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While the list of Texas children waiting to enroll in a charter school grows beyond 100,000, the battle over providing solutions for these students is waging on in the Texas Senate.

Senate Education Chairman Dan Patrick has been leading the charge to advocate for Senate Bill 2, which would allow more charter schools to be built in Texas, giving these 100,000+ students who are trapped on waiting lists, a place to succeed and thrive.

Creation of a Recovery School District can assist in rebuilding failing schools.

Approximately 50,000 Texas students have been trapped in 43 academically-unacceptable schools for at least two years, but in reality most of these schools have been failing their neighborhoods for far longer. Why?

Let's make school ratings easy for everyone to understand.

Texas’ school accountability system is intended to ensure that educators, principals, and school districts were held accountable for the quality of their campuses. Understanding schools’ ratings, however, is quite complex.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, among others, met with the Texas Senate Committee on Education on Wednesday, February 27th, to discuss public education reform. 

In response to the more than 100,000 children on waiting lists to enter a Texas public charter school, Senator Dan Patrick filed Senate Bill 2 that aims to lift the current cap on the number of public charters, provide facility funding, strengthen academic and financial accountability, and create an independent authorizer of public charters.

These changes are aimed at making public charter schools more available throughout Texas, while instituting a system that makes it easier to close failing charters.

The State of Louisiana recently implemented comprehensive education reform that included the creation of the Recovery School District (RSD). The RSD is a special public school district directly administered by the state - designed to take failing schools and transform them into exemplary schools. Once a school is turned around, control of the campus is returned to the local school district.

Parents who are tired of waiting for their kid’s failing school to improve could take quick action if Texas legislators improve the “Parent Trigger” law. This initiative was brought to national attention by the movie Won’t Back Down featuring Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal, who played two determined mothers looking to transform their children's failing inner city school despite facing a powerful and entrenched bureaucracy.

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