Getting Schooled

Fort Worth ISD educator Alexandra Checka will forewarn you in the short breaths taken throughout her spirited, hours-long conversations. Talking public education, she goes zero to 100 — really quick.

An Arlington native and the child of two parents who immigrated from Mexico, Checka grew up in a bilingual household that held public education in high esteem. The self-proclaimed Shakespeare nerd still recalls the names of all her elementary school teachers and will tell you she’s “horrified” by the idea of children not wanting to spend hours with their noses buried in books. She’ll tell you straight; Checka was a good student in good schools.

Now a seventh- and eighth-grade instructor teaching English and coding in Fort Worth ISD, Checka originally fancied herself a bookkeeper. Around 2007, she picked up substitute teaching at an Arlington public school as a means to fund college classes for bookkeeping. It would’ve been a means of work allowing her to surround herself with the literature she loves. 

That was, at least, before she discovered her true calling one day into her side gig. In something of a culture shock, posters plastered around the classroom implored children of low-income families not to do drugs or get pregnant. It was that instantaneous spark inside her mind that’s kept Checka in Fort Worth ISD schools — through good and bad — for more than a decade.   

“I had an extremely positive experience in school. The reason that most teachers get into what they do is to give them an experience they didn’t have growing up. I think I’m the opposite,” Checka says. “But it took exactly that one day to make me realize, ‘This is my thing.’”

Last year, Fort Worth schools earned a “C” grade — based on student achievement, school progress, and moves to close achievement gaps — in the Texas Education Agency’s first year to give grades. Moving forward, the big urban district is doubling down on early child literacy, (only 37 percent of Fort Worth’s public school third-graders read on level today); middle years math and algebra; and college and career readiness.

From her perspective teaching in the district, Checka refuses to call Fort Worth ISD a broken district. “The system goes all the way back to our founding fathers,” she says. “The idea that a community looks at not just one child, but every child, regardless of race, economic circumstances, or disability. That system, that’s what we’ve got going well for us.”

The heart of the issue, according to Checka, is inequity in funding schools. Property-rich divisions of school districts are plentiful in resources, while property-poor divisions are lacking. Public schools, which are funded by the Texas Legislature, must make do with what money they receive to bolster struggling campuses.

Fort Worth ISD has lowered its number of “needs improvement” campuses to 11 in 2018 from 14 the prior year and 22 in 2016. Five of Fort Worth’s lowest-performing schools came off of chronic “needs improvement” status after the district converted them to “Leadership Academies,” recruiting high-performing teachers and administrators, paying them more, intensifying instruction, lengthening the school day, and providing three meals daily.

New Leader, New Focus

The parking lot of the Fort Worth ISD administration building on North University Drive is full in July, signaling the district’s busy summer and full agenda. Unlike the students who were excused from class over a month ago, few working in an administrative capacity are on vacation, many of whom are working tirelessly to continue the improvements the district has seen since the beginning of Kent Scribner’s tenure as the superintendent of Fort Worth ISD.

Scribner, who was hired in 2015 to revive the flagging district, immediately set out to narrow its focus, yielding results that lead in the positive direction. “When I arrived three years ago, Fort Worth was focused in many, many areas,” he says. “Kind of the ‘spray and pray’ approach, where you’re trying to fix everything.” With more than 10,000 employees serving 85,000 children — 85 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch — the scattershot approach had taken hold over years.

The TEA’s 2019 accountability scores come out in August, and Scribner says early numbers suggest a continued upward path.

National Merit scholarships have more than tripled to $131 million from 2015. Voters in 2017 overwhelmingly approved a $750 million bond package, with money for next-generation STEM and career and technical education; upgrades to high school libraries, fine arts, athletics and infrastructure; and alleviation of overcrowding. And Scribner says the reshaped Fort Worth school board, with three trustees newly elected this spring, has quickly coalesced into a cohesive, thoughtful, professional group.

“We believe that we’re starting the modern age of Fort Worth ISD,” Scribner said during an interview in July. “We’re really, really moving away from some of the traditional ways of educating students and moving toward a 21st century approach.”

Yet, problems persist. 

Enrollment in the schools peaked at 87,432 in 2017 and has dipped since. The Fort Worth schools see their biggest enrollment drops between fifth and sixth grades. The district hasn’t re-examined its attendance boundaries since 1999; many campuses are crowded while nearby ones are underused. Charter schools — including some strong performers such as IDEA — are pushing into Fort Worth, challenging the urban districts for students and the connected public funding. The Fort Worth district hires hundreds of new teachers annually, but many are second-career, and Scribner acknowledges the schools’ curriculum is too “high-level” for teachers and doesn’t give them enough “nuts and bolts” guidance. High school students aren’t getting enough emotional and social support within their campuses. And the district and community are behind in their ambitious, critical goal of having all third-graders reading on level by 2025 — the “100x25” plan launched in 2016.

We believe that we’re starting the modern age of Fort Worth ISD. We’re really, really moving away from some of the traditional ways of educating students and moving toward a 21st century approach.”

- Kent Scribner, FWISD Superintendent

Setting Boundaries

Scribner, with the board’s backing, has begun a broad examination of attendance zones. President Clinton was still in office the last time the Fort Worth schools broadly redrew such zones. The city’s population has exploded since then, and demographic patterns have shifted dramatically. 

Scribner uses the example of South Hills High School and the nearby Southwest High School in South Fort Worth to illustrate the potential value in redrawing attendance boundaries.

South Hills is overcrowded, while Southwest is larger and is significantly underused. “It makes no sense to have a school that’s overcrowded a mile away from a school that’s under-utilized,” Scribner says. “That’s one example, and there will be many, many more as we go through this process.” The district also wants to address split attendance zones where children, for example, who attend the same middle school end up at different high schools based on where they live. “Every high school feeder has some type of issue where the kids are split,” Karen Molinar, the district’s chief of staff, said in an interview.

The pressure from charter schools has helped move the discussions along. Attendance at the district’s Leadership Academy at John T. White Elementary School on the East Side, for example, dropped when the public charter International Leadership Academy of Texas East Side Fort Worth opened in the nearby Woodhaven neighborhood. According to Molinar, the district expects attendance to drop this fall at its Western Hills campuses when the strong-performing IDEA Public Schools charter — whose backers include Fort Worth’s Sid Richardson Foundation — opens the IDEA on Cherry Lane near the troubled Las Vegas Trail corridor.

The district’s competitive response is one the schools need to make in any case, for the benefit of the students, school officials say. “I’m not concerned about charter schools,” Tobi Jackson, who represents the East Side and was succeeded in May as board president by Ramos, said in an interview. “What I’m concerned about is providing the best possible education we can in the Fort Worth ISD. I think we’re on the right track. I think this executive team is an amazing team.”

The district wants to put itself in families’ position. If they’re leaving the Fort Worth ISD, “why do parents want to leave?” Molinar says. “How can we make kids and parents feel invested?” The review of attendance zones will include an examination of how much time students spend on buses. “How many miles does a kid travel? How can we keep our kids off buses? How does it impact the whole child? We’re looking at it holistically.”

The idea of moving sixth grade to elementary school generated the most questions from trustees at the March meeting. The district created sixth-grade centers years ago to address crowding at other campuses, but the students, at that age and development, fit better in elementary schools, Molinar said. “Sixth-grade programming is more aligned to elementary, but we’re treating them like a middle school,” she said.

Trustee Judy Needham, who stepped down in May and was succeeded by the newly elected CJ Evans, asked Scribner at the March meeting whether he was confident the elementary schools had the capacity for sixth grade. “We don’t know those details yet,” Scribner responded. “That’s why we want to do this [review] over a period of time.”

Scribner plans to spend the fall semester meeting with families and community members at middle and high schools to get their input on how best to have a “balanced student population and use our facilities much more efficiently,” he said in the interview.

It will take time to implement proposals the board approves,” Scribner says. “Perhaps there are some easier cases that can take place immediately. Some of the more complex high school attendance patterns and middle school attendance patterns will take a year or so to implement. This is not a quick fix. It has to be a comprehensive, well-thought-out plan with a similarly comprehensive and well-thought-out implementation. There may be some parts of the community where we will be making a recommendation for 2020. In other parts, it may be 2021 and then down the road.”

Other possibilities for generating the extra space in elementary schools include creating regional Pre-K/kindergarten centers, repurposing underused school district buildings, and seeking funding in future voter-approved capital programs.

Why do parents want to leave? How can we make kids and parents feel invested? How many miles does a kid travel? How can we keep our kids off buses? How does it impact the whole child? We’re looking at it holistically.”

- Karen Molinar, Fort Worth ISD chief of staff

Attacking Literacy

Scribner has honed the strategy for early literacy since the district and business and community partners launched the Read Fort Worth initiative. “It is an enormous and complex problem that faces not only Fort Worth, but every major city,” Scribner says. “We think it’s a national problem, but we think we can design a Fort Worth solution. We focus on collective impact, getting everyone in the community focused on early literacy.”

Scribner points out that if kindergarteners enter reading on level, then they’ll most likely be on level by the critical third grade, where kids who are behind are statistically much less likely to catch up and more likely to not finish high school. “It starts at birth,” he says. “At the hospital, making sure we have healthy babies, where you send [families] home with a basket of reading materials, really getting some of these young mothers a sense of awareness of how important early literacy is. Really working with our social service agencies so students are not experiencing trauma and in difficult home situations, trying to minimize that as much as possible throughout their lives. Getting as many students as possible into quality preschools. Having higher-quality first-grade, second-grade, third-grade instruction. It’s a long process. What’s important is we stick to it.” Redesign of the teacher tools is one piece, he says. “You can’t give up on it.”

Anel Mercado, who took the helm a year ago as executive director of Read Fort Worth, has restructured the organization. When she entered, the organization had a full-time executive director and part-time employee. Bringing consulting work inside, the organization now has seven full-timers and two part-timers, with the same $1 million annual budget.

The organization, working with the Reading Partners and Read2Win nonprofits, has sent about 300 volunteer tutors into schools each year to read with students, and the district’s reading test scores are up 7 percent since the initiative was launched, but that’s far lower than the 8.4 percent annual growth needed to reach 100 percent on-level reading by 2025. “It’s headed in the right direction, but it’s not moving fast enough for us to reach the 100 x 25 goal by 2025,” Mercado says. “So, there’s a lot more work that needs to be done.”

Mercado also stretched $320,000 in raised funds to buy more books for kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade classroom libraries by switching to paperback from hardback. The literacy initiative today has much more definition than when it began, Mercado says. “There was a great call to action, but the system and implementation hadn’t been put into place.”

Read Fort Worth volunteers are in about 40 schools combined and has announced an aggressive goal of 1,000 volunteer tutors. The organization also revamped its summer programming, embedding literacy into the curriculum at 65 Fort Worth sites like city recreation centers, Boys and Girls Clubs, and Girls Inc. 

"It’s headed in the right direction, but it’s not moving fast enough for us to reach the 100 x 25 goal by 2025. So there’s a lot more work that needs to be done.” 

- Anel Mercado, Read Fort Worth executive director

Chart(er)ing a New Path

With the Fort Worth schools having acknowledged the staying power of the charter school movement, the district has its toes in the water, seeking partnerships. Money available under Texas Senate Bill 1882 enabled the school district to turn over management of the five leadership academies — four elementary schools and one middle school in Southeast and East Fort Worth and the West Side — to Texas Wesleyan University. The school district still pays to operate the academies, and the employees are still the district’s. The extra state funds pay for the new senior director Texas Wesleyan hired to run the program — Priscilla Dilley, who launched the Leadership Academy program as a school district employee — and her Wesleyan leadership group.

The Texas Wesleyan agreement is charter-like, with the independent management a requirement under the new state law. The Leadership Academy program, started in 2017 and backed by Fort Worth’s Rainwater Foundation, was an immediate success. The five schools, chronic underperformers, came off the “needs improvement” list in 2018 and met state standards. “There was never an issue with the students,” Molinar, the chief of staff, says. “We need to put the best teachers in front of the students.”

The Leadership Academies provide a new training lab for Texas Wesleyan’s undergraduate and graduate education students. “Our mission is urban teachers,” Carlos Martinez, Texas Wesleyan’s dean of education, says. “Our students are likely to work in an urban center at some point. [Leadership Academies provide] a training center for our students.”

Under Texas Wesleyan, the academies are looking at developing a leadership track under which the students go into the community. This year, 10 academy students flew to Washington, D.C., to make the case for after-school programming and met with staff members for U.S. Rep. Kay Granger and Sen. Ted Cruz. Dilley said a master teacher initiative in the academies is in the planning. “It’s just really about building capacity,” she said.

The model is too expensive to replicate across all schools that need it. Each school costs $1 million more than typical to run, and the school district isn’t shifting expense to Texas Wesleyan.

In its hunt for resources to fund future similar programs, the district is applying for a Texas Education Agency grant that, if won, would give the district a year to determine the school or schools and partners.

“What we want to do from an equity lens is invest in those students in those communities that have historically been the most challenged,” Scribner says. “TEA is doing some very interesting work looking at Census tracts. They want to identify generational poverty, communities that have been impoverished for a very long time, where most of the people in the community are experiencing the same circumstance. Those are the places that this additional investment needs to be made.”

Some teachers are critical of charter schools that open inside the boundaries of public school districts. Scribner sees good charter schools as a way to increase the likelihood that every student in the district has “access to a quality seat.” The district estimates 9,000 students live within the Fort Worth ISD boundaries but attend other schools.

“I’m a fan of good charter schools,” he says. “Those are the charter schools we want to partner with. But there are a handful of charter schools whose performance is substandard and who are not good for students and families. In fact, what you’ll find is they have an enormous number of students in the third grade, a smaller number in the fourth grade, a still-smaller number in the fifth grade, and by the time we get to 12th grade and we’re bragging about the 100 percent graduation rates, we have to ask the question, how many of these students were in the cohort in ninth grade?

“So, it’s my goal to partner with the charter schools with a track record of success. And bring them into our system, so the students get the best of both worlds. They can still have the small specialized experience but also participate on the speech and debate club, play on the soccer team, be in the band.”

Texas Senate Bill 1882, which the Texas legislature passed in 2017, incentivizes public school districts to partner with charter schools or other outside entities — including institutions of higher education — to operate a district campus. 

"Our mission is urban teachers. Our students are likely to work in an urban center at some point. [Leadership Academies provide] a training center for our students.”

- Carlos Martinez, Texas Wesleyan’s dean of education

IDEA Charter Schools’

Ana Martinez 

IDEA, a fast-growing public charter district, was started in 1998 in Donna, Texas. Today, it has 79 campuses and serves 45,000 students in Texas and Louisiana. In August, it will open IDEA Rise Academy and College Prep on Cherry Lane on Fort Worth’s West Side, and IDEA Achieve Academy and College Prep in Haltom City. The campuses will each open in August with a limited number of grades in elementary and middle schools. Each year, the schools will add a grade until they reach 12th. The IDEA district received a “B” grade last year by the Texas Education Agency. Ana Martinez, the Tarrant County executive director, sat down for an interview.

FW: Enrollment is still open. How is it going? Martinez: We are trending to open with 1,200 students at the two campuses (600 at each).

FW: What is IDEA’s growth plan for Tarrant County? Martinez: Across the region, we plan to grow to 10 campuses across six years. We’ve got to raise the educational attainment for all kids; it’s not where it needs to be.

FW: What are the demographics of IDEA students? Martinez: Eighty-eight percent of our kids qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch. We have 89 percent kids of color, 75 percent of teachers and principals are people of color.

FW: What are your criteria for sites? Martinez: Ten acres minimum. About $50,000 or less in median household income. We look for communities where we’re about to become part of a bigger story.

FW: Do you know where you’re going next in Tarrant County? Martinez: We have secured a site (near) Edgecliff Village, at Altamesa and Crowley Road. We would love to go to the North Side. Finding 10-15 acres of green grass on the North Side has been challenging. 

FW: You promote 100 percent graduation rates for 12th graders. How many of those students were there in ninth grade? Martinez: Ninety percent of our families persist from year to year. We put a lot of effort in goal-setting. We put a ton of time in ensuring our families persist.

A Golden Future

Omar Marquez, 21, still knows the shame he says he once felt for his heritage as a son of Mexican immigrants attending elementary and middle school in Fort Worth ISD. “I remember starting to get ashamed of my culture, heritage, [and] background, because it was something that wasn’t ‘American,’” Marquez says. “We were pushed to be all about America — speak English, pledge to the flag, et cetera.”

Despite that feeling, Marquez woke up with the sunrise each school day. Growing up on Fort Worth’s east side, he made his way to the bus stop every morning for the drive to Maudrie M. Walton Elementary School. He was going to get out of the east side and into better things, Marquez told himself.

He did.

Marquez seized pride for who he was in his time attending Marine Creek Collegiate High School, graduating early as the Class of 2015’s salutatorian with both an associate degree and a high school diploma. Thereon, Marquez became a first-generation, Latino college graduate. He was awarded a full ride to the University of North Texas and studied marketing and advertising. Internships came in spades for the scholar. 

Marquez is a product of Fort Worth ISD’s Gold Seal Programs of Choice, which are rigorous courses focused on students’ interests and the needs of the modern workplace. It’s what he says he appreciates the most in his time as a Fort Worth ISD student. For middle school, he attended Applied Learning Academy, where he first met Checka, his English teacher. Marquez says his tenure there impacted him the most.

“Out of all of the schools I attended, that one is the one I appreciate the most and the one that I have had the best teachers at and still keep in contact with them today,” Marquez says.

Marquez still saw turbulence. Although he says the benefits of accelerated learning helped immensely, resources weren’t plentiful. He also perceived a lack of knowledge or preparation among staff to help first-generation students that have no guidance at all for what to do when it comes to the college admissions process. A lack of funding for student activities was obvious to the student — Marine Creek Collegiate High School was small and hadn’t even had a prom yet.

“I had no idea what I was doing,” Marquez says. “My high school had a lack of resources, as well … The stress of graduating early and having to switch up your year plans and start the college app process was a lot.

“The counselors at my school tried to guide or help me as much as they could, but there wasn’t enough.”

Even so, teachers like Ms. Checka from Marquez’s middle school years provided guidance. Their dialogue is one that’s endured the test of time over the past decade, glued together by their mutual pride in their heritage and determination to do things bigger than themselves.

The teacher-student duo hopes that dialogue continues.

“This is a culture thing,” Marquez says, “but I think encouraging students to be more proud of where they come from and use that to their benefit to make them stand out would be a good thing to do.” 

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General demographics*

Students:

86,039

African-American:

22.7%

Statewide: 12.6%

American Indian:

0.1%

Statewide: 0.4%

Asian:

1.8%

Statewide: 4.4%

Hispanic:

62.4%

Statewide: 52.4%

Pacific Islander:

0.1%

Statewide: 0.1%

White:

11.3%

Statewide: 27.8%

Two or more races:

1.5%

Statewide: 2.3%

2017 FORT WORTH ISD stats, via Texas Tribune database