 So Maldiff has been in this battle for equitable and adequate funding and also to ensure fair policies to help provide equal opportunities for Latino children, not just Latino children, but also economically disadvantaged children, also English language learner children regardless of race, because oftentimes, you know, unkind policies don't just aren't just targeting Latino children, they're also targeting poor children as well. Is this, I don't know, oh, doesn't it not expand, all right, all right. So I'm going to have a little bit of overlap with what Kuka said, you know, we kind of consider at Maldiff, we've been doing a lot of work with IDRA for decades, and we kind of consider them our policy arm to a certain degree, although we do have a legislative staff attorney who's a registered lobbyist in Austin. And we just did a pitch, and we consider Maldiff our litigation branch. So it's all the more important today that, you know, education policy is sensitive to all populations, especially because all children are held to the same standards, right. We don't want children held to different standards. We don't want children in the Valley or even on the West side or South side of San Antonio held to different standards than the children in the North side or in Alamo Heights. That's definitely not where we're going with this. But because you have state standards where, should I just do it through here? Sorry, I went to Edward High School here in San Antonio, and back before our first lawsuit, before we had air conditioning, before we had really working computers. So not technology. So getting back to my point, the reason why is, you know, because we have children in the colonias, these are actual student homes, photos of student homes of people living in the Valley. And these children are held to the same standards as the children who live in these homes in Alamo Heights. And once again, we don't want it any differently, but we do understand that children are competing not just within the students in their classroom, not just against tax standards or now the star standards, you know, the testing, state testing, but they're also competing for admission slots into college. They're also competing for scholarships and et cetera, and later on they'll be competing in jobs. So what exactly are the opportunities and how, you know, Texas funds the opportunities for students in Texas schools still remains a really big problem, and that's because Texas continues to fund public schools on local property taxes, which the local property values are incredibly disparate. So this is part of an analysis done by IDRA in support of our more recent litigation in Texas, and you can see if you break down the districts by desile, so in other words about 102, 103 districts in each of these desiles, you have the highest desile of districts with over $1 million of property wealth per student, and then the lowest wealth at $76,000. So obviously, in these poorest districts, you're not going to be able to raise as much money with your taxes as much as you can in the wealthy districts. But even with, you know, if we look this, if we look, take a picture of, okay, what are districts taxing at right now, and how much are they generating? Even with what some of you know as the Robin Hood system, the recapture, where wealthy districts have to share some of their wealth, even with that system in place, the wealthiest desile still makes over $1,400 per student, and this is why all these wealthiest districts are taxing 11 cents less. So imagine if you can go to your, I'm not sure how many of you live in any other district in the San Antonio area other than Alamo Heights. For you in Alamo Heights, you would be in this area up here in the wealthiest desile. But all the rest of you would more or less be in this range. You know, San Antonio even north side, maybe not northeast, northeast might be a little bit more, but it's in this approximate range of where all the other districts are. And they're taxing 11 cents higher, but their kids are getting $1,400 less. And so let's say if we say, all right, well, because the Supreme Court has said, well, you don't have to have equity all up and down the system. We go on a policy and I'll sit there in front of the legislature and say, yes, we think that children deserve 100% equity. They shouldn't be valued differently. And the committee chairman has told me more than one time before, well, wait a second, no court's ever required us to provide 100% equity. I'm like, well, no, of course not. But that doesn't matter. That doesn't stop. That shouldn't stop the state of Texas. Let's say, and what the Supreme Court has said is you only have to provide equity up to the cost of an adequate education, of course, exactly how much it costs to provide a basic adequate education we don't know. But we did this study in the case and we've also presented this data to the legislature and we took the 15% of children in the poorest districts. And this is, again, an IDRA analysis. And the 15% of children in the wealthiest districts and we said, okay, let's group them together and let's see how much it would cost. Let's say it costs $5,000, which nobody could really say with a straight face that it would only cost $5,000, but let's just say that. How much would it take the poorest districts? They'd have to tax it 98 cents compared to the wealthiest who could tax 24 cents cheaper. And then as the cost of an adequate education increases and during the trial, it was shown to be in the range of $6,500, the poorest districts would have to tax it $1.28 and the wealthiest get to tax 32 cents less just to reach that same amount of revenue. And so from a taxpayer standpoint, it's incredibly inequitable. But one of the really big problems is that this $1.28, does anybody know what the maximum local property tax rate is for school districts? It's $1.17. So the poorest districts, the districts with the poorest percent of children could not even get up to that adequate level of $6,500. What really matters is how our children are performing in our schools. So when we look at non-economically disadvantaged versus economically disadvantaged, no one says, well, economically disadvantaged children just can't perform in school. There aren't programs such as high quality pre-K programs, high quality before and after school tutoring, various programs that can help these students catch up and close this gap. But even if we look at the tax testing, the tax test was the easier test that was finally phased out. So even after all those years of teaching to the tax test, the state had said, well, there's been an incredible closing of the achievement gaps. We've once again done our work. But this is their idea of closing the achievement gaps, 15 percentage points in the third grade, all the way to 14 percentage points in the 11th grade. And the same thing goes for English language learner students. So we took all the tax test and we take all the children that are taking those tests. Once again, we see these huge achievement gaps and even expanding as the years go through. And now that we've done the STAR test, which is supposed to have college readiness integrated into the curriculum, it's supposed to be more rigorous, et cetera. And these gaps have increased. They've reached 30 percentage points when you're looking at the English three test. You're looking at the English two test. You see gaps of over 60 percent or 50 percent, sorry, between English language learners and non-English language learners. And this is for the STAR test in reading in 2013. And then if we look at the economically disadvantaged students, we see once again, large gaps across all grade levels. And what we see is those opportunities that those children lack oftentimes in the classroom. And of course, it's not just about preparing students to take a test like that. It's about preparing students to be college ready. And here, once again, we see huge gaps between the races. White students, which isn't all that great. I mean, one out of every three white students is not college ready. And this is according to the state's own college ready criteria as weight against the tax. So they set the standard in tax test and they said, well, this would be college ready. What actually ended up happening was that not enough people were jumping over that bar. And so they arbitrarily lowered the number. So even after arbitrarily lowering the number, we still have only one half of the students barely achieving that minimum standard. And for ELL students, it's even worse, where we have only 6 percent. Nearly one out of every 20 students is not hitting that low bar there. So what gives us a better idea is the ACT and SAT testing. And this is all state data, too. So I apologize. It's only as good as what the state can produce. But we see where we have an increasing number of students taking the SAT and ACT. This has increased over the years, particularly for African-American. You see, more African-American students are taking the SAT and ACT than white students. I mean, that's really incredible. But when you look at how they're performing, they're performing the lowest among all racial groups. So you have a community that is really interested in testing, that their families want them to test, and they go and test, and then they perform at such dismal levels. And the same thing goes, I won't go through this one, but it's the AP, the IB testing, and the scores, you know, the percentage that are tested, and then the number of examinees who are hitting the criteria. And then we look at, okay, well, that's one side, funding and testing. And then what were the changes? Kuka went over some of these changes already. What was a really big push, though, was the reduction in end-of-course exams. And it was because of a large collaborative effort among civil rights community, like MALDEF, among research agencies like IDRA, among Texas HOPE, et cetera. And of course, a lot of you all know the TAMSA, the, someone called them mad moms, but I don't think that's really appropriate. But it was the TAMSA, you know, the Texas Association, probably one of you knows it, mothers against standardized assessments or something like that. But they were really upset because the state was now going to include the star test as part of their GPA, you know, it was going to affect their grade. And then now all of a sudden they're like, wait a second, my kids fought for his GPA, he's being tested already in their nice suburban school, we don't want that. But it really opened the door to cut back on standardized testing, end-of-course exams from 15 to five. So that was a really big positive step. And this all followed our big court victory that we got in February. So the legislature, this is the first time the legislature actually reacted to a school funding lawsuit without the Supreme Court's final decision. In the history of Texas school finance and litigation, that was the first time that they had done that. But what they ended up doing was also lowering the bar. You heard KUKA talk about the different endorsements. Now, we're not stopping there, we're not gonna, one of our tactics is that whereas the legislature seemingly took out algebra two as a basic requirement for the default graduation plan, they left it to the SBOE to define, okay, well, what courses does someone need to take for those various tracks, those endorsement tracks. And so we've been back at the SBOE. And right now, there's a little momentum and it's encouraged the SBOE to include algebra two as a required course for each of those endorsements. And so that's a really big step because students who don't take algebra two do not qualify for the top 10%. And the top 10% has opened doors for many students, not just Latino and African-American, but also many students in rural school districts that were never sending any students to Texas A&M and Texas and other schools like that. She mentioned the concerns with tracking, and then we have a punitive accountability system on the horizon, because now Texas wants to be like Florida. So people say that Texas leads the way, but in all actuality, when it comes to education policy, they're on the tail of states like Florida that had the A through F accountability system. And now they're actually going to maybe be fixing that. And then we have higher education policy. We have whether or not students are being prepared. I went through that a little bit. Accessing through the top 10%, which I'll get into in just a bit. Affordability, because we've had tuition deregulation. And I think in the more recent years, we've helped fight back against tuition deregulation, I apologize to UTSA, one of the sponsors of this event. But we need to make sure that it is affordable for all students. And the merit and need-based grants, there was a really big pushback a couple of years ago in the legislature of this past session. We helped push back against that and ensured that students, all qualified students would be open to, for example, Texas grants if they graduated with one of the endorsements. Recruitment and retention of Latino faculty remains a huge problem at many universities, including some of the state flagships at Texas A&M and UT. And the development of Latino-based degree programs, some of you might have caught wind of this past session, where the legislature was trying to push back against some of the Chicano studies programs, for example. And so I just want to give one quick brief on the top 10%. So this will give you a picture, and we're briefing the Fisher case right now. Some of you might be familiar with the Fisher v. Texas case, the reverse affirmative action case against UT, which is now on appeal before the Fifth Circuit. And this is the way that UT developed their policy. So top 10% is capped now at 75%. For all other students, they develop this policy that takes an academic index, and it takes a personal achievement index. Within this personal achievement index, you have a couple of essays, and then you have other activities that they will consider. Within these other activities are special circumstances, and way over here to the right you see race. That's how little consideration UT gives to race. They look at applicants holistically, and they will actually consider the race of any applicant. So if you're a white student of a majority minority school, and you were student body president or something of that nature, they'll look upon that positively, which they should, because of the experiences that that student can bring to UT. So this looks like a great policy, right? We got top 10%. We got a blended admissions program that looks at students holistically and doesn't just concentrate on the academic index, which SAT and ACT scores tend to have a disparate impact against minority communities. But then when we look at the numbers, it's not that great. So if we look at the top 10%, which is racially neutral, white students were down to about 39% of the admins. Latinos were about 31%, which was really a big jump. African Americans were at 6%, Asian Americans were 18%. But then when we look at the non-top 10%, so when UT could consider race, we see a big jump in white students. We see a big drop in Latino students and a relatively small but significant drop for Asian American. And the only reason why I bring this up is because no matter how much we can push for education policy on K-12, and I will say that we have made some progress over the years. Yes, we have a long way to go, but we have made progress. So no matter what we can do with the curriculum and preparation of students and etc., no matter when we're successful in getting UT to push for our blended admissions program so that it doesn't just pretend that race doesn't exist anymore, we see the implementation going the other direction. So thank you very much, be happy to answer any questions later on. And I can make this PowerPoint available over email if you wanna send me something. Thank you. Yeah, thanks.