As recently noted, Fort Worth ISD has been notified by the Texas Education Agency that they are required to intervene in that district. While it’s not been determined yet what that means, a takeover is on the list of possibilities. As FWISD is a large urban district, the comparison to HISD and our experience with being taken over is inevitable. The Star-Telegram did some reporting, and I was interested in how they saw things. I’m skipping the beginning of their story, which recounts where FWISD is and how HISD got to where we are, and we’ll pick it up from there.
What has happened since Miles took over has been something of a mixed bag. A year into the takeover, Houston ISD’s state test scores improved, even as they declined across Texas, a fact that district leaders held up as a sign their strategy was working.
But the district has also seen widespread principal turnover, a sharp uptick in teachers leaving and big declines in enrollment, especially at schools under Miles’ school reform model. [Duncan Klussmann, a professor of school leadership in the University of Houston’s College of Education] said he knows families who have transferred their kids from Houston ISD to private schools because of the instability the district has seen since Miles took over. Last year, voters in the district roundly rejected a $4.4 billion bond proposal, which both supporters and detractors saw as a referendum on Miles’ leadership.
In a virtual town hall last week organized by the Houston Chronicle, Miles said the lesson he took from the bond issue’s failure is that a state-appointed intervention team can’t bring a bond proposal to a community. The community needs to come to district leaders with what they want to see in a bond package.
But more broadly, Miles defended his slate of reforms. The large amount of turnover among Houston ISD’s principals was driven primarily by the district making leadership changes because former principals weren’t getting results, he said. While he acknowledged that a change in principals can bring disruption, he said it was necessary to improve school performance.
Klussmann, the University of Houston professor, said it’s too early to tell how effective Miles’ reforms will be in the long term. Much of his strategy for the district is centered around getting short-term wins, like improvement on STAAR scores, he said. But other metrics like high school graduation rates, student success after graduation and college-going rates can be better indicators of how a district is actually doing, he said. Any change in strategy could take five to seven years to show up in those metrics.
In a paper released in 2023, researchers at the University of Virginia and Brown University looked at the academic impact of state takeovers of school districts across the country. What they found was that, on average, takeovers had little impact on how students performed on state tests. But that average doesn’t tell the whole story — researchers found that takeovers had a widely varying impact from one district to another, leading to big gains in some districts, big losses in others and little impact in still others. Across the country, those effects tend to even out, said Beth Schueler, a professor of education and public policy at the University of Virginia and the lead author of the paper.
Researchers don’t completely understand the factors driving the results of state takeovers. The racial and ethnic makeup of the districts seems to make a difference, Schueler said — predominantly Hispanic districts seem to see the biggest gains, while predominantly Black districts tend to see smaller gains or even losses.
Schueler said it also isn’t clear what’s driving the difference in outcomes based on demographics. But she pointed to other research suggesting that takeovers seem to have different political implications for school districts, depending on who those districts serve. In majority-Black communities, state takeovers have tended to result in less Black representation on school boards, while in majority-Hispanic communities, takeovers seem to open the door for greater Hispanic representation. That trend can affect student performance, since separate research suggests students of color tend to do better in districts where elected officials reflect the communities they represent.
Another factor that seems to make a difference is how districts were doing academically before the takeover, Schueler said. Almost all the districts researchers looked at were struggling — that’s usually what prompted state education officials to step in — but within that group, there were some that had very low test scores and some that were closer to the middle of the pack, she said.
In general, districts that were struggling the most before state intervention tended to see better results, while those that were performing somewhat better beforehand were more likely to see their test scores decline. Schueler said state officials need to take a hard look at that factor when they’re considering taking over a school district.
It’s good to get an outside perspective once in awhile. Even better when that brings along some data you hadn’t known about before. I’m not sure where HISD would fit on the “how districts were doing academically before the takeover” scale – we’re a huge district, there were and are plenty of schools that perform well but also others that have struggled. Part of my beef with Mike Miles is that I believe he’s spent too much time and energy meddling in the affairs of the schools that didn’t need any intervention and should have been mostly left alone. Maybe sticking closer to the job he was brought here to do would have been the best course of action.
As for the representation item, I do think the appointed Board of Managers reasonably resembles both the elected Board and the district as a whole. I have my complaints about the Board but that’s not one of them. It is something for FWISD to be aware of if they go down this road. Which I hope they don’t.
One last item, about the endurance of the reforms and their long-term effect, I don’t think there’s any way that the NES model sticks around after Miles leaves. Even putting aside one’s feelings about the man, NES strikes me as a turnaround system, not a standard operating model. It’s also a financial burden at a time when the Lege is not giving districts the funding they need, and based on STAAR testing that’s on its way out. And HISD has had issues for some time with graduation rates and post-graduation accomplishments; if all we get out this takeover is some short-term gains on a to-be-obsolete testing regime, then what really was it all for? This is one of those times when I hope I am underestimating Mike Miles. Ask again in five to seven years.