Taking Root - Texas' Lessons for Sustaining the College- and Career-Ready Agenda

Monday, September 7, 2009Printer-friendly version

To give states the information they need to sustain hard-fought education reform policy changes effectively, Achieve, funded by the GE Foundation, conducted research on state education reforms that have been sustained successfully for over a decade or more. The Texas story is remarkable in its continuity. The state’s standards-based reforms have evolved over the past 25 years, as Texas has consistently and incrementally ratcheted up the expectations for students, teachers and schools alike. How did this come to be? What pieces needed to be in place for the standards-based reforms to take root in Texas? What type of leadership drove and sustained these reforms? Achieve hopes the answers to these questions can help other state leaders, wherever they may be on their road to reform, replicate successful strategies and accelerate school-system reform on their home turf.