To show how Texas stacks up against peer states and give policymakers and politicians a data-driven roadmap for the future, Texas 2036 has released its strategic framework titled Shaping Our Future: A Strategic Framework for Texas.
Texas 2036 is a nonprofit organization aimed at building long-term, data-driven strategies to secure Texas’ “continued prosperity for years to come,” its website says.
Too few Texas students can read at grade level. In the 2021-2022 school year, only 50% of third graders could read on grade level. Early learning difficulties hamper students’ success in future education, where today, fewer than one in three high school graduates obtain a post-secondary credential within six years of graduation. This rate is almost the lowest rate when compared against 11 peer states. Today, only 56% of Texas households earn above a living wage threshold (or $54,852 for a family of four). Texas is eighth among 12 peer states in providing living wage jobs for its residents, underperforming states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Peer states are demographically and size similar. Within education, there is a lot of good work happening in states like Florida and Tennessee that Texas can look to, Senior Policy Advisor Mary Lynn Pruneda said.
While they don’t track Mississippi, Pruneda said they are now among the best in education policy after years of being ranked last or near last in the country.
“They have actually just an enormous turnaround in their reading scores, thanks to a lot of programming that they’ve put in place and some requirements,” Pruneda said.
She added that the Texas Legislature enacted several of those in House Bill 3 in 2019.
“I do believe that’s why our reading scores are as good as they are, even if they’re not good enough by any stretch. There’s a lot to be said for the fact that this time around we did have the highest reading scores on the STAAR exam that Texas has ever had when you look at all students, all grades. That is most likely because we put in place a lot of the programming that Mississippi had piloted,” Pruneda said.
Ector County ISD saw score improvements, but officials said there is still more work to do. There were huge improvements across multiple grade levels and subjects including reading, math, algebra I and biology.
Areas of concern include social studies and U.S. History, English I and English II. While most of these decreases are between 1 and 3 points and followed a pattern seen across the state, the results must be studied to determine why improvements were not seen, a district news release said.
One of the ways they determine Texas academic proficiency is the third grade STAAR exam and the number of students that are at the meets grade level, or the masters grade level, Pruneda said.
“That basically tells us whether or not that student is going to need intervention in order to be successful in the next grade or whether or not they do not need intervention, which is what we want,” Pruneda said. “That means a student is prepared for fourth grade and prepared to do fourth grade work. When we did the data, I think about half our kids were not reading on grade level and that of course is concerning because it’s a leading indicator for so many things like graduation, college persistence; all of these things and then of course there’s the added at third grade you stop learning to read and then you begin to read to learn. So if you can’t read to begin with, you can’t learn and that’s a huge problem for fourth graders.”
She added that some of the things they do when they are looking at literacy rates or math proficiency levels is to make sure students are prepared whether they go into a job immediately after high school, or to go into college.
“But even within that, we don’t just want them to go to a job; we want them to go to a job that has a self-sustaining wage, or a wage that can support their family because what we don’t want is a situation where we’re kind of churning students out of the public education system, but they’re not equipped to support a family. A lot of our students do have children and they do get married pretty young, so we need to make sure that when we’re giving them the tools that they need to succeed that it’s not just a tool to find a job, but a tool to find a good job which also indicates you need to invest in career and technical education and a lot of other pathways and programming options in addition to higher education,” Pruneda said.
Prior to COVID, when you looked at Texas’ position in national rankings and how Hispanic students performed in demographically adjusted numbers compared to Florida, Tennessee and New York, Texas was “pretty excellent” in math, she added.
“Now that COVID’s happened, the thing that Texas was the best at, math, is now one our hardest hit subjects. Reading recovered a lot faster and there’s a lot of really good theories about that. The Foundation for Educational Excellence has done a lot of good research on this, but I think a lot of it comes down to it’s much more intuitive for a parent to read to their children or maybe to sound out words. When you’re talking to a kid you might say cat. You’re building phonics skills whenever you’re doing that, but often, I’m a parent of young children, I don’t often sit there and say 2 plus 2 equals 4; 4 plus 6 equals 10; ten minus 5 equals 5. We’re not as native at building mathematics fluency.”
“Then also we, as adults who are responsible for this, it’s very culturally appropriate to say I’m bad at math. No one says that they’re bad at reading or very few people do. … I think ultimately that does impact our mathematics scores in a post-COVID world,” Pruneda said.
One of the theories nationally is people were reading to their children more. Also, current teaching of mathematics is complicated and often done in a way that parents aren’t natively familiar with because that’s not how they learned mathematics.
“I think that was harder for parents to provide that supplemental support to their students during COVID, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t get back on track,” Pruneda said.
She added that math, particularly at the middle school level, is an issue ripe for the legislature to take up.
“We’ve got to begin to build those skills back among that group of students before they hit high school, or before they’re in calculus and pre-calculus or algebra II, or even physics. Those are very complicated subjects that require a lot of base knowledge that could have been lost in the pandemic.
“I think overall the legislature is really dialed in on helping school systems recover from COVID and I think that certainly is influenced by the Strategic Framework. That’s a valid and a good data source for members to use as they’re thinking through if I’m going to target something toward reading, mathematics, science, you can use the tools that we’ve put online and kind of determine where we are and how big the slide has been. We’re hopeful that it’ll be a good resource for them,” Pruneda said.
HEALTH AND HEALTHCARE
Rising prices have made health care unaffordable, even for those with insurance, Texas 2036 says.
Texas 2036 follows a metric that asks whether individuals needed to see a doctor but did not because of cost. Texas ranks last (12th out of 12) among peer states.
A related metric asks about any needed care or treatment, including prescription drugs. In this measure, 59% of Texans answered that they had skipped care due to cost – including 56% of insured Texans.
The organization said 56% of insured Texans and 78% of uninsured Texans skipped care due to cost.
Senior Advisor Charles Miller said if you’re not educated, you end up becoming less healthy. There are many terms for them — social determinants, non-clinical factors or non-medical drivers.
“Whatever you want to call them, they are the things that are impacting people’s health, so we’re fond of saying that all policy is health policy and our education and workforce efforts if people are educated and have good jobs they’re going to be more likely to be in better health which is ultimately the end goal of our health agenda is that people are leading healthy, happy lives,” Miller said.
He acknowledged that the “affordability crisis” affects people at all income levels.
“It honestly is affecting people regardless of whether they have insurance or not. One of the things that we measure is whether you have skipped care due to cost in the last year and that figure is higher for people without insurance. … Ultimately, the affordability issue that we’re facing of people skipping care due to that cost needs to be addressed by the actual prices of care. We’re working on policies that will end up bringing down those prices. As prices come down, so too will the cost of insurance. It’s a compounding factor.
“One of the things we’re seeing in our current study on who are the uninsured is that at the base layer of a lot of these cyclical issues are mental health challenges,” Miller said. “For a lot of the population that’s uninsured, they’re facing mental health challenges that prevent them from being able to do things that would enable them to get insurance that would allow them to get the mental healthcare they need to address those mental health challenges.”
“There’s a vicious kind of Catch-22 cycle that’s going on with these individuals. We saw these within our focus groups of uninsured individuals around the state and sometimes what we saw is we would see people confirm for us that morning an hour or two before the focus group session was going to occur, whether it was in person or virtual, that they would be there. About half the participants who had done that that morning weren’t able to show,” Miller said.
Of those they talked to later, almost universally it was not that something had come up or that they had a conflict, it was an anxiety or nervousness about discussing this issue that traces back to a mental health issue, Miller said.
“You can imagine what that would also look like for somebody who’s trying to go get a job. How can they handle a job interview if they’re having difficultly with this or even something as simple as going through an enrollment process. If it is causing any sort of anxiety that prompts them to just stop and go away these sorts of challenges are one of the largest barriers to getting on that ladder of being able to achieve (an) overall happy life,” he added.
There is also the issue of having enough providers whether it’s specialty or primary care.
“We look at the availability issue. It can impact affordability. … We look at availability almost as a separate issue of regardless of the cost is there somebody around who can actually treat you. Then we can address affordability through other measures, but certainly in rural areas and in many parts of the state there’s a primary care availability crisis where there are just shortages of those providers to even provide those services themselves,” Miller said.
He added that telehealth is promising, but it doesn’t work for everything.
“We certainly want to make sure that people have the ability to access it for what they’re able to. One of the biggest barriers to that, especially in our rural populations, is availability and affordability of broadband,” Miller said.
He stressed that insurance, especially for people who do not have a job, is more affordable than ever on the ACA (Affordable Care Act) marketplace.
“Even if you looked a couple of years ago back on to open enrollment right now … and check it out. … Because of changes in dynamics of the way these markets are working, these plans are more affordable than ever for folks to be able to get on there and get some ability to access more affordable care,” Miller said.
Open enrollment lasts until Jan. 15, but if you wanted to be covered start the first of the year that deadline has passed.
ACA enrollment is now open year round for anyone with an income level no more than 150% of the federal poverty level, according to information from Texas 2036.
