Well, hello, everybody and welcome back to another episode of The Learning Curve podcast.

I'm one of your co-host, Albert Chang.

And with me is the other co-host, Alicia Thomas Searcy.

What's up, Alicia?

Hello, Dr. Chang.

How are you doing?

Doing well, doing well. Yeah, we got an exciting show, you know, looking forward to having

Trish Schreiber. I'm excited about that. Not about you.

I am. She's doing great work, so I'm excited about hearing more and talking to about all

that's going on education. Yeah, that's right. So just to riff off our opening song, we do have

something to talk about. In case you for the listeners, we're wondering what that was by Bonnie Rait.

But we got stuff to talk about, Alicia, right? Let's talk between us on some news. So what do you have?

I've got an interesting story from real clear education, and it's a piece by David Hoyt,

the reformer saving Houston schools from disaster. So if you followed anything in public education,

particularly urban education over the last few years, we all know the battle that Houston Independent School District has been through

where the then state school superintendent, Mike Morath, who I actually have a lot of respect for,

decided to take over the school district because of all of the challenges that it was having.

It went through a legal battle. It was a lot, right? All through the news, school board issues, all kinds of things.

And so then there was a new school superintendent appointed, and I think it was 2022. And he

implemented some pretty significant reforms. One in particular is called NES, the new education

system. And so what does that mean? There are a few things that are involved in this. So the primary

goal of the model is to raise achievement and close achievement gaps for the highest

...