Whether you consider Michelle Williams a heroic whistleblower or a tedious extremist, she was due some respect Thursday night as she got up to address the board with her continuing concerns about the path Houston ISD has taken – knowing that same board was voting to fire her later that night.
Which it did.
For those who don’t know the Houston Education Association union leader’s story, Williams is a frequent, relentless critic of HISD Superintendent Mike Miles, standing up at one board meeting after another to rail at the man and his policies.
This has not gone unnoticed by the man or his administrators.
HISD had an earlier run at her in March 2024 when the veteran teacher was accused of filming videos at school when she should have been teaching. All of which Williams denied. She said she was filming in her off time at home in a special studio setting she’d created to mimic her school setting. The videos were scheduled to go live later. The independent examiner hearing her case recommended she be reinstated and that was that.
Before the start of the 2024-25 school year, Williams was transferred from Shadowbriar Elementary to Benbrook Elementary where her differences with the Miles’ preferred method of teaching became even more pronounced. She locked heads with newly installed Principal Edward Heard, who is enrolled in HISD’s principal training program.
“I had three classes of the lowest English proficiency,” she says. Her classes were with emergent English learners and special ed students.
Faced with what she saw was an impossible mission – requiring third graders who were already a year behind in reading she says – to take rapid fire tests on the grade level material they were presented with, she balked. She asked to be transferred to another school but that went nowhere.
In Martin Luther-like fashion, Williams posted her manifesto on her classroom door. There were some things she would do and some she would not, calling them violations of law and ethics.
“This is more about doing a disservice to children. And it’s educational malpractice,” she said in an interview this week with the Houston Press.
Williams says that the Science of Reading approach – often referred to by Miles – “had been turned into a test prep course which is against the law.” She says she told the assistant principal at the time that the children in her classes could not read the passages the district was giving them. She says after telling the assistant principal that the kids needed to learn how to read in English, she was told “There’s not any time for that.”
“I got mad. I was literally livid,” she says. “So what are we doing here? So I said: ‘Why don’t you just scratch teacher off my badge and put lecturer? Because this is not teaching.”
She says she told Principal Heard what her plans were to teach the children to read concentrating on phonics and phonemic awareness. “They didn’t like it. They didn’t like what I was doing in the class.”
That was just what the district needed. Here was a teacher who was absolutely refusing to follow their directions on how to teach children and charged her with insubordination. Williams was also accused of leaving the campus without telling anyone she was going – something she denies.
She was sent to “home duty” while being paid, as the process of dismissing her wove its way through the bureaucracy.
Most people in other jobs, whether they’re manager or employee can’t quite get their heads around someone repeatedly calling their boss names in public. How in the world did she not expect to be fired? If she didn’t like the job, why didn’t she just quit?
But as one local education guru explained, consider Williams as more of a whistleblower. Tied to a school district in which she’d invested so much time and effort, certain that Miles’ New Education System with its constant barrage of tests and timed responses is destructive to children, Williams couldn’t leave. Denied a transfer to another school, she had to let everyone know the issues she had with the Benbrook administration and on a larger plane, HISD itself.
So instead of one of those many anonymous teachers whose similar experiences have been read out on their behalf by public speakers at so many board meetings –who don’t come forward themselves citing “fear of retaliation” – Williams put herself front and center.
Thursday night she accused the administration, principal and executive directors of unprofessional behavior, saying they “used bullying, intimidation and lies to try to force me to break education law. They’re asking me to make eight-year-olds who can’t even read in English, imagine that, read STAAR passages in English. Why? To sell the lie that Mike Miles’ policies are working. What’s happening at Benbrook is not just wrong. It’s unethical and it’s illegal.”
As for a friendly ear on the board, Williams probably has blown that chance as well. Thursday night in the dwindling seconds she had available in her one-minute of allotted time to address the trustees, she accused Board President Ric Campo of wanting “the children in public schools to be employees.”
Usually, the state-appointed HISD board doesn’t name each of the staff members it is terminating, saying that is an undue burden. But after Williams’ attorney successfully argued to the hearing examiner in her earlier appeal that she has become a public figure, her name was listed in the agenda packet for Thursday night’s meeting.
All of this isn’t quite over, of course. Williams plans to embark on another appeals route, where more charges and counter charges will be made.
It can certainly be argued that Miles’ administration and the HISD school board is simply and justifiably dispensing with a problem teacher who won’t follow what they believe are the best teaching practices that so far have resulted in a significant improvement in student test scores.
In turn, Williams argues that her termination is all about retaliation and a message to other teachers to color within the lines that Miles has drawn.
And, of course, as in many situations, both things can be true.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.