Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath shared strategies to improve reading skills at an April 14 gathering at the Embassy Suites, 16435 Katy Fwy.

While his Katy talk focused on building a foundation of reading, Morath spoke briefly, after the meeting, about his agency’s takeover of the Houston ISD. TEA officials gave an overview of their plans at an April 13 Houston ISD trustee meeting. Morath said he spends “a healthy amount” of time focusing on the agency’s takeover and is in Houston about a day a week.

As part of the takeover, the agency seeks to hire people to serve on a board of managers that will supervise the district’s affairs and, hopefully, bring improvements. Morath said there were what he called “a huge number of people” who want to serve in some capacity, including on this board, and Houston ISD.

“I think we have 375 applicants, thereabouts,” Morath said. “It’s great to see so many people with character and the willingness to step up.”

In his Katy talk, Morath described the agency’s four priorities. He said teachers were the first priority and districts should be relentless in recruiting, supporting and retaining both teachers and principals.

“The most important in school factor that is now having a teacher in the classroom,” Morath said.

The second key priority, he said, focuses on the early grades, making sure that schools were building a foundation of reading in math. In this way, he said, the youngest learners would match to the fundamentals and have no gaps as they continue through their educational career.

The third priority, he said, was making high school relevant to students, by which he said it must be rigorous. The senior year of high school, he said, should not be just about “prom and cruising for chicks.”

“It needs to be very, very rigorous because you’re fixing to be sent off into life and life is awfully darn complex,” Morath said. “So, what we are doing to make sure that the high school experience is designed to be the most rigorous and most relevant from a standpoint of what a child is going to do to take care of themselves and their family when they’re done. This is key.”

Improving local schools, Morath said, was the fourth priority.

“Public schools are this phenomenal institution where we secure the American dream,” Morath said. “This general diffusion of knowledge. But our vision sometimes does not match reality. When adult expectations for children have gotten too low, where the work is not meeting the needs of our children. What do we do to remedy that? To wrap her arms around that school or to move with speed and precision to change the trajectory of both the students and the adults on that campus.”

As for learning to read, Morath said decoding, which involves phonics and reading skills, multiplied with language comprehension, which involves knowledge and vocabulary, equals reading comprehension.

“Decoding times language comprehension equals reading,” Morath said. “You’ll notice that the times, and for the math majors in here, zero times anything equals zero. So, you’ve got to have both sides of this equation.”

Expanding on the two sides of the equation, Morath said phonics is a sort of decoding.

“You have to be able to decode the written word, and then language comprehension turns out to be quite a bit more complex but it’s every word that you know,” Morath said. “The fact that you can listen to what I’m saying and you can understand the syntax, the grammar, the vocabulary, the background knowledge to know what it means. That’s what it is. If we understand that this is what drives the train in reading, we can adjust our curricular approach. We can adjust our practices in schools and begin to give the gift of reading to all of our children.”

In discussing language comprehension, Morath asked the audience to think about the word “fine.” The word has many different meanings, he said.

“When I ask my kids when they come home from school, how was school today, they always tell me it was fine,” Morath said. “It is like pulling teeth to get a legit answer from my children. Anyway, this is fine. We’re all familiar with this answer.”

The very different meanings people associate with “fine” however, can be confusing if students don’t understand the context in which the word is being used.

“If our kids don’t understand what the words mean, they can sound it out all day long, but this is how their brain processes it from a meaning perspective,” Morath said. “We take the words away from it.”

Morath illustrated his point by putting “decoding” in a yellow box and “language comprehension” in a blue box.

“Our goal in public education is yellow and blue make green,” Morath said. “We want to make sure the kids have strong decoding skills and a strong amount of background knowledge. And what this requires, what we know from the cognitive science is our approach to curriculum design, our approach to what happens while they are in school has to be well designed around these key points.”

The Katy Area Chamber of Commerce sponsored the event.