Fort Worth ISD asked residents for months what students should know, what graduates should look like and what needs to change.
The managers on the Texas-appointed board now have the answers in front of them.
Reading, critical thinking and preparation for life after high school emerged among the clearest priorities for students. But residents also repeatedly returned to how adults run the district — particularly teacher autonomy, trust and communication.
The findings are laid out in a new 162-page analysis that the board of managers will use during a Sept. 26 workshop meeting as it begins writing districtwide goals and limitations for Superintendent Peter Licata. An assessment of district needs will also help guide the workshop, according to the meeting’s agenda.
The meeting is open to the public and begins at 9 a.m. Saturday at 7060 Camp Bowie Blvd. It will also be streamed on YouTube.
More than 3,000 people submitted a survey response with at least one answer the district could analyze. Managers also held 43 listening sessions from June through September; 41 had transcripts or notes that were included. Together, the survey and sessions produced 20,744 entries.
Supporting and retaining educators topped both sets of feedback about the values that should guide FWISD. It was an issue raised by 20.9% of survey respondents and one that made up 22.8% of the listening-session comments tied to that question.
Honest, transparent and evidence-based leadership ranked second in both. Residents also emphasized consulting the community, considering students beyond test scores and making sure campuses have basic resources.
Asked what needs to stop, survey respondents most often pointed to scripted lessons and uniform campus mandates. About 1 in 5 raised the issue.
Teacher micromanagement was close behind. It was raised by 15.2% of survey respondents, the same share that mentioned cuts to lunch, recess, arts and enrichment or rigid schedules.
The listening sessions produced a somewhat different order. Decisions made without community or parent input ranked first. Scripted instruction remained second.
Those findings mirror what managers heard over the summer.
More than 100 people gathered inside Paschal High School’s cafeteria in June when parent Dionna Deardorff urged them to think about teacher autonomy in terms of what managers could actually control.
“If you have issues with teacher autonomy, valuing teachers, we need to frame those in terms of goals and guardrails,” Deardorff said.
By September, manager Tennessee Walker said similar concerns were showing up across the district.
“Every listening session I’ve been in, every teacher I’ve talked to, it’s prevalent districtwide,” Walker said during a session with Communities In Schools of Greater Tarrant County. “The fear is palpable.”
Participants were aligned on what students should learn.
Reading, grade-level academics, critical thinking, communication and social-emotional skills were the five leading answers from both the survey and listening sessions when people were asked what students should know and be able to do.
College, career and military readiness ranked first when participants described a successful graduate.
The data comes with limitations.
The survey was open to anyone, so the results are not a scientific sample and have no margin of error. The makeup of respondents also differed from FWISD’s student population. Among those reporting race and ethnicity, 49.5% were white and 36.9% Hispanic. FWISD enrollment is 12.6% white and 65% Hispanic.
The responses were uneven across the district, too. Nearly one-third of respondents who identified one of 13 feeder patterns selected Paschal. The Paschal feeder pattern accounts for 13.2% of enrollment across those same areas.
The district used Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence model to analyze responses and draft the report. The AI model marked 15.6% of survey entries as low-confidence. It also translated 830 Spanish-language survey entries, which were not reviewed by a human translator.
Matthew Sgroi is an education reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at matthew.sgroi@fortworthreport.org or @matthewsgroi1.
Disclosure: FWISD manager Pete Geren leads the Sid W. Richardson Foundation, a financial supporter of the Fort Worth Report. FWISD manager Laurie George is a member of the Report’s reader advisory council. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
