Director of Education and Workforce Policy
marylynn.pruneda@texas2036.org
Mary Lynn works as the Director of Education and Workforce Policy for Texas 2036. She is an expert in the most complex public education topics, including assessment, accountability and school finance.
When Texas 2036 asked voters last month which candidate positions would most move their vote, education issues rose to the top, but not in the way most would expect. Out of 13 positions tested, spanning everything from data center growth to school funding, two education items came out on top by a wide margin: This…
This special session, lawmakers have a chance to do what they nearly accomplished just weeks ago: eliminate the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, better known as the STAAR test, and replace it with something better, shorter and more frequent to allow more opportunity for instruction and make it more useful for students, parents…
It’s open season on the STAAR test and understandably so. Texans are right to expect better assessments that support students, inform instruction and don’t cause undue stress. But let’s be very clear: the solution isn’t to replace STAAR with a test that tells us less about what our kids are actually learning. Unfortunately, that’s exactly…
While Texas is home to some of the largest cities in the country, it is also home to a large rural population. More Texans live in rural areas (over 4.7 million) than in rural areas of any other state. That includes an estimated 900,000 K-12 students — the most of any state in the nation….