Eric.ed.gov – Year 1 State Report: Texas

The Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning (C-SAIL) examines how college- and career-readiness (CCR) standards are implemented, whether they improve student learning, and what instructional tools measure and support their implementation. Established in July 2015 and funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education, C-SAIL has partnered with California, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Texas to explore their experiences with CCR standards-based reform, particularly with regard to students with disabilities (SWDs) and English language learners (ELLs). This report examines how the state of Texas is approaching CCR standards implementation during a time of transition. The state has recently implemented revisions to the math standards and is currently revising the English language arts (ELA) standards. The revised ELA standards are expected to be ready for full implementation in the 2018-2019 school year. For the purposes of this report and in keeping with C-SAIL’s focus, the authors concentrate on implementation of Texas’s ELA and math standards. Drawing on interviews with seven key state officials across various offices of the Texas Education Agency, this report synthesizes and analyzes those responses using the “policy attributes theory” (Porter, Floden, Freeman, Schmidt, & Schwille, 1988), a theoretical framework positing five attributes related to successful policy implementation (specificity, authority, consistency, power, and stability). The report focuses on five focal areas–standards and curriculum, assessment, professional development (PD), English language learners (ELLs), and students with disabilities (SWDs). The authors report on each focal area through the lens of the policy attributes to help readers see how state officials identified areas of strengths and challenges related to standards implementation in Texas. [This report was written with T. Philip Nichols, Katie Pak, Emily Plummer, Amy Stornaiuolo, and Laura Desimone.]