ASU+GSV 2026 Summit | Monday, April 13, 2026, 9:00 am-9:40 am | Sponsored Partner Programming
Speakers
- F. Mike Miles, Houston ISD
- Jeff Edmonson, Ballmer Group
- Todd Williams, Commit Partnership
- Anne Wicks, Bush Institute
Key Takeaways
- This panel showcased Texas as a national model for place-based education partnerships, featuring F.
- Mike Miles (Houston ISD superintendent), Todd Williams (Commit Partnership), Jeff Edmonson (Ballmer Group), and Anne Wicks (Bush Institute) as moderator.
- Miles described Houston ISD's dramatic turnaround: from 56 failing campuses serving 35,000 students to zero failing campuses in two years, driven by instructional quality redesign and an "Art of Thinking" course (information literacy, problem-solving, critical thinking) required for grades 3-10.
- The Commit Partnership, described as "a consultant that never leaves," has helped move Dallas County's living-wage attainment rate from 22% to 33% through data-driven policy advocacy including the Teacher Incentive Allotment, which now covers 80% of Texas school districts and enables top teachers to earn over $100,000.
- Edmonson from the Ballmer Group (which has committed over $1 billion to place-based partnerships) highlighted Texas's $11 billion in incentive funding that pays districts for outcomes rather than inputs, calling the state policy environment unmatched nationally.
- The panel emphasized that transformation requires an ecosystem approach -- backbone organizations, state accountability, outcome-based funding, and talent -- not just individual district heroics.
Notable Quotes
"Don't think about AI as an add-on. Think about redesign."
— F. Mike Miles
"If you are gonna do anything with your time when it comes to benchmarking, you should just definitely be looking at Texas."
— Jeff Edmonson
"Think about Commit as a consultant that never leaves."
— Todd Williams
"He's investing $25 million in the backbone that's operating in Dallas to leverage over $500 million. We talk about leverage in philanthropy all the time. This is leverage."
— Jeff Edmonson
"State, you spend $100 billion a year for education in K-12 and higher ed, and historically, our outcomes were that basically one in four kids by the age of 24 was getting a two-year degree, a four-year degree, or an industry certificate. That is not a great ROI."
— Todd Williams
Full Transcript
Thank you for being here. I hope the box lunches are tasty. They sound good. We're going to dive right in.
I just want to make sure you all got a little bit about what Fran outlined about Texas. If you missed it, if you were coming in, that Texas educates 10 percent of the young kids in this country, 60 percent who are economically disadvantaged. Of course, as you've been sitting here in this conference and conversations elsewhere, we know the world is transforming for our economy or for our workforce, for education. As adults make decisions how to use AI or not, as geopolitical churn impacts our economy, our workforce, lots of big questions about what to do.
This group is here to talk about how place-based partnerships can really help ensure that more young people are prepared for these choices that are in front of us. It's hard for us to even know some of the choices and opportunities that we're preparing kids for. What is our responsibility as the adults in the system to ensure that more kids are ready for what's ahead and what will that look like? Before we dive in, I want to outline something.
If you're not familiar with what's happening in Houston, there was a governance change that allowed for a real different way of doing business in Houston led by Mike Miles. Two years ago, there were 56 failing campuses in Houston ISD. That meant that 35,000 kids walked onto a failing campus the first day of school. This year, no kids walked onto a failing campus.
That's a big deal. Mike's going to talk a little bit about that. In Dallas County, the Commit Partnership founded and led by Todd has a big goal of ensuring that at least half of the young adults in the county are earning a living wage or more. Since 2012, that rate has gone up by nine points.
There's something happening in Dallas that'll be really important for us to understand what's going on. Then the Balmer Group is investing heavily in this nationally, why they think place-based partnerships are so important. A really important lever for us is we're trying to ensure that more kids are ready for what's ahead. Jeff leads that work and we'll talk about why they are betting big on Texas.
We're big Friday Night Light fans around here, so why they're betting big on Texas and what we can learn from that. Let's start, Mike, with you. As you are leading this massive transformation in Houston, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you're prioritizing and why? Yes.
We can talk about all the initiatives that we put in place, but the key thing is to redesign the system. By that, I mean we had to change a lot of the approaches to the work, and especially around the quality of instruction. Quality of instruction is key to us, and that's one of the reasons why we've been able to move quickly and transform. We're also continuing to redesign now because of AI, and what that means for schools and school systems.
Fundamentally, though, in the end of the day, that transformation that we did sits in a larger ecosystem, and that's what we need to talk about today. I wonder if you could say something about my favorite class that you and I have talked about before, the art of thinking, and why that doesn't sound very much like AI, but I think it's really critical when you talk about the art of thinking. I also wanted you to mention a little bit about the travel requirement that you have for kids. What are you thinking about the skills and knowledge that they need and why you've prioritized something like that?
Yes. I don't have a lot of stress. My wife says I push my stress off to everybody else, but I do have some stress and urgency around AI in the future, and I have had for quite some time. In my last network, the network that I founded, Third Future Schools, before I came to Houston, we started the art of thinking course.
It's information literacy, problem-solving, decision-making, critical thinking. It's those skills that we thought would be, and as it turned out is, what employers want for our graduates. So coming to Houston, we started the art of thinking class in 130 schools. It's a block course, so three times a week, 90 minutes each time.
It's required, and it's third grade through 10th grade. And the next iteration of that is what we call Future 2, where we're going to add experiences and activities related to year 2030 competencies, like judgment, decision-making, leadership, learning how to learn, working in teams, art of thinking, those soft and durable skills that kids need. And part of those activities include travel, which we do now for 130 schools, but it's voluntary. Eighth graders, if an eighth grader is eligible, meaning they have 92% attendance, they will travel out of country.
So we've gone to Japan, Costa Rica, and one other country in the last three years. Seventh graders travel out of state. And for our kids, very high poverty, underserved populations, travel is a great experience and it's part of the future learning. Before we switch over to Dallas, I actually want you to talk a little bit about the partners that you're working with.
This is about place-based partnerships. You, transformation like you're describing is not just you sitting in an office dreaming stuff up. There's lots of people that you're working with, folks like Good Reason Houston, which is an intermediary in Houston. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the partners you work with, what you've learned from doing a similar process in Dallas over a decade ago, how you think about that?
Yes, so again, we sit in a larger ecosystem, so we can change our design, we can change our system in Dallas or in Houston, but in the end of the day, we need other groups, other partners in order for this to take hold in a community and to be enabled to go far and fast in a community. So in Dallas, we were fortunate enough to have Commit Partnership and Todd Williams will talk about it, but basically they helped us with data, policy, research, and then just key ideas around how to move forward in a larger ecosystem. So in Houston, we still rely on Commit, but we also have another group called Good Reason Houston that does very similar things to Commit. They're not as experienced as Commit.
Commit's now 10 years, 11 years, 14 years old, and Good Reason Houston's, I think, like six years old, something like that, but those external partners are incredibly helpful and necessary for large-scale transformation, and I can give a couple examples later about what we do with those partners. And it sounds like maybe a different panel to learn how you push off your stress to other people. Yeah, that's for next year's panel. We'll bring your wife.
Mike, a good trivia about Mike is he is a West Point grad, has had a very interesting storied career, which I think leads you to be the superintendent in Houston, so you'll have to find him afterwards to ask about that. Todd, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about Commit. So your mission is to give every Texas student today every opportunity to earn a living wage in the future. So how did you focus on that or how did you come up with that and what are you focusing on that to make that real in Dallas County and then working across the state?
Sure. So thanks for having me here. So think about Commit as a consultant that never leaves. We have about 75 people who are philanthropically funded whose sole job is to basically support 14 school districts, 10 to 12 different higher ed institutions, align our foundation activity, align our business community when it comes to things like tax ratification elections, passage of school bonds, and convening employers to make sure that we're preparing our kids for the jobs of the future, et cetera.
We have really focused on trying to identify the underlying root causes that cause us to have the outcomes that we do and then design policy or change practices, et cetera, that can address that. So, for example, the data was very clear that in high-poverty campuses, they were typically staffed by primarily beginning teachers, young teachers, inexperienced teachers, often led by an inexperienced principal because there was no financial incentive under a tenure-based compensation system to actually go to schools where you were needed the most. And so we, in partnership with Mike Morath, who's a Texas Education Commissioner and a lot of other advocates in the state, basically passed what's called the Teacher Incentive Allotment, which says that if you're a district and you want to evaluate and pay your best performers, and we used data from Dallas ISD that Mike Miles had led in his effort there, you can basically pull down money from the state to pay your best educators significantly more, particularly if they will work in your most challenged schools. And that has been continued on by superintendents that followed Mike, including Dr.
Elizalde.
who is the current superintendent of Dallas ISD. But now across Texas, almost 80% of all school districts in the entire state are now evaluating and paying their best teachers more and sooner. And so that our best educators, for example, in Dallas can make north of $100,000 a year actually leading classrooms where they're needed the most. So that was one underlying root cause.
We also implemented outcomes funding in K-12, outcomes funding in the community college space, high quality instructional materials to make that available and free to our school districts who want to basically have a standardized high quality curriculum. And a whole host requiring school boards to pass, every five years they have to pass a goal around third grade reading and math and around college completion. So whatever the underlying root causes were that were causing us poor incentives, lack of funding, et cetera, how could we with others advocate in Austin at our state capital to try and drive funding toward evidence-based practices, removing barriers, changing incentives, et cetera. So again, toward our goal of 50% living wage attainment, we've gone from 22 to 33, still have a ways to go.
We've got 16 years left in our plan. Our plan is called Opportunity 2040, trying to get 150,000 kids on a path to economic mobility, more kids passing third grade, more kids graduating high school, more kids completing a post-secondary credential. But it's a very data-driven approach where we work collaboratively with all our partners together to basically come to the table, bring data, figure out what's working, learn from innovative practices that are occurring in one district, spreading it to another district, and just trying to make the system produce better outcomes, all funded by great philanthropists like the Balmer Group and others. I wanna note Dr.
Elizalde is with us today and if you wanna see her afterwards. Todd, you did not grow up in education, meaning in the business. You were doing some big things at Goldman Sachs for a long time. What made you make this pivot and what did you bring from what you'd been doing in the business world into this?
Or what surprised you that didn't exist that you thought I better build something to fill this gap? Well, this is personal for me. I grew up in Dallas ISD in a 900 square foot rental house where common conversation was, my parents, they thought they're away from our ears. Do we pay the light bill or do we pay the gas bill?
Because we can't pay both this month. And so to be able to go to Goldman Sachs and be a partner and is really great public education, great mentors, great financial aid, luck, lots of reasons. And so I got to the point in my life at Goldman where I felt like I was enjoying my nonprofit boardship and funding and stuff. And I just felt like, why don't we do?
And so this guy, Jeff Edmondson, we did a national best practice tour around the country of emerging practices after I left Goldman. And I came upon this concept of collective impact and Cincinnati led by Jeff Edmondson. And so I brought Jeff down to Dallas and said, tell your story. And then we went to all the funders and said, we wanna have a data driven support mechanism to support all our districts.
Will you agree to multi-year funding so we can get the districts to believe that we have legs, we can hire talent and talent is a huge issue. We probably have 25 to 30 Teach for America alumni on our staff, high quality talent pipelines, et cetera. But what drove me was a personal passion. And what's kept me at the table was the fact that it's been mission driven.
And I love the people that I work with inside commit, but also the partners that I get to work with outside commit. And it just brings some purpose to your work. Jeff, why don't we switch to you? Because obviously Balmer's making a big bet on these kind of place-based partnerships.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about what a good one looks like and what's behind the strategy you all have at Balmer? Sounds great. It's such an honor to be here. I appreciate that you referenced that I showed up.
That was 14 years ago now at a meeting where Mike was there. If Mike had not jumped on the train with you as you were trying to help this thing take off, it wouldn't have happened. So thank you, superintendent. And I just wanna say that I led a partnership in Cincinnati that was sort of the feature of this collective impact article.
And it was amazing to go around the country for a while and talk to folks. I could have never imagined what commit has developed. I just wanna say that. It literally blows my mind on a daily basis.
So I just wanna say thank you to you as well, Todd. The time, energy, commitment that you have put into this is next level. The other thing I can say is that I then had the privilege now to be at Balmer Group. It's the philanthropic arm for Steve and Connie Balmer.
We have now committed over a billion with a B to this kind of work that commit is doing. And so not only did I get to travel around the country after that collective impact article was written, I now get to actually work with leaders like Todd all over the country. And we are learning incredible things about what it takes to make this kind of work happen. And I just wanna say that for everybody in this room, Texas is truly unique right now, right?
I have looked all over the country. The good news is Texas is informing other states. Tennessee is learning a ton. Ohio is learning a ton.
South Carolina, Utah, Minnesota. There are states that are actively taking what Mike laid the groundwork for and what Todd has helped to implement. And they are trying to grow that. But if you are gonna do anything with your time when it comes to benchmarking, you should just definitely be looking at Texas.
And I wanna give you three reasons, all right? Number one is the state policy context. And I've actually got to pull out notes. I take great, great pride in never having to pull out notes during a session.
It's just something that I've always loved to do. But the numbers here are so big. Like they're Texas sized, right? We love Texas.
That's what they are. All right, so number one is the state policies. In Texas, there is $11 billion, billion with a B, of incentive funding. How many of you in this room are funders?
Anybody? How many in this room know a funder? That's better. Okay, go talk to your friend funders and say, we gotta go look at these policies in Texas.
And these policies fall into two categories. One is they fund outcomes. So of that 11 billion, you can get about 1.6 billion, just districts can, like Dallas ISD, can get about 1.6 billion just for getting kids into college, career, or the military, right? So districts can actually get repaid once they prove that kids have achieved those milestones.
Dallas College, the community college there can now get about $2 billion for proving that they're able to get kids certifications and completing, graduating, and going into careers. 2 billion. 200 million. 200 million. 200 million. 2 billion statewide, 2 billion. All right, okay, sorry. 2 billion statewide. So much for your notes. God.
I'm just kidding. It really didn't work. If I hadn't had the notes, I'd have memorized it. All right, 2 billion statewide. 200 million at Dallas College.
The second bucket of policies are evidence-based practice. So for those of you that care about summer learning, there's $3 billion available in Texas, where if you implement summer learning, up to 25 days, they now know, increases literacy rates by 9%, increases math proficiency by 6%. If you implement that, the state will pay for it. That's bonkers.
So like Wallace Foundation loves summer learning. They're investing in Texas to try to get more summer learning because the state will actually pay for it. The other thing is the teacher incentive allotment. All right, so number one, you should be looking at Texas because HB3, which is the K-12 policy, HB8, the community college policy, the teacher incentive allotment is HB2.
You should look at the policies. The second thing you should look at is that they don't just implement the policies, then they help implement them. So Todd has created something called the Texas Impact Network. Take a look at it.
Go to their website. Blows your mind because what they have done is try to help districts like Houston, also in Dallas, to implement these policies. Let me give you an example. See if I get this one right.
It's gonna be interesting. Here it comes. I can't wait. In 2022, districts were pulling down 43 million of the teacher incentive allotment.
That's it, okay? There was up to how much? Two billion available. About a billion four.
About a billion four. Dang, I thought I was gonna do better than this. All right, billion four, they were only pulling down 43 million. Now in 2026, they're pulling down 481 million because of the TA that is being provided by the Texas Impact Network.
So not only do they have the policies passed, they have the state infrastructure to work with the districts to make sure that the benefits of these policies are actually realized. And then the third reason is that they have these place-based partnerships. We've said this multiple times. You can actually go to a beta website.
Maybe it's an alpha website. It's called placebasedpartnerships.org right now. And you can look at what the heck is a place-based partnership. There's five elements of it.
It's what we look for to fund at Ballmer Group. If you have one of these things, we get very excited. There's national networks like Strive Together, the one I founded. Purpose-built communities, which works at the neighborhood level.
My Brother's Keeper Alliance, which now is promoting this for boys and men of color. And you got groups like the William Julius Wilson Institute at Harlem Children's Zone. And you've got the Partners for Rural Impact that are working rural communities. You can go to this website and you can find all the great entities that can help you create one of these partnerships like Todd has done.
There's 13 of them across Texas. So if you want to invest in Texas, Commit is definitely setting the bar. But there's other ones as well. So what I got to say to you is there is a state that is making this possible.
There's three things you can invest in. You should invest in the backbones. If you are a funder or if you know a funder, get them to invest in these backbones. He's investing $25 million in the backbone that's operating in Dallas to leverage over $500 million.
So we talk about leverage in philanthropy all the time. This is leverage. That's what this is. The second thing you can fund is program scale.
They've funded a group called Education is Freedom to provide college access advising to students so that they can get to the college career of the military. They're getting a return now, and that money is just going to recycle back through the system. Then the last thing you can fund is these national networks to try to do more of this, and make sure what is being learned in Texas can actually be taken elsewhere. But I just got to say to you all, spend some time learning about this work.
Check out Commit's website, check out the Texas Impact Network, and then seriously consider trying to do something similar in your home state. Okay. That gave you a great charge and things to think about. I'm hoping that Todd and Mike, you can talk a little bit about the policy and politics in Texas.
So I think for people who sit outside, they may have assumptions about how things work or don't in Texas and what's talked about. When it comes to kids, there's actually some incredibly rich, robust, thoughtful policy. Jeff was just giving us an overview on that. Todd, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the commission behind HB8 and the stakeholders were part of that.
Then Mike, maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the changes that allowed the governance that we have in Houston right now and what's in front of you, and how that process is supposed to work because it's very distinctive and very focused on outcomes for kids. Sure. So Texas is a state where the legislature only meets four months out of every 24. So there's a lot of time in between.
These are all part-time legislators that make $7,000 a year. So effectively, what we and others have been doing in Texas is creating commissions to study a problem, organizing testimony, looking at data, trying to figure out what are the underlying root causes of why we get the outcomes we get from people in the field and then designing policies which we hopefully then subsequently implement to effectively address those root causes. But the goal is to try and convert the legislature and this, particularly the education committees in the House and the Senate, to think of themselves as continuous improvement vehicles and not as vehicles that every two years have to basically take the budget and figure out how much more money to give K-12, how much more money to give higher ed and hope that it works. So really trying to drive funding toward evidence-based practices that will effectively get better outcomes.
We are a fiscally red state, and the way that we have positioned it in the legislature is state, you spend $100 billion a year for education in K-12 and higher ed, and historically, our outcomes were that basically one in four kids by the age of 24 was getting a two-year degree, a four-year degree, or an industry certificate. That is not a great ROI on $100 billion, which represents almost half your state budget. So how might we design policies and practices and incentives, etc, to try and get a better ROI on the amount of money that you're spending? That resonates in a fiscally conservative red state, albeit also recognizing without collective bargaining.
So I think that's important. So that's the mindset, how you operate within a state that thinks about how to get a better ROI. Mike, you want to talk a little bit about what got you set up in Houston, what drew you to it given the policy environment, and how you leverage state policy to achieve results for kids? Yes.
So the context is the urgency. If you can't read at grade level or do math at grade level when you graduate, the odds of you getting a livable wage are a lot lower. Yet, there are always exceptions. There's always a school here, a classroom here, or these kids here.
But on average, that's the way it's going to be. Now, it's even harder. We have two gaps growing, which is a traditional achievement gap that has failed to close or narrow significantly over two decades. Now, we have the year 2030, year 2035 competencies gap, partly driven by AI, but just the way technology is moving generally.
So learning how to learn critical thinking, information literacy, working in teams, all the things we talked about earlier. So in order for districts to move forward, a state has to be serious about accountability and outcomes. There are some states, but Texas, I think, is leading that battle to say, our kids need reading, writing, math, and science at a proficient level. That's serious business in districts.
You're going to be given most of the autonomy to do that, but you have to produce outcomes and there's serious accountability. So when Houston got 121 D and F campuses, 121 in 2023 out of the 274 schools that they had, which was 44 percent, that's not good for kids and that was part of the accountability framework, and the state said, we're going to take it over. They've done that with, I think, seven other districts in the past, and they're going to continue to do that. So people are serious about outcomes for kids.
You can't just keep doing things, doing the do, and then not getting outcomes for kids. You can't just get growth, you have to actually move the proficiency needle. So I came in as an intervention superintendent with a board of managers, not an elected board, in June 2023. As a result of that, we've been able to move very fast.
We reduced the Fs, of course, to zero from 56, but we had 121 D and F campuses. Now, there's only 16 D campuses in just two years, and we're in the testing season right now, and we're going to lower that D, maybe to zero this year. So that's the environment that we have, the accountability environment that really supports the work. I'm wondering if you all, we were talking a lot about success, but obviously, we know how complicated this work is, and maybe you all could reflect a little bit on what gets in the way sometimes with these place-based partnerships and how you all have solved for that.
Jeff, I don't know if you want to comment first, and then Todd and Mike, you can jump in after that. Yeah, I would just say that I want to make sure that for those of you who may not live in a red state that has the advantages of being able to create such an accountability environment in some ways, maybe you're in a blue state, there's a lot to be said about these policies for creating opportunity. I think it's both about accountability- And equity. And opportunity, and equity.
Just take HP3, for example. If you look up HP3, a district can get back $3,000-$9,000 per kid based on the child's level of economic disadvantage. That's an opportunity bill right there, right? That is an opportunity that any state could get behind, including a union, I would imagine.
So it'd be worthwhile thinking about it. If you are in a blue state, I know we're talking with some states that are like, maybe we need to dip our toe in the water. I think it's worth taking that on. I would say that to answer your question, there's a few big things that we know for sure.
One is talent. This work, I think you talk about this better than anybody. The work that Todd's leading in the backbone, you gotta have the best talent in the world to do this. I have two sets of twins, folks.
I have two sets of twins. They're all in college right now. Yeah. Most people think, most people think that my gray hair comes from that.
It does not. It comes- I don't want to be your checkbook. Yeah, the checkbook is terrible. But the reason I have gray hair is because I did the work that he did in Cincinnati trying to lead one of these partnerships.
You need the best talent in the world to lead these partnerships. Number two is the data technology infrastructure. That's why it's so cool to be here. All the great work that I'm hearing about on data and tech.
And then the third thing is actual advocacy around getting the dollars to flow what works. And that's what makes Texas so unique. Mike or Todd, anything you'd add to that? I would just echo the talent issue.
I was blessed to work for 20 years at Goldman Sachs where you might have 100,000 resumes submitted for 500 jobs. And so you get used to having that level of talent around you left and right. And so I think we need to do everything we can to be at the nation's best and brightest into this field. In Singapore, teachers are called nation builders.
They recruit from the top 10% of the country because they don't have any natural resources in Singapore. They even import their water. And they're natural resources between the years. And so they invest deeply and heavily and systemically in education.
And we were commenting about if we spend as much time on making college football as effective as we do and spend it on education, we could make some great progress. Just two quick things to be solution-oriented. There's something that Strive Together built called the Strive Together Training Hub where you can go and get basic training on what the heck this is. So I would encourage people to look that up.
There's also these fellowships that exist out there like Ed Pioneers, whoop, there we go. Right now, here we go. Ed Pioneers is amazing. And they can place data tech talent and other kinds of talent in these backbones.
So if you're interested in that, my colleague, Ashana Smith, has just done an amazing job building out a strategy for how to get more people into these backbones. And I'm happy to talk to you about it. A lot of the things that are being recommended by both superintendents and these community partners are bold changes. And the policy environment can be bold and scary for communities.
Just the teacher incentive allotment, paying teacher for their effectiveness, that's controversial. And so one of the things that's very helpful with the commit or a good reason Houston is the communications and the and the the data and the information that they push out to the to the public. We have a public that's kind of data adverse sometimes and so even with the data from commit or from from the district sometimes people just just poo-poo it or don't believe it and so you have to over communicate with the data. And as a district superintendent one of the things we did was we we started live streaming our own information.
So we have our own news organization. It doesn't run 24-7 but twice a day live and then often repeated. We give out information about the district, information about what we're doing, data, and that has helped as well. And I know commit spends a lot of money on on broad broadly communicating data and information to various communities and so there's good reason Houston down in that in the Houston area.
Todd. I would just say two other challenges obviously are governance and one of the things that we've done in Dallas is something called commit to leaders where we recruit, train, and through a C4 actually help elect great board members because as Mike has known having an appointed board in that region has really helped. We don't have to have an appointed board. We can have an elected board but it takes a conscious effort to deal with that.
And secondly is resourcing. Dr. Elizalde is leading the charge to pass the second largest bond in US history. Six and a quarter billion dollars.
We'll know in two weeks whether or not that passes but if it passes we will effectively eliminate all deferred maintenance in one of the largest urban districts in the country. And it's taken three different bond elections over a decade to do that but that's what our kids deserves and I'm just so proud of that district and the leadership that has really led that charge. There's a your homework for this. There's some resources.
Go read commit. Go to the place place partnerships. Check out the state-run media here at Houston ISD. It's called HISD now.
Just go to YouTube HISD now. Yep and there is an incredible op-ed in the Dallas Morning News about that bond election endorsing it and giving a really clear explanation of why that matters. These are all great resources for you. I have one commit annual report if anybody wants the lucky winner can come find me afterwards to get that.
I'll give you all the last word is this we walk around sometimes in a place like this there's lots of blingy tech and cool stuff and shiny objects. What would you like people to be thinking about as they walk around a place like this thinking about the kids you all work with every day? Todd I'll start with you and we'll come down and give Mike the last word on that. I would just say that there's a lot that's possible if you just have an aligned system to make it happen.
Yeah and I would say that the that all the technology and data you know integration in the world is great. You do need these entities these backbones that also cut across silos education, housing, health care, wellness. You need these backbones in order to make that data actionable for people. So don't forget about the people you need to operationalize all these amazing tools we're seeing out here.
Mike? Yeah as you walk around and these various sessions don't think about AI as an add-on. Think about redesign. There you go.
Well please join me in thanking these gentlemen for sharing with us about Texas. Thanks everyone.
This transcript was put together by our friend Philippos Savvides from Arizona State University. The original transcript and additional summit resources are available on GitHub. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.