Advancing Education Equity

• The is an excerpt of a presentation given to members of Corpus Christi Mayor’s Education/Workforce Committee in July.
• Like the state, Corpus Christi has fallen short of meeting the educational attainment target for achieving the 60x30 goal.
• The number of higher education completions has been rising among minority populations, but not enough to close existing gaps.
• Education equity sets the stage for health equity in addition to workforce development.

Spearheaded by E2E (Education to Employment Partners), the Mayor’s  Education/Workforce Committee  was formed in October 2015. Supported by Corpus Christi City mayors beginning with Joe Adame through currently Paulette Guajardo, the committee aims at increasing the region’s educational attainment as a way to build a skilled, quality workforce that drives sustained economic development.

Aligned with the state’s higher education  goal of 60x30 , this committee adopted a  strategic plan  in October 2017 to pursue an educational attainment goal of “sixty percent of the Corpus Christi population will have a postsecondary certificate or degree by 2030.”

Since the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board adopted its 60x30 goal, the percent of Texans age 25 to 34 with a postsecondary credential has indeed risen over time, reaching 43.6% in 2018. Though the pace of improvement has slowed down in each consecutive year: 1.3% in 2016, 1.2% in 2017, and 0.1% in 2018. To close the gap in higher education attainment, increasingly more Texans should have attended college instead. Given the current trend, it is unlikely that the state would have met the mid-point benchmark of 48% in 2020, as an intermediate target for the ultimate goal of 60% by 2030.

One key driver for meeting the educational attainment goal is the number of postsecondary degree or certificate completions. While Texas added an average of more than 8,700 completions, the gains tapered off from one year to the next. The state’s educational gap could not be closed when the gains in program completions fell short of population growth averaging at about one percent annually.

The educational gap is quite uneven across different demographic groups. Overall, the number of postsecondary completions statewide is currently about 63% of the 2030 goal. That relative rate falls to 53% for Blacks and even lower at 43% for Hispanics. Economically disadvantaged students, who are children of low-income families, also tend to fall behind other students in graduating from college.

Educational outcomes take years, if not decades, to take shape. College completions in this year are the outcomes of high school graduates who began attending college a few years back. The share of Texas public high school grads enrolling in Texas higher education has remained quite stable between 51% and 52% since 2015. Falling short of the 58% state target for this year, it becomes more challenging to achieve the long-term goal.

How have Corpus Christi and the Coastal Bend performed relative to the state? To address this question, we draw data for the state’s  Education Service Center Region 2,  which comprises 10 Coastal Bend counties surrounding Corpus Christi. Compared with the state-level data, the share of the regional population with a postsecondary credential has varied more widely from one year to the next.

Following a downward trend ending in 2017, the year of Hurricane Harvey’s strike, the share jumped to 37.4% in 2018, nearly 10 percentage points higher than that in 2015. Gains in residents with a certificate or associate degree contributed to much of the improvement in overall educational attainment.

The remarkable improvement of overall educational attainment in 2018 was attributable to rises in high education completions in earlier years. Together, the area’s community colleges, led by Del Mar College, added about 400 graduates from a certificate or associate degree program each year. But the declines in 2019 and 2020 will likely reverse the positive trend of educational attainment in the years to come.

As for the state, the educational attainment gap is much wider for Hispanics, Blacks and other underserved populations. As Hispanics make up more than two-thirds of Corpus Christi’s population, an increase of 440 postsecondary completions among them in 2017 helped raise the overall educational attainment in 2018. But then the drops of Hispanic college graduates beginning in 2019 will likely widen the gap again.

From a long-term perspective, the overall educational attainment in Corpus Christi has improved remarkably in the past decade. In 2020, 30% of the county population had earned a college degree, compared with 26% in 2010. Yet the state and the nation showed similar improvement, meaning the region remains relatively less competitive in workforce quality.

A breakdown of local college degree holders by demographics shows wide disparities in the improvement of educational attainment over the past decade. In 2010, the local share of college degree holders was the same between males and females, but since then the share for females has increased at twice the speed as that for males. Also, today more than 60% of Asians in the area are college graduates, so are 44% of the non-Hispanic whites. While Hispanics make up over two-thirds of the local population, only 22% of them have graduated from college. These comparative statistics support the state’s designation of Hispanics and males as the target populations for its 60x30 initiative.

We’ve long understood that students’ academic success is highly tied to their parents’  socioeconomic status . According to a  study  by researchers at Stanford, sixth graders in the richest U.S. school districts are four grade levels ahead of children in the poorest districts. The poorest districts also tend to have the highest concentrations of Hispanics and Blacks.

Standardized test scores on reading and math across the nation also confirm the extent that socioeconomic conditions matter in academic gaps. Even within a school district, the academic gaps between white children and their black and Hispanic classmates are larger in communities with larger economic disparities. Still academic gaps persist even in school districts where whites and their minority counterparts have similar socioeconomic backgrounds.

Locally, our  reports  on student performance over the past few years also align with these nationwide observations: The STAAR (State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness) scores tend to be higher among schools or school districts of wealthier communities. Overall, students in the Corpus Christi Independent School District (CCISD) are 0.6 grade below the national average.

The local  STAAR results  since 2015 also confirm that student performance gaps begin as early as the first grade. This highlights the importance of early childhood development as an  announced priority  of President Biden, who has called for universal pre-K programs.

While findings on the immediate benefits of early childhood education in terms of test scores remain mixed, its long-term effects on people’s development of  social and emotional skills  are clear.  Head-start programs  have also been found to improve disadvantaged children’s high school completion rate and health outcomes in adulthood.

Education and health outcomes are interrelated. It is now well known that the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted  Hispanic and black communities  across the nation. This simply reflects the vulnerability of minority populations to a disaster, regardless of its nature.

A recent first-of-its-kind  report  by the Texas Health Institute indicated that socially disadvantaged people in South Texas are not only more subjected to COVID-19 contraction, but they face poorer health outcomes than whites, including heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity.

That study aims at helping community stakeholders create long-term recommendations to achieve health equity. According to  County Judge Canales , who initiated this project, “We have to accept and recognize that we are who we are because of … a legacy of discriminatory practices … and we still have to fight every day in order to find ways to heal these previous injustices."

To put it bluntly, we cannot change our race/ethnicity, or skin color, but we can set the stage for a more socially equitable recovery from the pandemic.

The  report  concludes with seven recommendations for policy actions. One recommended action is to “address the root causes of health inequities.” This is a formidable task, given the complexity of the relationship between myriad socioeconomic factors and health outcomes.

Still the  data appendix  of that report points to the benefits of educational attainment as a key socioeconomic status measure: People who have not finished high school not only earn less income, but they are more likely to suffer chronic health diseases and die sooner. According to statistical analysis of data from the 24 zip-code areas, people without a high-school diploma are 27% more likely to have high blood pressure, 20% more likely to have diabetes, and at least 10% more likely to have heart disease and poor mental health. These estimates apply to people of any race/ethnicity.

Above all, the data is a reflection of the long-term benefits of academic success. Education improves the lives of citizens as well as social well-being.

Hopefully, emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, federal, state and local policymakers will focus more on the promotion of educational opportunities that will bear fruits for decades.

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