A lot of people didn’t think Houston ISD could see marked improvement to its school ratings in just two years, Superintendent Mike Miles told a room full of onlookers at this month’s board meeting Thursday night.
But according the HISD-computed scores, the district did it. No F rated schools and only 18 D rated schools out of 273 total for the 2024-25 school year. (The Texas Education Agency has released the official numbers today). As Board President Ric Campo pointed out, this means 70,000 more HISD students are attending A and B schools than they did before.
“What this really means is that more kids are reading at grade level, doing math at grade level. More kids are attending A and B campuses,” Miles said to cheers from members of his administration in attendance and applause from the state-appointed Board of Managers.
In addition, the achievement gap among different groups taking standardized tests is narrowing, he said. “The promise of America has been broken by most other districts. Not here.”
His vision for the next two years? “I think it’s possible to have only A and B rated campuses three years from now.”
As usual, other than with his administrators and board, Miles faced a tough audience. Most public speakers had something negative to say about his New Education System teaching strategies with daily timed tests, the lack of librarians, the focus on prep for the state’s STAAR test and what several said are intrusive spot checks of teachers during the day and conflicting instructions on what they should be doing.
“High performing teacher attrition should be a red flag,” said Cathryn Estes, who read a letter from a former HISD teacher who left the district after last year after teaching for 16 years. “The feedback I received was inconsistent.
“When leadership is driven by metrics, then teachers and students become nothing more than numbers.”
Critics at Thursday night’s meeting also continue to allege that HISD is gaming the system by encouraging low-performing students to leave the district or take lower level science classes so when they are tested in biology, they do better on the state tests. Miles has previously said that by giving struggling students an extra year of science it helps them to be better able to understand the biology course when they take it in 10th rather than 9th grade.
A sizable contingent of parents of students at Durham Elementary came to protest the very last minute changes to the curriculum at that school. This was done just a few days before the first day of school because the dual language school dropped from a B to a C rating.
Every Durham parent who spoke echoed the mantra that they were not opposed to change but said it needed not to have been done in such an abrupt fashion and without added support from the district.
This is, they said, not only confusing to the students but confusing and disappointing to the teachers who prepared all summer for another system.
“These last minute adjustments do far more than shuffle names on a roster, With no time to adjust, put student academic outcomes at risk, undermine teacher morale and jeopardize the trust between HISD and the families it serves,” said parent Michelle Witkowski.
Chief Academic Officer Kristen Hole gave the quarterly report on whether the board and the district are meeting their goals which they met or exceeded for the most part but in some areas — Asian students, disabled students — did not. She said special attention to those groups is planned for the next year.
Although the district has made a commitment to pre-K, expanding the possible number of seats for this year by 800, Hole said it is “really hard to reach families about pre-K” especially in the western part of the school district. Some zones in HISD have every pre-K seat filled and a waiting list beyond that, in other areas the interest is lower.
