Melissa Yarborough had been teaching sixth-grade reading at Navarro Middle School for seven years when state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles took over in 2023.
She loved her students but heard one too many times that asking children how their day was going or encouraging them to read during reading class was “wasting instructional time.”
“My professional values and my personal morals conflicted directly and strongly with things they were telling me to implement in my classroom,” Yarborough said.
She joined a group of HISD students at a Thursday press conference to raise awareness about how they believe students and teachers have suffered since the Texas Education Agency appointed Miles as part of a state takeover and handpicked a board of managers to improve the district’s performance.
Kylie Mavris, a student organizer with Community Voices for Public Education, said Miles converted 130 out of 274 campuses to New Education System schools, almost all in under-resourced Black and brown communities. The superintendent eliminated libraries on those campuses, Mavris said.
Teachers now have no control over their lessons and must use AI-generated, error-ridden slide shows, students said at Thursday’s event. Youth now take several timed 10-minute tests daily and do worksheets and test prep. They’re not allowed to read novels during reading classes. Bathroom use is restricted, and students have to carry traffic cones to the bathroom, Mavris said.
Micah Gabay, a senior at Worthing High School, said she has had difficulty connecting with teachers, and her test scores have fallen since the takeover. She said she’s seen good teachers get fired or leave because of the hostile environment.
“I’ve been fighting against the TEA since I was a freshman and I’m about to be out of high school but I still have younger siblings,” she said. “The system is broken. The laughter in the hallways is gone. The trust between teachers and students is broken.”
“They call it acountability but who’s holding them accountable?” she continued. “We are and we won’t stop fighting until Worthing and every other HISD school gets back to the people who actually care about us.”
Emily Yanez became emotional when she spoke about how the educational experience has changed since Miles took over.
“Lessons were reduced to packets; slideshows were made by AI,” she said. “Teachers were overwhelmed grading repetitive and unengaging material. As the school year ended, we started losing teachers. Some were told to teach subjects they had no training in.”
Miles was charged with improving the district’s performance and announced earlier this week that preliminary data show the district has improved and there are no longer any F-rated campuses in HISD.
The “historic gains” are based on lies, students said at the press conference, alleging that Miles has blocked 70 percent of NES ninth graders from taking biology and kept high-achieving eighth graders out of algebra, instead placing them in remedial math, to “artificially raise” STAAR scores.
“I had teachers who advocated for me,” said Chavez High School graduate Jimena Acosta. “What about the students who don’t? For every advocate who leaves, HISD becomes a place where potential goes to die. When the district brags about students like me, ask them, ‘Who’s left to fight for the kids who need it most?’ Right now, the answer is nobody, and that’s the greatest failure of all.”
HISD parent Jessica Campos said her daughter, who has dyslexia, wasn’t reading or making progress under the new NES model.
“Her mental health was deteriorating,” Campos said. “She was having regular panic attacks and struggling with depression. Both her therapist and the pediatrician said the same thing: the system was harming my child.”
“I begged for help, I spoke at board meetings, I submitted medical letters, and requested better for her. No one listened,” she added. “I did what I had to do for my child’s health and I pulled her out of the NES system.”
Her daughter is thriving now, Campos said. “Her grades have shot up to 80s, 90s and even 100s, but even more important than that, she’s smiling again.”
Yarborough said she couldn’t deal with the daily guided STAAR test practice and cookie-cutter teaching models that she says discriminate against special education students. Administrators told teachers that they should be able to walk between classrooms and campuses and hear the same thing from different teachers.
“That was a Mike Miles directive,” Yarborough said. “Evaluators expect not just to see teachers but also kids behaving in unison. Imagine boot camp, soldiers, robots. Instruction is scripted so tightly that individualized support for special education students, for English learners, is rendered impossible.”
