Give the Gift of Education This Season
As an organization that leads a citywide strategy for education improvement, Good Reason Houston plays a crucial role in the overall performance of our schools districts. Carrying the ambitious vision that one day every child in every neighborhood will be able to attend a great public school, this nonprofit aims to set up young people to thrive in the Houston of tomorrow.
CEO Alex Elizondo was available to share their story, along with why it’s imperative Houstonians band together to give the gift of education this holiday season.
Going Strong for Over Half a Decade
In her previous role as an Executive Director at Teach for America, Alex Elizondo helped launch the Dallas-Fort Worth region, where they experienced enormous growth under her leadership.
“From that experience, I learned that nonprofits could be accelerators for education progress and that having positive forces outside of the traditional education system helped make our education system better,” Elizondo says.
After completing the Graduate School of Business program at Stanford, Elizondo relocated to Houston with her husband. Upon arrival, she soon discovered the Houston Endowment, Kinder Foundation, and the Greater Houston Partnership were actively searching for someone to step up and become the founding leader of Good Reason Houston and build supportive relationships with school districts.
This was five years ago, and Elizondo hasn’t looked back since, now working with nine different ISDs, as well as making their services available to all public charter schools – within city limits – that primarily serve low-income students.
Doing Right by Their Namesake
There are numerous “good reasons” to improve our public schools, hence the nonprofit’s name is getting at the heart of why Houston needs an organization like this. “Every child in our city is a good reason to get education right,” Elizondo states.
Building what Elizondo refers to as a “coalition of the willing,” if any Houston public school or charter has a need and Good Reason Houston has a service that matches that need, they’ll work to set up a meaningful partnership. Alongside school district senior teams, they help them build out their strategic plans, from conception to implementation, making 100% certain that every public dollar can go farther.
“We’re an organization that has a bird’s eye view of what is happening across our city,” Elizondo says. “We are constantly crunching data and looking at where areas of our city need more support. We also play a role as the technical assistance provider for school turnaround strategies like the Accelerated Campus Excellence (ACE) program, which is the most successful school turnaround strategy used in Texas right now.”
Helping Others Is How We Help Ourselves
Being a nonprofit that champions a vision for the type of education progress that’s possible is far from a simple undertaking. To help grow the demand and supply of great schools across Houston, an enormous amount of commitment, time and generosity have been contributed from some of the city’s most successful businessmen/women and philanthropists.
“If we care about Houston being a major international hub for trade, for business, for innovation, the education system in our city has to set us up for that long term,” Elizondo says. “We very much believe that Good Reason Houston is the best place for major corporations to contribute to so they can help all Houston schools improve.”
Key members include their Founding Board Chair, H-E-B President Scott McClelland – who every Texan can instantly recognize from their hilarious TV spots over the years – while Jim Postl, former President and CEO of Pennzoil Quaker State and Nabisco, is heavily involved on the Board of Directors as well. As prominent figures in business and charity alike, both of them remain fastidiously dedicated to the overall mission of Good Reason Houston.
“It seems like in Texas we have the ability to build jails, but we don’t want to invest more in education,”
Scott McClelland says. “If everybody just gave a little bit to help turn around public education, the benefits would extend far beyond your own household and ultimately improve our city in terms of the quality of jobs and quality of the economy.”
According to McClelland, Good Reason Houston operates similarly to moneyball but for schools rather than sports teams. “School districts have a lot of data, but data isn’t useful until it’s turned into information,” he says. “Oftentimes school districts just don’t have the resources to mine the data. You don’t have to look any farther than the Astros’ World Series Championship and what they’ve been able to do with their version of moneyball, taking data to use it to their own strategic advantage. We do the same thing – look at where there’s need and partner with local schools to become more efficient.”
Research shows that 40% of all third graders fail to read at their grade level, and only 1% of those third-grade kids struggling to read go on to find academic success and attend college. As someone who has devoted serious efforts to this issue longer before Good Reason Houston was even formed, Jim Postl will be the first person to tell you why it’s such a huge problem.
“We knew that if kids can’t read at or above grade level by the end of third grade, they’re four times more likely to drop out of high school, and that’s a pipeline to poverty and the criminal justice system,” Postl says. “As time went on, we came to the conclusion that you really couldn’t stop at third grade. We needed to focus on the entire continuum from early childhood through some form of post-secondary attainment.
And that ultimately led to the creation of Good Reason Houston.”
“It’s about starting early in pre-K and kindergarten and making sure kids get off to a good start,” McClelland agrees. “This is a long-haul game. You invest in kids when they’re young, make sure they can do math and read well in elementary school, and you build upon that. But if you wait too long, then the kids are too far gone and that’s why this is so important.”
So far, on the early childhood front, the efforts of Good Reason Houston have successfully driven up pre-K enrollment across the city, much of that by investing in awareness advertising for parents and providing district support to streamline enrollment processes.
“It’s one of the most important things that I do,” Postl says of this cause. “Education is the key to longterm prosperity for individuals and for our community.”
If you look at Good Reason Houston’s Board of Directors, they are all extremely passionate about getting to the place where all our kids and all our neighborhoods are able to get a first-class public school education, even going so far as to help fund the cause themselves.
“Coming out of the pandemic, students are farther behind than they’ve been in a generation in our country. If our kids do not succeed, Houston won’t succeed. Good Reason Houston is helping make sure our districts and our schools are delivering for kids through monitoring how schools are doing and providing extra support for schools to improve.”
– Alex Elizondo, Founding CEO of Good Reason Houston
Start Making a Difference
This holiday season is the perfect time to make dollars go farther. In fact, every dollar contributed to Good Reason Houston will be equally matched by the Kinder Foundation. To get involved, sign up for their newsletter to receive crucial updates related to education in Houston and ways you can financially support this cause.