When Mike Miles first came in as the state-appointed superintendent of Houston ISD in June 2023, one of the key points he repeatedly hammered then and in following months was the district’s loss of 28,000 students in six years.
In an initial meeting with the Houston Press, he referenced a 225-page draft he’d pulled together that he said would answer the questions about turning around a district that was bleeding enrollment.
Nowadays, though, when HISD talks about continued student departures, there is no suggestion that perhaps Miles is doing anything wrong about student retention. Instead, small victories are announced as at this week’s budget workshop that instead of an estimated 8,000 fewer students next year, now it looks like there will “only” be a drop of 6,800. In the 2024-25 year, the district lost 7,378 students from the previous year, in the last four years 17,000 students and if you look at the last 10 years, the district is down by 30,000 students.
That’s a lot of students, a lot of money lost to HISD for each of those students from the state. Maybe/possibly/probably Miles like other urban superintendents across the country can’t change the way things are going but still there’s that ping of irony isn’t there?
Unless, all along what he was talking about wasn’t getting kids to stay in HISD, but to close the right number of schools and cut out any departments and personnel not essential to mission. Those were two tactics he talked about from the start when he brought up the numbers. He’s probably put off the school closings for as long as he can. The 2025-26 school year will be the test of that.
Most of the most recent decline, as Miles and his administrators readily admit, has been among students attending his New Education System schools with daily testing, no librarians and in many cases no libraries. It follows, as he’s pointed out, that there will be further adjustments to the staffing numbers at those schools.
Students at all campuses have left the district for charter schools, suburban districts, home schooling, private and parochial schools or just sitting at home doing nothing. The old excuse — long before Miles’ time here — used to be they’d all moved to Mexico which led to a stellar and totally false dropout rate. With news of Miles’ appointment, some departures were to be expected, even predicted, based upon what happened in Dallas where as superintendent there he also introduced wholescale reform which was received initially with some grumbling and over time accelerated into full scale rebellion.
Even before Miles and the Board of Managers appointed by Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath had done anything, there were departures. People were offended by or scared of what would happen with a state takeover. Teachers left, administrators skedaddled and students who didn’t necessarily understand what was going on were taken away by their parents. In what was probably the most unique level of cooperation between Dallas and Houston, teachers from Dallas ISD caravanned down I-45 to testify to their interactions with Miles to boisterous crowds.
In the last couple of weeks, the district has resumed handing out batches of teacher termination notices. Ones we talked with said they had no idea that one or two low spot observation scores meant they would be out of a job by the end of the semester. Anyone who doesn’t understand that now isn’t very observant. Options are to accept and resign or to appeal, which can take as much as a year to resolve. As one teacher was told by the union, there’s 200 teachers ahead of him protesting their dismissals. Even if teachers resign, they are being told the wording on their file will read “resigned in lieu of termination.” It isn’t enough to get them gone, apparently.
From the start, to combat the imbalance between the number of students and all the Central Office employees, Miles took aim at several departments. Central Office was downsized from 10,204 to 7,857 positions the first year. It was easy for many people to cheer this on and whether these displaced employees were actually spending their days lolling about or performing critical work, well this one didn’t hit too close to home for most HISD parents.
What did was when the HISD public realized the money saved was in large part going toward the NES program Miles brought in with extra money designated for a select number of few schools. Higher salaries were going to go to certain types of teachers (English and math) there. In the months since, firing librarians and all the wraparound specialists remains a festering wound. As do the significantly high wages paid to upper level HISD administrators.
On Thursday, the Texas Education Agency was finally allowed by the courts to release its 2022-23 accountability ratings and HISD got a C (actually a low C with the number 72 assigned to it.)
This should have been absolutely no surprise to anyone keeping up with Miles. Although 120 Texas public schools had filed suit against the release of that year’s accountability ratings saying the report cards were unfair, Miles said he had other more pressing things to worry about in HISD. And iIn December 2023, he worked up his own set of numbers and presented them to the public..
Miles had initially predicted about 80 schools would fall into D or F ratings. Then after applying TEA’s methodology, the superintendent called a press conference to say that he believed 111 schools would fall into D and F ratings land. It was even worse than he’d thought. We were truly in OMG let’s do something now territory.
According to the just-released TEA’s ratings, there were 65 Ds and 56 Fs for a 121 total. So that’s only 10 off Miles’ mathematics and he was only one or two points off the number of A (36) B (57) and C schools (53).
So what does this all mean? Well actually not much for most of the districts who waited on those scores from TEA. They’re two years old and weren’t available to help any parents make a decision about what school their children should attend.
Miles got ahead of the game by releasing his own set of scores sooner. It was data-driven support to justify all his arguments that immediate change was needed. (Fun fact: Some media outlets took to reporting the Miles numbers as the actual TEA scores. Very close but no cigar.)
A Thursday afternoon HISD press release drew a clear line between the before and after of Miles leadership: “It is important for the community to know that the data released today reflects the performance of the District and its schools prior to the state intervention and the appointment of Superintendent Mike Miles. The 2022-2023 ratings confirm what many already knew: HISD was a deeply inequitable system in need of urgent change—clear evidence the intervention was needed.”
But grain of salt time: the 2023-24 scores are from a school year right after the height of the pandemic when students had, for the most part, been learning remotely. The ratings system was changed – something school district principals and superintendents always will say is unfair. Of course, test scores in many cases were lower. Of course, they reinforced the divide between more affluent student bodies and low income. The same divide and inequity that Miles highlighted in his calls for drastic change.
The HISD press release also drew attention to Miles’ 2024-25 numbers, also calculated and released while the rest of the state still waits for a judge to decide whether TEA or the school districts are right about whether anyone should see them.
The latest numbers from Miles show impressive increases in a lot of areas, particularly when judged against the 2023-24 year. Weighed against pre-pandemic years of 2018-19, that critics say make for a more accurate comparison, maybe the gains aren’t quite so rosy. But give Miles credit. It wasn’t a backslide from the year before. Whether that will be enough for more parents to decide to stay put is anyone’s guess.
Given the recent budget discussions, the continuing student departures are unwelcome, but not something the superintendent will be taken to the woodshed over. Declining enrollments helped get Mike Miles his HISD job. It is doubtful they will mean an end to it.
