 So, good afternoon. My name is Davidine Amosa. I'm the National Director of Policy at IDRA. I've been at the job since April 7th, so I haven't been there long, but I come from Maldef. I was a former regional counsel for Maldef here in San Antonio. We're seeing the Southwest office, and I worked there for 11 years. And as some of you may know, if you don't know, Maldef and IDRA have worked very closely together on a lot of the policy issues, especially in education, where they've testified as experts in our cases, and so now I've got this opportunity to come over. I'm delighted to be here. Also here in the room with us in the back is Sophia by Anna, with IDRA. She's an education associate, a graduate of Harvard with her master's and doctorate degrees. And so she'll also be here in case I stumble, and certainly if we end up getting some Spanish speakers in the classroom in the room today. So I am going to start off just by talking about why should you care about policy. I'm happy that you're here. I knew that it was going to be a lower attended program here at this conference, since it's very geared towards parents. But I think sometimes people don't understand exactly what policy is. So policy comes in very different frameworks. It can be a rule promulgated by the Texas Commissioner of Education. It can be a rule that's established at the local school level. It can be a board regulation by the Board of Trustees. And so, you know, policy is just kind of like this outline of how it's going to direct the work that it's meant to guide. You know, federal policy, so we have a no child left behind app that, you know, led to a lot of the certifications of teachers. It led to, you know, with a highly qualified status, it led to accountability systems and disaggregated data. So that's basically, you know, the framework of what is policy. And then who makes policy? Like I said, it could be a local board of education. It could be, of course, the legislature at the federal level, it's Congress. There are some regulations that are done pursuant to law. So those are done by the agency's responsible for enforcing the laws. It might be, for example, in Texas, it's the Texas Education Agency, right? They don't have the authority to make laws, but within the laws that are passed, they're allowed to make regulations. And that's where we have a lot of regulations in their area of bilingual education, for example. And then, who helps shape policy? This, of course, comes from a variety of different interests. You know, I was just testifying for IDRA this past Monday on a bill that would improve monitoring for English language learning programs. And there were a number of players that were on the side of the bill that were in favor of the stronger, clearer accountability system that would hopefully help hold schools and school districts responsible for educating English language learners if this law passed. And it would make it, eventually, you know, you would hope to have a responsive school system that would improve the programs. So on one side, you had the civil rights groups who were very much in favor of this stronger, clearer accountability system. You had people like Lulac, Texas Code of the Texas NAACP. You also had business interests like the Texas Association of Business who always went stronger accountability systems as well. And then on the other side, you had people like the Texas School Coalition, which is an organization of some of the largest school districts in Texas. Like Northside Independent School District, for example, I think PSJA is a member of the Texas School Coalition, and they didn't want that accountability. They didn't want this law passed because they're afraid, well, you know, if TEA is looking over our shoulder even more, then we have more paperwork. We have more resources to direct, you know, towards responding to this accountability system. And so that's how you have different roles. You have the Texas Association of School Administrators, the Texas Association of School Boards. So you have associations and organizations. Then you have very private interests as well, such as business environmental groups as well that come in and try to shape, you know, Texas policy. And then how does policy impact practice? Of course, whatever happens, you know, whatever policies are passed, that's going to direct what happens, you know, whether it's in the classroom. Ultimately, the teacher's going to have a lot of control. You can't have policies that are going to be quite so intrusive that it's going to impact the day-to-day operations. On the one hand, that's what you could say, but on the other hand, when you have policies such as like we have in Texas with high-stakes testing, for example, right, that's driven a lot of the learning. And, you know, we went from a culture of learning to a culture of testing. And so, you know, teachers have, you know, diverted a lot of their attention and their work to preparing for the test. I mean, we see it, you know, on kids' t-shirts, you know, that are like, oh, the star is coming, you know, and you see giant posters. And I think there should be a law passed about against allowing something like that in classes. But I don't know if that's an idea or a policy, by the way. Off the come. I gave my children a t-shirt that had the Death Star on it. And my wife thought to me, and she said, hey, this isn't your battle, you know. So, in any event, that's how policy, you know, impacts, can impact process or the practice. I'm only going to mention five areas today. We have 10 education policy issues for 2015. So, the five areas that I'm going to look at are fair funding. I'm going to look, I'm going to speak about special program funding. I'm going to speak about quality curriculum for all students, accountability, and higher education assets for success. There should be handouts in your packet that have, you know, a few more details about these different areas. I'm not going to go line by line on these different areas. I should say funding on one of them. There's a summary page. Yeah. So, that's one, that's an outliner, and then they might, there might be a thicker packet on one pagers on each of the different policy issues. And they're not. They are available on the website at highgra.org. School finance and fair funding. I'm not going to get into the weeds of this. So, don't run out of the room and say, no, no, he's going to talk about school finance. But I do want to give you, you know, a broad brush approach of, you know, the importance of how our schools are funded and just give you a little bit of background on that. So, two of the major issues in fair funding is equalized formulas and funding cuts, reinstating the funding cuts. So, equalized formulas just basically means, you know, ensuring that the framework for funding in Texas provides similar funding to most school districts in Texas. Taking into account student characteristics, you know, such as poverty, such as English language arts would require additional resources. But there's no reason why, for example, how high size ISD in San Antonio should get more money without taxing higher than in actually high school in San Antonio, which is only about eight miles away. But that's the way Texas law has been for a number of years. There have been a number of lawsuits filed to try and equalize that funding, to try and also provide adequate funding, and it's been met with mixed success over the years. And it's also got to be storing cuts to funding that were made to special programs. We all know about the importance of early childhood education, for example, and about how important it is, especially for economic disadvantage and English language learner students. But yet, Texas cut over $100 million from those programs, cut over $200 million from summer school programs, which also helps students, you know, catch up. So these programs that are meant to be directed towards the students most at being most challenged in our Texas public schools was actually cut back tremendously. So with that in mind, I'm just going to give you this real broad brush background of how Texas schools are funded. So primarily, Texas relies on property taxes to fund its public schools. If you're a homeowner, you're paying property taxes, you're maybe not too happy because you're putting $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, but that's Texas' own policy. Nobody requires the state of Texas to rely on property taxes to fund your public schools. Other states use sales taxes, other states use a mix of business taxes, and there are other business taxes that are used to help support, but primarily the main source of funding for Texas public schools is property taxes. And of course, when you have 1,024 school districts, that's how many we have in Texas, not including charter schools, just public school districts. We have 1,024, 1,018 of those tax their residents, some of them don't have the ability to tax such as South Texas ISD. It doesn't have boundaries necessarily that it can tax. But if you were to break up the districts in about groups of 102, and you lined them up from the poorest to the wealthiest, this is how different you see Texas schools, the property values are. So the poorest are 76,000 per pupil versus over a million dollars for the wealthiest. So if you think of this in terms of, OK, well, if I raise taxes on the people in the poorest districts of one penny, I'm basically only going to get kind of a little more complicated. But basically, let's just say that you're going to get like $7.60 for the $100 of valuation of a property that's at 100,000. So $7.60 for that one penny of tax. If I raise a penny and I'm in the wealthiest districts, now I'm getting $108 over there. So $108 versus $7.60 is a huge difference, right? So Texas has these equalization provisions that say, OK, well, school districts can tax and they have to tax to raise the local monies. And the states are going to try and squeeze them in closer to try and make up the difference between the poorest districts. And so they do that, you might have heard of the Robin Hood Plan, where they take money from the rich and give to the poor. Well, you know, they need to bring down that wealth level from some of the wealthiest districts in the state. Mostly you're only looking at the last two districts. So like Northside ISD here in San Antonio, they don't give any money to the state. There's a lot of people on Northside that are against the Robin Hood Plan and they don't even know that Northside actually benefits from the Robin Hood. They get money from the state. You know, their values are about 200 or something thousand per pupil. You know, the Edgewoods, the Hardingales, PSJA's, you know, those are among the poorest in the state, Brownsville. So they try to take some of the money away from the wealthiest and put them out in court. They also put some state money into it, trying to raise the poor districts up. So that when poor districts are taxing $1.10, $1.15, $1.17, they should be yielding similar results that the wealthy districts do. Unfortunately, in Texas, we don't do a very good job of cutting the pie even, right? So a pie is very easy to cut if you think about an eight relatively equal pieces, right? You know, depending on who's cutting it, maybe there might be that final piece that's, you know, a little smaller than some of the others. But, you know, it's pretty easy. But once you start cutting one slice a little bigger and another slice a little bigger, then all of a sudden to try and cut the rest of the pie evenly is a lot more difficult. And so in Texas, even though they try to equalize the funding, you still have a gap of over $1,000 a student. And what that means is that if you were to look at it and, you know, you can take into account an average class from the size of about 22, you're looking at the difference for the wealthiest districts would have $167,000 versus, of course, $149,000. So if you're a school teacher, just imagine having access to $1,000 or an administrator, $1,000 more for every student in your classroom. But that's the built-in advantage that Texas policy has created for the wealthiest districts in our state. And when I say the wealthiest districts in the state, you know, you're basically talking about, you know, only about 100 to 125 districts. For the most part, a lot of the other districts are relatively in the same boat. But it's these super wealthy districts that have these built-in advantages for them. It's a funding, a special program for them. So economically disadvantaged and English learner students, typically, and I say typically, not always, typically they come to school with fewer resources in the home. They have access, perhaps their parents don't have as high educational levels, you know, in general. It can help students catch up. Some of you might be leaders of some of those programs. Increase is in special program funding because when you look at the data all across the state, you know, no matter where you look at graduation rates or testing results, these are the two student group populations that are being most challenged in the classroom and trying to bring those opportunities, those children, because they can succeed. But they need, you know, other opportunities such as smaller class sizes, such as access to high quality prepaid programs, such as training for the teachers, because not every teacher can teach, you know, to students of very poverty levels. But once again, you know, well, let me back up. So when you look at the state of Texas, the state of Texas recognizes, okay, well, low income students and English language learner students, even special education students, require additional funding, right? We're going to give additional funding. They started this back in the ground in 1984 and they convened a committee of professionals and they said, okay, well, what sort of things do they need in the classroom? And that was, you know, what was their tabs or teams? One of those testing that was starting to take place in Texas. Much lower standards back then. I think they communicated like 20 credits to graduate back then. And so, you know, even under those lower standards, they came up with a wait. They said, okay, well, it would probably cost, after convening all these professionals, they said it's going to probably cost about 40% more of the average cost of a general ed student, not a special program student. It's going to cost 40% more to provide these opportunities in the classroom for these students. So the legislature said, wow, 40% more for English learners and economically disadvantaged. That's a lot. We're going to automatically, arbitrarily cut it down for economically disadvantaged 20% and for English language learners to 10%. Ever since 1984, and here we are 30 years later, it still remains at 10% and 20%. And today, we have star test students, the expectation that all students should be graduating from college, college and career ready. We have so many more mandates placed on our public schools and our public school students. You know, we have high stakes testing with graduation requirements. And yet, Texas still maintains those weights that were arbitrarily established in 1984. And even with the more recent case, as I would leave Maldiff Council in the Texas School of Finance case that took over three months to try, the big push in that case was the performance of English language learner and economically disadvantaged students. We have superintendents from Northside in San Antonio, from the Valley in San Juanito in McAllen, to Richardson ISD in the Dallas area, to Houston area, the superintendents from Pasadena and Houston ISD in other places. All the superintendents, all experts also who were coming in testifying about how these students can succeed they're just not, they're just not enough resources. And it's not like money's going to magically change everything, right? But it does make a huge difference in helping students reach their full potential. And so, we got a great ruling in that case back in 2013 and again in 2014. And the court said, look, you know these, it's a constitutional obligation for the state supreme, for the state legislature to provide an efficient public school system that means for all children. And what the judge ruled based on the evidence in the case was that economically disadvantaged English language learner students were being denied the opportunities they needed to acquire the essential knowledge and skills in the Texas public school system, right? But there was no movement. And IDRA presented testimony or they presented this analysis. So what does it mean if you were to provide 40% funding for economically disadvantaged students, 40% more funding for English language learner students? And among those same desiled districts, remember we broke them up into groups of 102? The poorest desiled would get $510. The wealthiest desiled would get $277. And the reason for the difference is that there's higher concentrations of economically disadvantaged English language learner students in the core districts than in the wealthiest districts, right? So not only does Texas provide unequal funding through its formulas, right? Well, how much is the average student going to get and how much are you going to get for every penny of tax? But they compound that problem by underfunding special programs. So it's almost like a double whammy for many of the core school districts. And you'll see large numbers all the way through the middle and even in the ninth desile. The ninth desile includes, I believe, Houston ISD, which, you know, has 80% economically disadvantaged over 30% English language learner students. And so those are, you know, some of the policy issues that IDRA has taken up with respect to funding. What time is this? 1.05? Okay, you'll give me a 10 or 15. So another area that IDRA pushes is quality. So it's not just about, you know, funding, but what are the expectations for students in the classroom? We would all agree that, you know, to prepare students for college and career is where we need to go. You know, and it's not just about getting a job, because there are the jobs people who say, oh, well, you know, let's just train them for a job. Well, yeah, because they just want line workers to fill, but there are people, those people aren't ever going to be able to move up to a supervisor position or something, you know, that would provide them a career track, right? So during the last session, last legislative session, there was a huge disagreement about Texas. As Texas before said, okay, well, all students are going to graduate college and career ready, they have to take four years of math, four years of science, four years of social studies, four years of English language arts, right? And they were going to have to take Algebra II. And there's people who debate, well, you know, there's Algebra II for everyone, not everybody's strong in math and so forth. Let's develop these different career tracks, you know. So if they want to go into career technology, they can do that. They want to go into arts, they can do that. And it sounds kind of good, because you're like, well, you know, there's interest, but one, you're asking kids who are in the ninth grade to make this decision about what career track they're going to get on. But two, it also, in our history, we know which students are going to be trapped into which curriculum tracks. You know, by and large, there's, you know, minority students, economically disadvantaged students are going to be trapped into the less rigorous tracks. And that's large, that's unfortunate, but it's largely true, you know, when you look at Texas as a whole. So IRA has pushed, you know, high-quality curriculum that prepares all students to enroll in complete college and supplemented by optional courses that would prepare them to enter into the workforce, you know, through a career. Because maybe, you know, college isn't for everyone in the sense that they don't want to choose to go to college, right? But having the system, you know, decide that for them is, you know, the wrong way to go. And so, IRA, even, you know, with alternative education programs, you know, where, you know, they send in, quote, unquote, trouble kids there. You know, sometimes they don't have access to certified teachers. They don't have access to the same curriculum. So, IRA has been pushing for policies that would require, you know, certified teachers in those classes that would require the same curriculum for those students who are placed into alternative education programs. Is it for just school districts or charter schools? Charter schools also are required to, you know, that they have, you know, a five-track system now that students would be graduating from. We were telling you our policies were required to meet with every fifth-grade parent because now we're beginning to have the fifth graders sign with a longer period of graduation time. So, my understanding is that, correct, so now every parent, along with their child, students are having to sign a graduation time. So, it's not a little longer, even in my grade, our fifth-grade students, and our parents are so confused because they're saying, I hear now it's a law that those schools have to meet with the fifth graders to say this is a graduation plan or trap that your child will be on. Yeah, and I'm not too familiar with that. Yeah, that might be a school district policy. And, you know, it sounds fairly good on the one hand, you know, because, depending on how prescriptive it is, but, you know, if the plan is okay, well, how are we going to help our student? How is the student going to be prepared to go to college? You know, by the time they graduate from high school, you have them thinking about that, you know, it's the fifth grade where the plan is kind of like that. Yeah, and hopefully they won't be so stringent with that, you know, as these kids go up. I know my daughter last year wanted to take Algebra II and Geometry at the same time, and this school counselor told us, no, she can't do that. And I was like, you can't tell me that she can't do that. Show me a policy that says that she can't do that. That's good. You don't know your card. Yeah, I know. I know. It's like a slide of my card there. But yeah, you know, and it is, you know, and I can tell you, it's not always easy, you know, even when you are, you know, the former Malden Southwest Regional Counsel, there's soon, you know, many school districts in the state of Texas. But, you know, I don't want to get off track, you know, and just basically, you know, look at the central point, which is, you know, these policies that the state of Texas, you know, adopted a couple of years ago are now going to be impacting schools and school districts, and it's really incumbent upon parents and educational leaders to make sure that that track doesn't control those various tracks, don't control, you know, the ultimate outcome of preparing the students for college and career. And this is why it's very important. Some of the research and analysis that IDRA has shown is that, you know, Texas high school graduates and parents did not go to college and who enrolled in four-year institutions. The higher level of math that a student is taking is a strong predictor of whether or not that child is going to enroll in a four-year institution. It's not, you know, there's not a direct correlation, right? And it is not, you know, necessarily a causal relationship. But definitely there is some relationship between taking, you know, Algebra II or beyond Algebra II and where that student might end up, you know, after graduating from. The next issue that I want to address is the accountability. And this is extremely important because, you know, these accountability systems have been evolving, you know, since the 1990s and many people say that they started hearing Texas, you know, other people in other states say, no, that's not necessarily true. And on one hand you want to say, well, you know, accountability has become so overbearing, it has become so burdensome, you know, for the teachers or, you know, the principals or district administrators who are always worried about, well, is my school going to be academically unacceptable or not? On the other hand, you have a community or various communities who have been very concerned with social promotion. So some of you may have colleagues in France, you know, who you grew up with and weren't the best students and they somehow graduated, you know, from school not with very many skills and they're still doing, you know, very low-skilled, low-wage jobs, you know, to this day. And it's just because, you know, schools were just trying to get kids in and get kids out. It didn't matter what kind of skills they had. And, you know, a large part of that culture, you know, resulted in, you know, huge achievement gaps in people who were actually going to college and getting into college. So there's been accountability systems that in part have been used to make sure to basically keep a watch alive on what's going on in schools and school districts. Now that can also be abused in the teaching environment where, you know, teachers end up teaching to the test because they know that their school rating is going to depend on how their students, you know, test in these schools. And so IDRA has strongly advocated against testing every student in every school every year. They suggest that a randomized testing arrangement can be made so that, you know, you get an idea of how students are doing in a given district, you know, from year to year. But that it won't be the central, you know, it's going to be random so you don't know which students are going to be tested necessarily. But you want to still a good flavor of, you know, the various student groups, you know, Latino students, African-American students, Asian students, white students. You want to make sure, you know, economically disadvantaged that the data is still going to be disaggregated, that it's still going to have, you know, sufficient numbers that are representative of schools, school district, and state sampling. But it wouldn't drive it so much, you know, because, you know, as I've said before, you know, the use of high-stakes testing and standardized testing has, you know, really undercut a lot of learning that can be had in Texas classrooms. So we also don't believe that high-stakes testing, so there's standardized testing, right? Like, let's say the star, it wasn't required to pass, to go into the sixth grade, or to go into the ninth grade, or to graduate, right? It's just a standardized test, like an ITBS test, right? That's, you know, a standardized test that would give you an idea of what students, you know, are learning in school, which student groups, you know, are struggling and learning certain things that are tested, but it's not necessarily geared towards, you know, it's not so over-intrusive that it has high-stakes attached to it. And if you disconnect that high-stakes testing from standardized testing, then, you know, you have a whole different policy, you have a whole different framework for it. But once you tie student promotions, great promotions, once you tie graduation to those tests, now all of a sudden they become central schools. And what they've done in Texas now for teachers is that they're tying teacher evaluations to student performance. How far has it been in eighth grade and fourth grade, even third and sixth grade? Yes, even arts teachers and, you know, everybody's teachers and principals are going to be evaluated in part based on student performance. Now in New Mexico, we also filed litigation when I was at Maldiv. They used 50% of a teacher's evaluation based on student test scores, which was incredible, because, I mean, even in Texas, like last time I looked, they also have a law student somewhere in Texas, some challenge in this, but it's about 15 to 20% of a teacher's evaluation is going to be based on student test scores. And this is once again, you know, how policy can drive that practice, you know, what happens in the classroom. And there's been a large pushback against, you know, these policies, this past session. So there's bills that have been passed through the Senate or in the House, and I think one of them just passed in the House with some amendments to it. But they're basically going to look at a holistic set of factors. For those students who don't pass end-of-course exams, for example, they're going to look at other factors, such as, you know, attendance, grades, grades are actually going to matter no matter how much you graduate, or holistically and frankly, more smart by looking at, you know, various factors. A lot of resources. IDRA does a lobby for or against certain bills. We've testified on bills, and we've certainly testified on smarter, clearer, and stronger accountability systems. But we do want to make sure that accountability systems remain in place, that they're not abused. Are there some examples you can provide for us? As far as what are the alternatives that John are pushing for instead of the high-stakes test, because there does need to be an accountability system, and I agree that this needs not to be formed. But if you're an example that you can provide for us like IDRA, so we don't testify for things, but we have testified on the importance of standardized testing and the use of randomized tests. So that's a really good, strong example. We still are in support of disaggregation of student test scores, you know, based on race, language, and economic disadvantage and special education. Of course, we want to know how students are doing. And the reason why we want to know and why we want to make sure that schools are held accountable, because even under the accountability system we have, which we think is very coarse in many areas, it's very fractured, is because when you look at the performance of English learner students, this is on the 2012 exam, but there's very similar results on the 2013 exam as well. You see these huge achievement gaps. And certainly some people can say, well, you can't expect English language learner students who are identified as an English learner, whereas we like to say emerging bilingual students, you can't expect them to perform as well non-English language learner students on the reading and writing tests, but you also should expect to see more than one out of five achieve the minimum standard, that minimum standard has been lowered so much to allow more students to jump over that bar. You know, more than eight percent, one out of 12 English learner students in the state of Texas who are barely achieving that minimum standard, and then an algebra and biology. So across all the great subjects you see huge gaps in achievement. And the same thing is for economically disadvantaged students. This is actually an exhibit from the trial that was used last year from one of our experts who looked at, well, you know, how students are doing in 2013 because the state said, well, scores will improve, you know, from one year to the next. And you still saw, you know, incredible achievement of the percent. This is the percentage of students scoring unsatisfactory. So the greenish line is the economic and disadvantaged and that's the percentage you were scoring unsatisfactory on the English Star exam in the second year of administration. And like I said, you know, higher education remains, you know, one of the goals of policy. If a student wants to go into a career, that's fine, but we think that all students should be prepared to make that decision when they graduate, whether or not they want to pursue a career or college right out of high school. I think to keep the doors open to public institutions in Texas because we do have different resources available in different districts. I showed you about the difference in funding. I showed you about, you know, some of the differences in special program funding, how that would impact students. And a lot of that helps shape how students are prepared. Yeah, you can have students, you know, I think Sophia went to mention she had went to Harvard and she had went to the Fox Tech Magnet here in San Antonio. That's a great success story. You know, I'm a child of Edward Independent School District here in San Antonio, Harvard. Started at school in the fifth grade. And so you can say, well, look, you know, they can produce success, but we are the exceptions to the general rule, right? And so when you think about, okay, well, we want all students to go to college, but are they going to be prepared to go to college? And then we know about the systemic inequality in Texas public policy and the history of Texas public education. So how do we open the doors? How do we keep those doors open so that when they graduate, they can't get into the right university that they want to or aspire to at least. And so one of the things is, and I'm going to go down to the third one, is the high school curriculum should prepare all students. So what people don't realize is that with these various tracks that they've set up in the Texas public schools, you know, the high school curriculum tracks, a lot of them don't require algebra, too. Well, if you graduate in the top 10% of your class, you're supposed to be able to go to the University of Texas, Texas A&M. But if you don't have Algebra II on your resume, you're not getting in. And that's a kind of good thing, right? Because, you know, these universities should want your students very well prepared. But then when a student is told, oh yeah, you know, go into this track. Oh, well, in your 11th grade year now, all of a sudden you want to go, you know, to the University of Texas at Austin. Certainly that would be a wise decision. I think there's a long-worn law school grad. But, you know, they should have that opportunity, and they're going to have that opportunity stripped from them if they don't end up getting on that track. So the Texas top 10% plan, which there's been, you know, some debate on it, I don't think the debate's very logical, because, you know, if they're saying, well, you know, there's the same curriculum requirements, the same graduation requirements for all students in Texas. And if you graduate from Texas, your diploma in a school in San Bonito should be worth just as much as the diploma from Highland Park in the Dallas area. And so what the top 10% plan does is say, yeah, we're going to value all diplomas equally. And you can have people, you know, from the suburban schools who cry about, well, my child didn't get into UT and they were in the top 13%, and our top 13% is way better than the top 3% at, you know, that inner city school. But that's also, you know, because of the inequities that we have in our Texas public school system. And so the Texas top 10% says, well, you know, so long as you meet these basic requirements, you're going to be able to go to just about any Texas public university that you graduate, which is very important. And so we've been, you know, providing a lot of research on, okay, well, who is getting into Texas, University of Texas at Austin, because that's always the hot topic because the top 10% students have been crowding out, you know, non-top 10%. You ask UC Berkeley how many students, how many of their admissions get in as a result of graduating from the top 10% in their classes? It's like 95% of their students, you know, the same thing goes with a lot of the Harvard's and the Yale's and some of the more prestigious universities. But now University of Texas, you know, they say, well, wait a second, we have too many top 10%ers going in, so we're going to cap it at 75% of the admissions going into UT, which is kind of good policy in one sense because you don't want just, you know, kids, maybe they were late starters, maybe they were late bloomers, and, you know, they've really pushed forward and they've challenged themselves with AP courses and so forth, and they weren't in the top 10%, but they're very strong students and committed. They should have an opportunity, too, but, you know, it's that policy of the 75% cap. Is that being driven because of those students or is it because of the suburban students in the Plano's, in the Alamo Heights who are graduating the top 15%, their kids, their parents going to UT and their parents' parents going to UT now all of a sudden that cycle has been, you know, broken because of the top 10% clash. But it's had tremendous success for a lot of rural schools as well in Texas who never sent students to Texas, but now they have almost like this automatic golden ticket as long as they are, you know, on the right rear track, which before all students would have been on the right rear track, but they all would have been required to graduate, you know, taking Algebra 2 unless you opted out and into the minimum high school program. And this is how, you know, our students are being prepared. So if we look at just the star, in fact, this is what TEA says, okay, sport, X amount on the star, at least two star subjects, then, you know, you'll be prepared, you know, for college. It's not really a college admissions exam, the star isn't certainly, but, you know, this is just what the TEA status is. And you will see, you know, what I think is most striking about this is that according to the state's own test and their own bar that they draw on there, 59% of the students in the state of Texas are not prepared to go to college. Does that mean your data to the university or the university is having to take remedial courses? It's in the bar, you know, plus or minus, you know, 10%. But you will see the huge gaps, 68% of Latinos, 74% of African-Americans are not prepared to go to college. And when you look at the SAT and ACT, which are the more standardized college admissions exams, right? Those are the ones that really matter to universities when you're applying to many of the four-year universities. You'll see the yellow bar is the percentage of students who are actually taking the tests. So in Texas, we actually have one out of three students who isn't even bothering taking the SAT or ACT. And of those students who do bother to take it, only one out of four is sparring at the outer or above criteria. For African-Americans, what's pretty incredible here, I think, is the African-Americans basically are taking it at the same rate as white students in the state of Texas. Basically, two out of three of those students, that's great. The African-Americans was actually above the white students. They were at 75% just a couple of years ago. But then when you look at how they were hitting that mark, one out of 12 students. And we all know it's not because they're black or brown, they're race, of course. But a lot of it has to do with preparation. Some of it has to do with expectations, both within the home and certainly at school. And so that concludes my presentation on where we're at. Why we push for these policies for equitable funding, for special program funding, for curriculum. I mean, it is really a comprehensive strategic manner of trying to impact Texas public policy that affects as many students, and especially the students who are often ignored in our Texas public schools. So I'll open it up to any questions that anybody has right now. Yeah. And there used to be and you know, I apologize I've gone from doing 80% litigation to doing 100% policy. Albert Cortez is actually our director of policy and he knows a lot more about the Texas policy than I do. But I know that there was the personal graduation requirements for students who were failing at one time which is kind of a good thing to get them back on track. But I'm not honestly, I'm not familiar at all with a fifth grade personal graduation plan required for all students. I'm not sure if anybody else experienced that. Matter of fact it must not be this, like my son she knows where she wants to go but not exactly what she has to do. It should be, I think that everything is going to be posted online and through the now cast website they'll have it there. Any other questions? Yeah, what the worst thing is for some school districts that are really strapped for funds is that they say, ok well we're going to have summer school but for language learners you might not have an ESL about a certified teacher. So we're going to try and help you catch up but we're not going to have a trained teacher help you catch up so good luck. If the doors even do open to all students who are failing because it's not always those resources because they've been cut back in the state and they're not made up in other parts really but schools and school districts those spots are here too to get to the past and so you might just keep out of here the past but they still need support but they're not going to get it. Yeah and hopefully with some of these policies that really look like they're going to gain some traction they're going to look at a more holistic package for these students who aren't taking the star again and again because the only winners in that retaking of the star are the testing companies I mean it's not helping students to you know have to retake the test Can you even understand why this high state testing only implies so it's like why have the star for third grade grade and then would you pass it to go into the fifth and second grade Well the third through eighth grade and the one year in high school is actually a federal policy I'm sure in Texas they would have it anyway but but if it's at the federal law they require grades three through eight every grade tested at least reading it in the app and I think all science and one or two grade levels so like if you get the star you're okay but I can't see that right? Yeah and it doesn't make sense you know but I won't tell you that you know the third grade for example they changed the law that most had more holistic factors and leaves it in the hands of the principal and the advisor and the parent to see whether and now that's supposed to be being adopted definitely for the high school grades and I know there was another bill for the fifth and eighth grades that maybe being worked on right now Any other questions? I know I'm standing between you and lunch so thank you all very much