South Oak Cliff High School (SOC) in 2023/24 was first DISD high school to have all students in all grades write letters to themselves about their plans for their future. The 9 point SEI one year gain in 2024 for SOC was a record! Then in 2025 SOC had parents and relatives begin writing letters to about half their students about dreams for them, including a story from family history in the letter.  The goal was to continue to improve student motivation by bringing the family into the discussion of family roots and family goals for the students.  Those efforts succeeded wonderfully! SOC beat their 2024 SEI record 54.0 score by 9.8 points earning a 63.8 for the highest 2025 SEI score among all DISD seconday schools, including magnet and choice schools! Now such progress must become normal!  

In 2025 SOC set a new DISD record of a one year gain of 9.8 SEI points. This was even higher than their 2024 gain.  In only two school years SOC raised their SEI score a total of 19.3 SEI Points!  This is a phenomenal 2-year record unmatched by any DISD school over the past 30 years of SEI scores.

In 2005 academic progress was shown from the very start of this Project. Originally the Project started as a middle school Project and by 2019, just before Covid shut down the letter writing, there was a history of progress in 6 different middle schools. But this progress was only documented in the years when they had active letter writing that could be documented by letters still stored in most Time Capsule Vaults as of 2/3/26. The highlighted yellow cells in the chart below are years that schools were actively having letters written in the Project.

Whenever an active StudentMotivation.org school stops letter writing their SEI scores drop!

The red cells document dramatic SEI drops in the chart below. T.W. Browne dropped dramatically from their record high setting 61.7 SEI score in 2017. They stopped all letter writing and lost over 13 SEI points by 2019! Quintanilla also lost points from their Second Best in District SEI score average from 2015 to 2019 while they were actively writing letters, down to only having 2 of the thirty middles schools with lower SEI scores than Quintanilla’s by 2024. They were almost the worst! Does it surprise anyone that when students suddenly are not focusing on their own life goals, not reading the goals their family has for them, and not reading new family history stories, that suddently school achievement goes down?

How could a homework project be more valuable?

Project History in middle schools 2005 to 2023