Promising Approaches to Workforce Development in Texas

July 9, 2020

Erin Davis Valdez

Erin Davis Valdez is an education policy director at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. She has been passionate about the transformational power of education all her life, having been given the gift of being homeschooled. She taught for over a decade in Austin-area schools and served as an assistant principal at a charter school in Lewisville. These experiences have given her the opportunity to see first-hand how students can thrive when they have excellent options.

David Bass

In the midst of the COVID-19 recession, it is vitally important that public benefits to the unemployed be backed by evidence that they provide families a path to economic independence and not an obstacle to prosperity.

Key points:

LEO and TPPF are working together to build evidence on strategies to support low-income Texans with workforce engagement and self-sufficiency. With this partnership, we are starting with the end in mind—creating evidence to be used by policymakers to improve workforce and self-sufficiency outcomes for Texans.
It’s not enough to base public policy and social services around hunches or anecdotal success stories. Low-income Texas families deserve interventions that are backed by evidence that they work.
We believe that the social service community contains innovations that can show us how to help families escape poverty. We are partnering with five Texas organizations to study the impact of their interventions: Catholic Charities Dallas, Catholic Charities Galveston-Houston, Combined Arms, The Excel Center—Goodwill of Central Texas, Jewish Family Service—Houston.

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Erin Davis Valdez

David Bass

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