Thirty Years of Expanding Horizons in Texas

Earlier this month, the Texas Public Charter Schools Association put out some data that more people ought to be paying attention to and discussing. Across the state, 576,000 Texas high schoolers are zoned to a school rated C or lower. That's the bad news, and it's been the bad news for a long time.

But TPCSA wanted to know how many of those kids live within a fifteen-minute drive of an A or B-rated public charter high school? Here's the good news . . .

368,000!

Nearly two out of three Texas students who are zoned to a C-or-below high school can take a quick car ride and walk into an A or B-rated public charter school. They have access to a high-quality school. Not in some future plan, not with more funding, but right now, TODAY, within a fifteen-minute drive of their home.

That's the result of thirty years of hard work from great educators across Texas and it's a long way from where we started.

It all makes me think about my own time teaching in Houston's East End. Great kids from great families who wanted something better from a system that just wasn't designed to give it to them. That's why, in 1998, we started YES Prep Public Schools.

And that's why the Houston number in the TPCSA report hits me the way it does. Today, 96,584 Houston-area high schoolers are zoned to a C-or-lower ISD campus. But 62% of them, about 60,000 kids, have a high-quality public charter option close to their home. The grandkids of the families who showed up to those East End community meetings in the mid-90s have real choices now.

Houston is far from the only Texas city where this is happening. Two places where we at City Fund work closely with our local partners are doing some of the most encouraging work in the state.

83% of San Antonio students zoned to a lower-rated high school have a strong public charter option close by. Public charters have more than doubled access to high-performing high schools. And a lot of that progress is the result of the terrific work being done by City Education Partners and Choose to Succeed and the local school leaders they've supported.

Dallas-Fort Worth comes in at 81%. The Fort Worth Education Partnership is doing the important work of expanding good schools where families need them, and the data reflects it.

There's still a long way to go. Hundreds of thousands of Texas kids are on the wrong side of these numbers, and we can't pretend otherwise. But the direction the work is headed is undeniably right. Thirty years ago a legislature said yes to charter schools, and ever since, in every one of these cities, parents and educators and advocates have decided what families had wasn't good enough and they got to work to build something much better.

That's the part I keep coming back to over and over again in my work at City Fund. The story of these next thirty years gets written by local leaders who refuse to wait and act with urgency. Texas shows us all what's possible when we back them.