The state takeover of the Houston ISD has done a great deal of harm. That’s the conclusion of a report issued Thursday by the independent Commission on the HISD Takeover that calls out the district and Superintendent Mike Miles for what has happened to HISD since the 2023 state takeover ordered up by Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath.
The five main points summarized at the beginning of the 81-page document: curriculum standards were diminished; relationships among parents, teachers and students were torn apart; educators were not respected and were embarrassed in front of their students; democratic governance was discarded and financial oversight was significantly weakened. Note is also taken of the high number of both students and teachers who’ve left the district since Miles’ arrival.
In a group effort that lasted more than a year, education experts from Houston and around the nation weighed in on Superintendent Miles’ New Education System approach of timed days filled with scripted lessons from central office, daily worksheets and the dispensing of librarians throughout the district. They based these conclusions on a series of sessions students, parents and teachers as well as online comments they received.
They also concluded that taking over an entire large public school district with 274 schools because of one consistently failing school was an overstep and that other methods should have been employed to help that school and its students.
With the title “Diminished, Degraded and Destroyed,” it was pretty easy to figure out that the report would not be complimentary. Major points were covered in a 30-minute press conference on the grounds of the HISD administration building Thursday held right before this month’s board meeting that began at 5 p.m. Many of those points were repeated during the public address section of the board meeting. In fact many of the “listening” sessions held to collect input from teachers, students and parents throughout the year were read out verbatim to the state-appointed Board of Managers during the meeting.
Early in its report the Commission acknowledged that its findings did not agree with the state’s much more positive assessment of the effect of the takeover on student achievement.
“These findings differ sharply from the state’s public account of the takeover, which highlights improvements in student test performance and campus accountability ratings as evidence of total success,” the report said. “The testimony gathered by this Commission exposes the human and material costs of these gains—a reality obscured and downplayed in the district’s official narrative. Instead, this report documents a broader set of consequences affecting teaching, learning, school culture, democratic governance, and public trust across HISD.”
The Commission had three co-chairs. Texas Senator Molly Cook, State Representative Lauren Ashley Simmons and the Rev. Dr. Colin Bossen, senior minister at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston. Clerk was Dr. Ruth Hoffman-Lach, Ph.D., public education advocate, First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston.
Other Commission members included: Daniel I. Dawer, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, The University of Texas at Austin; Geneva Jones, education attorney, Houston; Jasmin Lee, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Sociology, Rice University, Houston; Domingo Morel, Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Service, Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University; Steven (Steve) L. Nelson, J.D., Ph.D., Professor of Education Policy & Leadership, Departments of Educational Psychology, Leadership, and Higher Education, University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr., Emeritus Professor of History, University of Houstonand HISD parent; Kay Wasden, Founder and Executive Director of Community of Resources, Houston; Rachel Williams, Assistant Professor, Educational Policy Studies Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Emily Yanez, Student, Northside High School, HISD and Melissa Yarborough, HISD parent and former HISD teacher.
The Commission’s report offers alternative policy recommendations that could be implemented when a school district has one or several failing schools. They are:
1. Raising the threshold for triggering state intervention
2. Shifting from a punitive to a collaborative approach
3. Specifying firm guardrails on the authority of state-appointed boards and superintendents
4. Establishing local avenues for ending state intervention
5. Imposing clear limits on the TEA Commissioner’s authority
6. Adequately funding public education in Texas
As regards other points the Commission made, its report pointed out that under the NES system, “legally mandated” accommodations for students with disabilities were not being met. Both they and emergent bilingual students were not given any extra help because there was no time to do that under the NES rigid model, teachers said. Test-prep dominated classes and as has been reported at many board meetings by parents and teachers, NES lesson plans were error-ridden.
Some of the testimonies collected during the listening sessions:
Libraries: “When I was hired, I was hired at [an elementary school], which was a Title I campus in [a historically Black neighborhood]. I was filling a position that had been empty for 10 years. I was ecstatic. I chose that campus knowing it would be a challenge to update all of the books and to get a program started from nothing. Then, Mike Miles came, and I had to transfer because my library was closed…. There are only a handful of libraries left in HISD, and they’re all in affluent neighborhoods.”
Relationships and Continuity: “If the teacher just decides they don’t want to come back, it throws you off for the rest of the year because most of the time, if a teacher leaves, you either don’t get a teacher for the rest of that semester, or you don’t get a teacher for the rest of the year. I have so many classes from last year and the year before where I had like five teachers that one year because no teacher stayed the whole year.”
Turnover: “During my time at [school name], eight of my teachers alone—and I’ve only been there for two years—have left. That is more than half of my teachers. Many of these teachers have taught at [School Name] for over a decade, and they left despite their long history because of their treatment by the district. I’ve been in classrooms as teachers broke down crying because of what the district did to them. I’ve had to sign so many goodbye cards for my teachers, and I thought these were the people who were going to watch me graduate. I thought these were the people who were going to watch me grow up, who were going to write rec letters for me, who were going to help me build my future, and they’re being pushed out now. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. That’s just what I see as a student and not what’s going on behind the scenes.
“It has infiltrated every aspect of my education. And all of these teachers, they go to teach at private schools. They go to teach in wealthy suburbs. And I just think about the kids who get the free lunches, what’s going to happen to them?… They’re not going to have the experienced teachers to teach them, and they’re going to get left behind…
“We don’t have that stability. We don’t know who to turn to when we need a recommendation letter because we met our teacher last week. So that kind of stability, that long-term planning is really damaged by not having teachers there for a long time. And when it comes to extracurricular programs like newspaper, for example, when you lose someone who’s been running that program, there’s a huge learning curve for teachers who have to learn how to best help students run those programs. and how to, how to do all these things that require a very specific skill set, you lose a lot of that knowledge that that teacher had.”
The fast pace: “The workload is outrageous. I have been questioned by my principal as to why I am not at work until 8 pm like she is…I am given only so many minutes to teach a lesson, whether students understand it or not. I have to time them on the test for the material taught and take it from students even if they are not finished. Students are feeling insecure and lack confidence because they are rushed. I have been told I must change my grades on the recent report card to show that students are doing better than they are actually doing. When I expressed that I was not comfortable with lying about the grades. I was told by my principal that this is a requirement handed down by our superintendent and do it, or face repercussions.”
Superintendent drop-ins: “Over the announcements, it was heard from our principal saying, “Remember, be Miles-ready, every day.” That’s not, “Oh, he’s coming tomorrow.” That is every day. They’re supposed to be Miles-ready. Teachers are coming in to the nurse with racing heartbeats and panic attack symptoms just from being in meetings.”
Lack of respect for teachers: “The admin[istrators] will call teachers out by name and disrespect them in front of students. And teachers aren’t allowed to sit down at their desks. They have to stand up the whole 90-minute class period . . . . Most of the teachers they talk to disrespectfully leave the same day, the same time they’re talking to them disrespectfully. My aquatic science teacher, they talked to her disrespectfully, and literally the same minute when the principal left the classroom, she grabbed her stuff and she walked. She didn’t come back for the rest of the semester. We didn’t have a teacher for the rest of that semester.”
Superintendent Miles’ spending patterns: “By March 2024, Miles had spent over $97 million on building improvements, furniture, and equipment for NES schools,144 such as desks for Teams Centers, adult-sized spin bikes, interactive whiteboards, and video recording/livestreaming equipment for every classroom,” the Commission noted. “These purchases were made without consulting campus administrators or inventorying existing equipment. For example, district leaders bought new interactive whiteboards to replace functioning SmartBoards; elementary schools received adult-size spin bikes that remained in their boxes;and piles of excess student desks, which had already been upgraded, crowded school hallways.”
As is usual procedure, the Board of Managers and Miles did not respond to any of the public speakers Thursday night. Read on for the Commission’s report.
