state assessment information, specifically STAAR results, easily accessible for all parents. It would ensure privacy, protect data, and empower parents to act when their child falls behind.

I shared this story with the committee. I brought pages of notes, anticipating tough questions. I got none. Not one. Maybe because the problem—and the solution—is so obvious. How could anyone be against this?

Unfortunately, HB 5263 didn’t survive the session. It was folded into HB 4, a broader accountability bill that ultimately failed to pass, getting stuck in negotiations between the House and the Senate.

That’s frustrating. But it doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do.

Here in Fort Worth, we didn’t wait. Last year, Fort Worth ISD made the change. FWISD parents now have quick, easy access to their child’s state test scores. Other districts and public charter networks across Texas can do the same—and they should.

Until a statewide solution is in place, we’ll continue doing everything possible to help parents navigate the system. We’ve created a step-by-step guide to access the TEA’s site (Texasassessment.gov.docx), and we’re connecting families to free summer learning opportunities across Tarrant County that help students stay on track.

Because here’s what I know:
Parents may not always have access.
But they always care.

And when given the information they need, they act—because no one will fight harder for a child than their parent.

Let’s not make that fight any harder than it has to be.

Advocacy: Adding Our Voices to the Chorus

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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.

The Beauty of Quality Education for All

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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 17th 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

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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.

 

[1] Why Teacher Residencies Need to be the Standard

[1] Policy Brief: Innovations in University-Based Teacher Preparation: Comparing the ‘Grow Your Own’ Alternative to the Traditional Program at Texas Tech.