Last year, Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles celebrated the fact that not a single HISD student was going to an F-rated school.
He can’t say that anymore.
Preliminary district scores released Thursday showed four unnamed elementary schools had in fact slipped in the state accountability ratings from the Texas Education Agency and were now rated F.
In statistics published Friday morning on TXschools.gov , TEA named four elementary schools with Fs in HISD: Benavidez, Foster, Highland Heights and Madding.
Instead he focused on the fact that for the first time ever, both Northside and Wheatley highs had scored A ratings. And overall, HISD had still significantly increased its number of A and B-rated schools, more than doubling that number since the state takeover in 2023.
No middle or high schools in HISD scored lower than a C. Among elementary schools, in addition to the four Fs, another nine elementaries got a D rating.
As usual, many in the audience at Thursday night’s board meeting weren’t buying his message. Critics say Miles manipulates the ratings, keeping students out of tougher math courses, for example, as a way to make sure the scores on standardized tests like the state’s STAAR are higher.
Miles addressed that directly Thursday when he insisted that rather than keeping students away from the Algebra I course, the number of HISD students taking that has increased. In the last three years, HISD statistics show that almost 1,000 more students took Algebra I in the eighth grade than in 2023.
Miles said he hopes to have an increasing number of students take Algebra I in middle school, clearing the way for them to take more higher-level courses in high school.
Wheatley is, of course, the school that triggered the state takeover of the Houston ISD in 2023 after seven continuous years of F ratings. Miles promised a celebration at the school Friday.
According to HISD, this year 92 of its schools scored an A rating and 113 a B. In 2023 only 93 schools were in the A or B range.
HISD has also narrowed the achieved gap between Black and white students and between Hispanic and white students, Miles said.
The issue of special education came up both in a press conference before the board meeting and during the meeting itself. Miles maintained that special ed parents whose kids were moved to new schools in the just established “hub” configuration were happy about the change.
He said parents of children who are educated in self-contained classrooms were happy with the change, especially with the new limits on the number of grades that could be in one classroom. Under the new system, there will be at most two grade levels in the room, instead of the previous system that could see kids in five different grade levels in the same class.
Miles discounted complaints about the special ed realignment, saying people didn’t understand the difference between location and placement. And despite the TEA sending a letter to the two conservators overseeing HISD special ed for the state, saying that HISD could be violating federal law if it moved students without an accompanying IEP amendment first. Miles insisted that an IEP change was not needed just because a district sends a special ed student to a different school.
“We had 1,600 that were moved and had their location changed. Not their IEP. And hence these experts who are not legal experts thought that placement and location were one and the same.”
“We went over and above what is legally required,” Miles said. “There are 22,000 students with disabilities in this district. Five thousand of those students are in what we call self-contained classroom settings.
Placement, he said, refers to the courses the student takes. Location is where they go to school. “As a result of working closely with TEA and the conservators, they wanted to go over and above the legal requirements and to ask the parents about the location.”
However, in its letter to HISD conservators TEA specifically cited location (not placement) when it noted a second concern that HISD “did not effectively consider the potential harmful effects related to the proposed change in service-delivery location.”
