An affable, casually dressed Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Morath came to Houston Tuesday, surveyed the goings on at three Houston ISD schools and pronounced himself pleased with how things are proceeding at the New Education System schools.
“I, of course, have visited Houston schools many times over the years and what you can see really is a night and day difference in terms of the degree to which students are engaged in rigorous academic discussions,” Morath told a group of reporters, photographers and videographers invited to see him in action at his last tour stop of the day at Kashmere High School.
He asterisked his exuberance with the caution that “This is mid-year first year of some of these changes. Education it’s a marathon. this is hard work. a lot of people working very, very hard in support of kids. It will take some time to see the fruits of all of that work in the achievements of our kids. “
This was the first time Morath had visited HISD since the state took over the district. During the transition and early days of the takeover, angry crowds at public HISD meetings often demanded to know why Morath had sent TEA deputies in his stead to explain what would happen next and answer questions. They wanted to hear the man himself explain why he thought the superintendent and board he appointed could run the district better than its previous elected officials. Some probably just wanted to yell at him.
There was no chance of any messy public displays Tuesday since for the most part, people didn’t know Morath would be here. Instead, the commissioner, accompanied by HISD Superintendent Mike Miles along with an entourage of staffers and officials of the Texas Education Agency and HISD made their way through two elementary schools before arriving at Kashmere.
The media was allowed to trail Morath as he entered classrooms, talked with individual students at their desks — providing substantial photo and video opportunities — before answering questions in a brief press conference.
What Morath said he saw Tuesday was a “holistic” approach to education with robust reading materials, math both conceptual and practical, an emphasis on science and the arts as well as art classes, piano lessons and yoga classes.
Asked why he timed his HISD visit to now, Morath said that by waiting till after the Christmas break, it gave the district time to settle in with rhythms and procedures. “Walking in on the first day of instruction back in August, it’s a little disruptive for me to visit at that point. I want to see when folks have had some time to get their feet underneath them.”
Asked what he’s want to see a year from now, Morath said he’d be looking for higher levels of achievement in reading and math as well as ” competitive achievements at UIIL events and extracurriculars.”
“It’s been true in Houston that Houston’s had some of the greatest schools in the United States. But it has also been true that it’s a bit of a tale of two cities. What I want to be able to see is that the intentional effort of the system is focused on meeting the needs of all kids not just some kids.
He said he doesn’t talk to Miles more than any other superintendent in the state and leaves it to the Board of Managers to run the district. At the end of two years, TEA and Morath will be looking formally at the district’s results to see whether certain exit criteria have been met. Since those criteria are that no campus receives Ds or Fs for multiple years, the district’s special education program is totally compliant with state and federal guidelines, and a school board is created that highly focused on student outcomes (rather than administrative matters) it’s looking pretty doubtful this will be achieved by then.
“Our goal is to revert to elected trustee control as quickly as possible but we want to make sure that the reasons that necessitated the intervention in the first place have been fundamentally addressed,” Morath said.
Asked about concerns that with the set schedule and only so many minutes allowed for taking each test that some students will fall behind at NES schools, Morath said it’s been time for a change at HISD and that the new approach will save rather than discard students who weren’t keeping up.
“What we’ve had in Houston for two decades or more is a system that methodically allowed massive numbers of kids to fall behind,” he said “A student in middle school happens to be two grade levels behind. If all you ever do for that student is teach them the very next thing that was in fact two grade levels behind, that student will never catch up.
“You cannot create an environment where it is true for all children that they’re being prepared for the American Dream, that they are being prepared for success and deny them access to rigorous content. Students need to be wrestling with Shakespeare and Keats, they need to be wrestling with complex texts, the complex ideas that are in those texts, the vocabulary that those texts have embedded in them.”
He said the difference in the new system is that not only are students taught on grade level, but with individualized instruction teachers work with students to cover the material from two years before. To work, he said, this has to happen simultaneously.
Instead, he said, in Houston, students who were two years behind were only getting instruction covering those grade levels. “Those kids were being prepared to graduate completely unprepared for success in this country.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
