The Texas Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Gov. Greg Abbott’s ban on local mask mandates means the state has officially told public schools to start the 2021-2022 school year as if the COVID-19 pandemic never happened. More correctly, as if it was still not happening. Others have already pointed to the health risks posed by not having a mask mandate in place at schools, and schools around the Houston area have already had to close because of outbreaks. But beyond the dangers posed to the health of students, staff, and families, the state’s approach is undermining schools’ ability to accelerate students’ learning and close gaps created and compounded over the past 18 months.
With 25 years of service, the Girls Empowerment Network's focus on listening and being responsive to its clients drove home a key lesson: For any nonprofit to be effective, it needs to continually make its services accessible to people.
This study used seven years of data from the state of Texas (2010-11 through 2016-17) to illustrate how statewide patterns of school year student mobility differed by subgroup. Patterns of student mobility differed by race, socioeconomic status, and English learner status.
The shift to 100% online instruction in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020 meant school districts around the country needed to quickly develop plans for how to implement distance learning and serve student needs. The Houston Education Research Consortium analyzed the plans of 45 school districts from 15 states for insights into the collective response to the pandemic.
HERC collected 45 school district action plans addressing continuity of learning during the COVID-19 pandemic from school districts in 15 states that were publicly available between March and May 2020.
As the school year ends, the relief is palpable. Let’s acknowledge what we went through during the pandemic. Many of us are feeling burnt out, but this is not the time to stop paying attention. Now is the moment to think big about the future of education.
To investigate this phenomenon of “returners,” Houston Education Research Consortium researchers followed two types of leavers in a cohort of Houston-area students to see if and when they return.
Houston, a quintessentially free-enterprise, anti-government city, is increasingly recognizing the critical role of government in strengthening the safety net, expanding opportunity and building resiliency, according to the Kinder Houston Area Surveys.
The Literacy by 3 Classroom Practices and Campus Literacy Growth study is the first to examine the relationship between Literacy by 3 practices and campus literacy growth in HISD.
For the past four decades, Rice University’s Kinder Houston Area Survey (KHAS) has been tracking the changing attitudes and beliefs of Harris County residents. The 2021 survey summarizes the most consequential changes and their implications for public policy initiatives going forward.
The goal of this methodological study is to evaluate the efficacy of an innovative approach to create a proxy indicator of immigrant generation for school districts to use when data on immigrant generation or parent birthplace are unavailable.
In Houston and across the country, the growth in younger populations is being driven by people of color — many of whom continue to grow up experiencing high levels of poverty. To ensure the nation's economic success in the future, there needs to be more support for children in the U.S. starting now.
This brief highlights the increasing percent of English learners becoming long-term English learners in the last two decades and points to a set of mechanisms that may serve to explain this increase.
