Texas is squaring off against a cataclysmic challenge, according to the state’s Education Commissioner Mike Morath.
If Texas can’t find a way to catch up from learning losses suffered during the pandemic, the state’s public school students will lose trillions in lifetime earning potential, Morath said.
“This is the largest problem facing the state of Texas,” he said.
Morath shared those thoughts during a sobering half-hour presentation as the keynote speaker at Tuesday’s State of Public Education luncheon, held by the Dallas Regional Chamber at its headquarters.
Here are a few takeaways from the event:
Historic declines for Texas students
Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, Texas schools had “seen ten years of unadulterated improvement in reading and mathematics,” Morath said.
The gains weren’t across the board, the commissioner acknowledged; for example, less than one in three graduates held a bachelor’s or associate’s degree or trade credential six years after high school.
But the improvements were “the best as [they’ve] ever been,” he said.
That momentum has come to a screeching halt over the past 18 months, as schools and society have struggled with the disruptions that have come with the coronavirus.
In fact, in some key metrics, the state has lost “at least a decade’s worth of progress,” Morath said. The number of students on grade level in math in both third and eighth grade dropped by nearly 20%, falling back to percentages not seen since 2012.
For individual students, the decline in proficiency could manifest itself in children lacking basic knowledge and skills, Morath said, like whether a third-grader has their times tables memorized.
Need to catch up, but how quickly?
As a result of the declines, the state needs to be able to close those deficiencies — and fast.
But Morath acknowledged that public school systems have historically struggled with that type of work. He pointed to one of the last major disruptions to student learning in the United States: 2005′s Hurricane Katrina.
The diaspora from that natural disaster left hundreds of thousands of New Orleans residents away from their homes for more than a year after the storm, and many never returned.
“After four years of intense intervention, [students] did, in fact, catch back up to state averages in reading,” Morath said.
“They never caught up in mathematics,” he added, pointing to similar results from other events in Argentina, Germany and Iran that led to student learning loss.
“Our track record at accelerating instruction, accelerating learning, getting kids to learn more than a year’s worth of content in a year’s worth of time ... has not been strong,” Morath said.
He pointed to a cohort of Texas third-graders from 2017 that did not meet grade level in math. By the time the approximately 85,000 students made it to fifth grade, only about 6,000 of them had made it back to grade level.
“Across all grades and subjects, our track record [for catching students up] is about 4%,” Morath said. “And this is a deeply troubling statistic, a deeply troubling truth.”
‘$2 trillion problem’ — and possible solutions
Talking to an audience of educators and business leaders, Morath drew a picture of the state’s financial future if the gaps were not closed.
Basing his calculations on the premise that state achievement levels — determined by assessments — are strongly linked to lifetime earnings, Morath said if declines weren’t addressed, the state’s students would lose, on average, 6% of their earning potential, or approximately $100,000 over their lifetimes.
Cumulatively, that could mean a reduction in the state’s gross domestic product of $2 trillion, Morath said.
“This is not a hypothetical future,” Morath said. “This is going to be our actual future.”
Morath said that the state has already embarked on a series of changes designed to cut into the learning loss, several of which predated the pandemic: additional instructional days, more rigorous instructional materials, boosting and strengthening teacher development and retention, and “high-impact” tutoring.
“This is hard blocking and tackling, it’s not sexy,” he said.
D-FW leading the way
The commissioner praised the work of school districts in Dallas County, pointing out that many districts have been early adopters to these initiatives, such as pushing students into college-credit programs or rethinking teacher pay and evaluation systems.
Morath, a former Dallas ISD trustee, lauded DISD superintendent Michael Hinojosa for his work in developing P-TECH (Pathways in Technology) early college high schools. The state will open 69 new P-TECH schools in 2022-23.
Dallas County schools were responsible for 13% of all the associate’s degrees earned by Texas high school students in 2020, Morath said.
“Y’all are leading the way,” Morath said. “It is remarkable.”
The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, The Meadows Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University and Todd A. Williams Family Foundation. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.
