An urgent call for change in Texas education
2011 was a challenging year for Texas education. With lingering effects from the 2008 recession and an unbalanced budget, the Texas Legislature faced the difficult choice to cut $5.3 billion from public education, with over $500 million of this cut being felt in Dallas County.
This reduction couldn’t have come at a worse time for Dallas County and its 14 public school districts, with only 35% of its third graders reading on grade level and just 15% of its high school graduates completing a postsecondary degree within six years. This lack of educational attainment was severely impairing economic opportunity in one of the nation’s most robust economies. Employers were being forced to recruit talent that had been educated elsewhere to fill our jobs, with the under-skilling of our own young adults ages 25-34 resulting in less than a quarter of all adults earning a living wage.
It was clear that something had to change.
A new vision
In September 2011, Commit CEO and founder Todd Williams, alongside newly elected Mayor Mike Rawlings, launched the Commit Partnership. They aimed to help unite and align institutions by hiring a dedicated team focused on leveraging robust data insights to identify the underlying root causes impairing our outcomes and supporting innovation, adoption of best practices, and passage of key state legislation to drive progress in public education outcomes.
“Our region had a continuing proclivity to form volunteer task forces to study and admire the size of our problems,” says Todd Williams, “But too often we failed to outline the subsequent strategies, organize, and raise the necessary resources needed to solve them. That had to end.”
With a focus on data-driven decision-making and collective action across numerous historically siloed institutions, Commit began working to help improve educational and economic outcomes within Dallas County.
A decade of progress in Dallas
As one example over the past decade, Commit has worked closely with Dallas County’s largest district (Dallas ISD) on a number of fronts, including helping incorporate and incentivize a number of its innovative approaches into state legislation. While there is still much work to do, the district has become a statewide leader in educational improvement, with key milestones including:
- 3rd Grade Reading
A 25% increase in the number of students reading on grade level, impacted in part by substantial growth in the number of students attending Pre-K as 3- and 4-year-olds. - Innovative Programs
Pioneering initiatives like the Accelerating Campus Excellence program, P-Tech and Early College high schools, and Career Institutes and creating schools of choice with an intentional effort to create mixed socioeconomic campuses. - Educator Support
Implementation of performance-based compensation for teachers and staff with a strategic focus on incentivizing its best talent to work at campuses where they are needed most.
Dallas County leads the way
Throughout Dallas County, student achievement has grown meaningfully at all levels despite reflecting higher poverty rates and a significant population of Emergent Bilingual students. This progress has been fueled by numerous factors including:
- Strategic resourcing
- Capacity building
Improved data-driven governance practices
Substantially increased community awareness of current outcomes and impactful strategies - Regional alignment on key educational goals
- Impactful policy advocacy & implementation
A vision for the future
Dallas County’s progress has been made possible through unprecedented collaboration among an engaged community of hardworking educators, student-focused elected officials, and an increasingly aligned and outcomes-driven funding community. Together, we are working together to transform Dallas County’s educational landscape and shape a brighter future for all students.
Be a part of the impact
