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Why Houston is Poised to be the First City in the Country to Close the Achievement Gap

May 26, 2011 by Jeremy Jones

There isn’t much mystery as to why we exist in Houston. The drop-out rate stands at about half, crippling the future of our local economy and giving rise to a generation of children that will be worse off in terms of quality of life than their parents. A sixth grader growing up in a low-income neighborhood has a 1 and 10 chance of graduating from a four-year college. Even when we factor in 6th graders from all neighborhoods, their chances only rise to about 1 out of 7. Houston is quickly becoming a microcosm of what our country soon will be: a city of immigrant and/or low-income families that pushes the racial, ethnic, national and economic composition of city away from what we once knew, becoming a “majority minority” environment. When we talk about the achievement gap, we have to address the fact that it falls along racial and economic lines because ignoring that paradigm will hinder our ability to influence the revolutionary change that will need to occur to adjust course. We can no longer accept the status quo and we need to create a new one for our students and our collective future. At YES Prep, we have and will continue to prove that low-income, minority students can achieve on an absolute scale when given access to great teachers and great schools.

In the last few weeks I have attended several events in the Houston area that rebuild my confidence in my generation’s ability to change, to alter or even to create anew the status quo. I had an amazing dinner with Teach For America Houston alumni to talk about how we become a transformation force in the city. Our essential question was, “How do we radically impact student achievement in Houston?” The operative word there being “radically,” simply because it will take a radical, evangelical and revolutionary fervor to move the dial enough to impact kids now. I had the privilege of hearing the founder of Teach For America, Wendy Kopp, speak at Rice’s Jones Business School about her new book, A Chance to Make History. I also attended a great town hall meeting hosted by Children At Risk with an all-star panel of YES Prep Founder and former President Chris Baric, Rice Professor Ruth Lopez Turley, HISD School Board Member Paula Harris, Executive Director of Houston A Plus Scott Van Beck and distinguished guest former DCPS Chancellor and Founder of Students First and The New Teacher Project Michelle Rhee. Finally, I finished the week celebrating YES Prep and KIPP first year teachers for their completion of our Teaching Excellence Development and Alternative Certification Pathway program. I left feeling heartened and even emboldened to find new and better ways to recruit great teachers and leaders for students, families and communities.

It is my belief that Houston is the epicenter of educational innovation in the country right now. That’s not discounting the changes that have happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or the recent push in the state of Tennessee for transformational change in education, but I do not think that there is any other education environment in the country that is reaching a critical mass of reform fervor like we are in Houston. The next couple of years will be a test to whether or not we will achieve this goal of ensuring that all of our students are set on a new and better life path, one that allows them to choose their way free from social barriers like geography or income. Houston is ripe for change.

It is no longer about if we can do it. It is now a question of will we?

For more information about how you can help us transform Houston by preparing 10,000 students for college graduation, please visit our job board or email me at teach@yesprep.org. For more blogs about Houston and YES Prep's commitment to establish a new status quo, read our Y Houston blog.

jeremy jones is a teach for america alum and the senior director of recruitment and selection for yes prep Jeremy Jones is the Senior Director of Recruitment and Selection for the YES Prep Public Schools. He was a 2005 Teach For America Corps Member and former YES Prep middle school math teacher. You can follow him @YESPrep on Twitter.