Doesn’t seem to be going away.
Across Texas, 1 in 6 teachers didn’t return to teach in 2024-25. In Houston ISD, it was nearly 1 of 3.
The state’s largest school district had a turnover rate of 32.2% compared with the statewide average of 18.8% in 2024-25, according to new Texas Education Agency data obtained by the Houston Chronicle.
HISD’s teacher turnover rate increased 12.5 percentage points in 2024-25 after a large exodus of teachers following the first year under state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles. Nearly a third of teachers who taught in 2023-24 did not return to teach in 2024-25, pushing the district’s turnover rate significantly higher than the statewide rate.
Some departures can be traced to low morale and the district’s stringent expectations to meet Miles’ vision of reform, teachers previously shared. Houston ISD has previously said it prioritizes high-quality instruction and maintains standards for performance.
[…]
A separate Houston Chronicle analysis of district records reported the head count of teachers who left after the 2023-24 school year. In June 2024, almost 2,500 teachers left the district after the first year of state-appointed leadership’s reforms. The Chronicle’s analysis did not calculate turnover rates for individual teachers between fall 2023 and fall 2024.
More than 800 teachers left the district from August 2024 through May. And in June 2025 alone, more than 2,300 of the district’s roughly 10,000 teachers left, district records showed.
The HISD spokesperson mostly avoided the question about this when asked. You can only spin this as Mike Miles chasing out the bad teachers for so long. At some point, it looks like a lot of people don’t want to teach as HISD. And also at some point, you would think it would get harder to find quality replacements for those who leave. I’m just saying.
It helps that HISD pays teachers relatively well. That should keep the supply of teachers coming. But yeah, rotating a third of your workforce every year does not facilitate growth and improvement.