Every two years, Texas lawmakers descend upon Austin for a pressure-packed 140 days to consider thousands of bills on hundreds of complex issues. In the noisy arena of public policy, the legislative halls are often dominated by powerful, well-funded special interests.
“The majority of people who come before legislators are vested interests,” notes Laura Arnold, co-founder of the multi-billion-dollar philanthropy Arnold Ventures. “They are there because they want something that relates to their own bottom line and their own pockets”.
For a state home to 31 million people and one of the largest economies in the world, letting the squeaky wheel dictate long-term planning is a dangerous strategy. In the latest episode of the Future of Texas podcast series, hosted by Brad Swail, Arnold and Texas 2036 President and CEO David Leebron outline a different path forward.
Their objective is a relentless “commitment and fealty to evidence as a guiding force for determining what to work on and what to advocate for”.
By acting as a trusted, objective voice, their organizations aim to shift the state’s focus away from what merely sounds good or gets funded, and toward what delivers real, enduring results at scale. According to Leebron, “You start with data and you have to find or obtain the data, and then you have to analyze the data, and then you have to apply the data. And then you have to use data techniques to judge the results”.
The necessity of an evidence-based framework is best illustrated by a glaring paradox in Texas’ educational pipelines, according to Leebron and Arnold. If you evaluate the state based on high school graduation numbers, Texas looks spectacular, boasting a 90% graduation rate. However, the disaggregated data reveals a harsher reality: only one in three Texas high school graduates goes on to earn any form of postsecondary credential within six years of graduation.
This achievement gap leaves the state vulnerable, says Leebron. More than 60% of modern jobs in Texas require a postsecondary credential, and individuals who hold one are over eight times more likely to secure a high-paying, family-sustaining career.
To bridge this gap, Texas 2036 and Arnold Ventures championed the passage of House Bill 8 during the 2023 legislative session, completely transforming how community colleges are financed. Rather than allocating public funds based on “sitting in a seat,” the new law ties state funding directly to measurable student outcomes and “credentials of value”—certificates or degrees that reliably translate into immediate workforce demand and higher income trajectories for students.
However, passing a law is only half the battle. Leebron warns that policy advocates can never declare victory simply because a bill is signed. “You’re not done when the legislature passes the policy,” Leebron explains. “You really have to say, how has it been implemented and what are the consequences? Because often what happens is not everybody likes that policy and they get another bite at the apple when it comes to implementation”.
During the 2025 legislative session, some special interests attempted to dilute the definition of a credential of value, says Arnold. Maintaining a tight grip on accountability is crucial, because as Arnold notes, “If a certain program is not yielding those results for students, what are we doing? Not only is it a waste of time for the student, it is a waste of resources for the taxpayer”.
A prime example of an evidence-backed intervention is Arnold Ventures’ recent $15.3 million partnership with San Jacinto College in Houston. The initiative introduces a highly structured student support model derived from the City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (CUNY ASAP).
The program tackles the state’s low community college completion rates by surrounding students with extensive resources, including targeted coaching, career guidance, and financial assistance to eliminate early barriers to graduation.
According to Arnold, when tested meticulously across different geographies and demographics over a decade, the model has repeatedly proven that it can scale and meaningfully double graduation rates. By embedding this verified framework in a major Texas institution, policymakers can ground their education-to-workforce strategies in rigorous, empirical proof rather than speculation.
As the ten-year countdown to the 2036 bicentennial ticks forward, data-driven planning by the groups is expanding to address other foundational pressures threatening the state’s prosperity. Leebron emphasizes that Texas must play an offense-oriented game rather than a defensive one. “The thing that’s really true is we have to anticipate the issues before they arrive,” he warns. “If we wait until there’s a problem, bigger problem, we’re not going to be able to solve that problem in the way we can solve it if we anticipate it”.
This proactive model is currently driving Texas 2036’s deep-dive research into early childhood systems and childcare availability, where clean data from state agencies is being aggregated to map workforce gaps before they trigger labor supply crises.
Similarly, Leebron says, the state must confront a severe academic foundations crisis: currently, less than half of all Texas third graders can perform math at grade level, a statistic with catastrophic implications for future economic competitiveness if left unaddressed.
The economic landscape is further challenged by a housing supply crunch, a massive $174 billion need for water infrastructure, and rising healthcare costs—which 85% of Texas business leaders flag as unsustainable. Confronting these market distortions requires the same rigorous baseline metrics used to reform higher education.
Ultimately, the data is not valuable because it satisfies policy nerds; it is valuable because it represents the single most effective tool to de-escalate partisan division and center government choices on human impact, argues Arnold. When presented with unassailable facts, even deeply divided political actors tend to arrive at identical conclusions.
“If everything is working as it should, we will have much fewer areas of controversy,” Arnold reflects, looking toward the landscape of 2036. “We will have gravitated toward an environment of civil discourse relating to evidence. And we’ll have a commitment to doing the things that the evidence tells us we should do, and not doing the things that evidence tells us we shouldn’t do”.
By serving as objective evaluators of what works and what doesn’t, nonpartisan policy organizations and strategic philanthropies offer Texas lawmakers a stable foundation to build a future where every child can access genuine opportunity, and where the state’s governance keeps pace with its staggering scale.