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Texans on education
by Michael Marder, professor of physics and co-director of UTeach at the University of Texas at Austin
Texas Public Education: Better Than
You Think
Texas schools
have made
remarkable
progress in very
important areas,
and everyone
should know
about it.
Public education is often in the news, and the news
is almost always bad. Criticism of public schools
comes from the desire to make them better. Yet, so
relentless is the emphasis on things going wrong
that even those who work in schools can become
discouraged and wonder if they are doing much
good. Here is the reality. Texas schools have made
remarkable progress in very important areas, and
everyone should know about it.
The Truth about Texas Schools
Let's start with middle school mathematics. On
the National Assessment of Educational Progress in
2013, comparing all the states, Texas's low-income
students are in a four-way tie for second place,
dipping slightly from a frst-place showing in 2011.
Texas's Hispanic students are in fourth place, as are
our African American students. The results in other
subjects are not as striking but still good: Texas's
low-income eighth graders perform signifcantly
higher than the national average in science and at
the national average in reading.
One aspect of these rankings can be puzzling.
Texas students overall are in a four-way tie for
16th place in eighth-grade mathematics. Why
do Texas students overall rank much lower than
both the state's low-income students and its
well-off students? The answer is that Texas has a
particularly large share of low-income students,
around 50 percent. Students across the country who
are eligible for free or reduced-cost lunch do worse
on almost every academic measure than students
who are not eligible. In judging the effectiveness
of teachers and schools, it is only fair to take that
into account, and the way to do that is to pay more
attention to the rankings of subgroups such as low-
income students than to overall rankings.
Between 2005 (left)
and 2013 (right), the
percentage of Texas
students not needing
remedial mathematics
after high school improved
greatly. Every bubble is
a school. The horizontal
axis shows school poverty
concentration, and
the vertical axis shows
percentage of kids with
high enough test scores in
mathematics to exempt
them from remedial
mathematics if they go to
college.