Marshall Garland

The School Improvement Division of the Texas Education Agency (TEA) identifies, monitors, and supports low-performing schools. To identify low-performing schools, TEA assigns annual academic accountability ratings to its districts and schools, but these ratings are only provided once per year and are vulnerable to disruptions in the assessment system. Schools that receive low accountability ratings do not meet accountability expectations and are considered low-performing. TEA partnered with R...

The Texas Education Agency offers grants for districts to implement school turnaround strategies at low-performing schools. Districts that receive these grants can implement a school turnaround strategy (referred to as a district-managed restart strategy) that includes replacing most of the principals and teachers at schools that the district identifies as struggling and needing additional support. From 2015/16 to 2018/19, 29 schools across four urban and suburban districts in Texas implement...

Texas House Bill 3 established a college, career, and military readiness (CCMR) outcomes bonus, which provides extra funding to districts for each annual graduate demonstrating CCMR under the state accountability system. Some small district and rural district leaders expressed concern about the ability of their graduates to meet the career readiness component of the CCMR accountability standards due to a lack of career and technical education (CTE) program or course resources. In response to ...

In response to concerns raised by Texas higher education stakeholders about the limited information available on students with a disability who are attending college in the state, this study examined college enrollment and completion among Texas public high school graduates by disability status, student demographic characteristics, and primary disability type. Across four statewide cohorts of high school graduates (2006/07 through 2009/10), 31 percent of graduates with a designated disability...

The New Mexico Public Education Department developed the Kindergarten Observation Tool (KOT) as a multidimensional observational measure of students' knowledge and skills at kindergarten entry. The primary purpose of the KOT is to inform instruction, so that kindergarten teachers can use the information about their students' knowledge and skills from the KOT to inform their curricular and pedagogical decisions. Stakeholders also are interested in using data from the KOT for other purposes, su...

Nationwide, Hispanic students continue to be underrepresented among students who complete a four-year degree in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016) and among workers in STEM fields. This discrepancy is a concern, especially in light of the projected growth in employment in STEM fields and in light of the fact that wages for jobs in STEM fields are 26 percent higher on average than wages for jobs in non-STEM fields. Concern ...