Statement
Last week, the House and Senate education committee chairmen filed major school finance reform proposals. IDRA reviewed them with an eye toward equity and how they would impact students across the state, particularly those from low-income families, students of color and English learners.
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eNews
IDRA President & CEO, Celina Moreno, J.D., gives an update on her first month as CEO.
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IDRA statement
When tests are tied to high-stakes consequences, they can deny capable, motivated students the opportunity to proceed to the next grade or graduate from high school. Such tests can negatively impact students' confidence, academic achievement and lifelong opportunities. A recent Texas Monthly article, Are Texas Kids Failing? Or Are the Tests Rigged? revealed that the Texas Education Agency (TEA) may have ignored at least two academic studies that questioned the reliability of the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) reading tests. The researchers found that, for the exact same passages, the reading levels identified by TEA did not match the reading levels determined by the readability tools. On average, Texas students were being tested on reading passages that were two grade levels higher than they should have been.
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IDRA Newsletter
This issue of the IDRA Newsletter includes a message from IDRA's new CEO; an article on the proposed changes to Title IX; an introduction to Morgan Craven, IDRA’s National Director of Policy; IDRA's policy issues for Texas in 2019, and more!
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TLEC News Release
The Texas Latino Education Coalition Applauds the Addition of Latino Senators José Menéndez and Pete Flores to the Higher Education Committee
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Joint statement
IDRA and 14 other teacher groups, school administrators, school board members, and public education advocates have come together to support a legislative agenda that will increase the transparency and efficiency of charter schools in Texas.
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Testimony
IDRA National Director of Policy, Morgan Craven, J.D., presented invited testimony before the House Public Education Committee on the recommendations of the Texas Commission on Public School Finance. "If we do not increase resources for English learners, we are compromising the academic success and life opportunities for one-fifth of the entire public school student population, just as we did in the 1980s."
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Podcast
Classnotes Podcast (February 12, 2019). Most schools express within their vision that “all children will learn.” Yet, the pathway to … read more
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News Release
In an additional analysis to IDRA’s annual attrition study released in December, IDRA examined data from a national and statewide perspective on attrition rates of economically disadvantaged students and examined the issue in terms of school district property wealth.
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Call for Applications
IDRA is inviting research applications for the IDRA José A. Cárdenas School Finance Fellows Program. This will be the third round of this fellows program to support research that will inform efforts to secure equitable funding of public schools across the country. Under the leadership of Dr. María "Cuca" Robledo Montecel, IDRA President & CEO, the program was established by IDRA to honor the memory of IDRA founder, Dr. José Angel Cárdenas.
IDRA will select one or more fellows who will dedicate themselves to a period of intense study and writing in school finance. We will hold a symposium that includes the release of the fellow's program paper. The paper and findings will be published in the symposium proceedings and disseminated to the education research and policymaker community.
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eNews
IDRA is pleased to welcome Morgan Craven, J.D., as the new IDRA National Director of Policy. Ms. Craven is an attorney and director of Texas Appleseed's School-to-Prison Pipeline Project.
We also have published our Key Policy Issues for Texas in 2019.
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IDRA eNews
IDRA's latest annual attrition study found that the Texas high school attrition rate has declined from 24 percent last year to 22 percent in 2017-18 – the lowest rate in over three decades. In 1985-86, when IDRA conducted the state’s first attrition study, the rate was 33 percent and grew as high as 43 percent in later years. It has taken over three decades to improve by 11 percentage points.
At this pace, Texas will not reach universal high school education for another two decades and stands to lose over 2.3 million more students.
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Report
A new IDRA report outlines the contributions of IDRA's 15 years in teacher preparation through six multi-year Transition to Teaching grants, funded by the U.S. Department of Education. IDRA partnered with universities and more than 55 school districts across Texas to prepare a new generation of skilled, effective teachers to lead and innovate in schools that need them most.
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Coca-Cola Valued Youth Program
Six students received prizes in a national competition among participants in the Coca-Cola Valued Youth Program, a nationally-recognized cross-age tutoring program of the Intercultural Development Research Association. Coca-Cola Valued Youth Program tutors wrote about how the program helped them do better in school and how they had helped their tutees to do better.
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IDRA eNews
Study on the Impact of Texas' New Weakened Graduation Requirements in HB5 Released by IDRA
The class of 2018 is the first to graduate under the new graduation requirements put in place in 2013 by the Texas legislature. Many advocates raised concerns that lowering graduation requirements could possibly affect college readiness and preparation. With funding from the Greater Texas Foundation, IDRA conducted a mixed method study to examine the early effects of the new graduation requirements. See the study findings.
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IDRA eNews
Across the country, school doors are now open. Families have gathered supplies. Teachers have arranged their rooms. Principals have organized their staff. The sights and sounds are familiar, just like every year. But some things need to be different if we are going to better serve our diverse students and lead them to success.
See a few examples of our new and most popular packages:
• English Learner Literacy Coaching
• Instructional Strategies for Building Inferencing Skills
• Effective Dropout Prevention through the Coca-Cola Valued Youth Program
• Use Semillitas de Aprendizaje™ to Support Bilingual Early Childhood Literacy Development
Video
IDRA’s Coca-Cola Valued Youth Program is a research-based, internationally-recognized dropout prevention program that has kept 98 percent of its tutors … read more
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Contact
5815 Callaghan Road, Suite 101
San Antonio, TX 78228
Phone: 210-444-1710
Fax: 210-444-1714
