A deep dive by the Trib.
The Texas Education Agency last year launched plans to take over four school districts due to low academic performance, confiscating decision-making power from elected leaders based on state-issued F grades at six campuses.
All six “trigger” schools share notable similarities.
Between 80% and 97% of their students live in low-income households, far above the state average of 60%.
Black and Hispanic children make up the dominant majority of the student populations, from 88% at Marilyn Miller Language Academy near Lake Worth to almost every child at Fehl-Price Elementary School in Beaumont.
And nearly half of students at each school are on the fringes of dropping out — including 64% to 92% of kids on five of the six campuses.
Texas’ 2015 school accountability law places a momentous decision in the hands of the state’s education commissioner. When at least one school receives an F for five years in a row, the commissioner must order the campus closed or initiate a state takeover of the entire district, replacing elected school board members with leaders of the education chief’s choosing.
Commissioner Mike Morath, in his decade as leader of the Texas Education Agency, has ordered two campuses closed: Snyder Junior High and Travis Elementary, both in West Texas. Snyder Junior High, located in the Snyder Independent School District, has since reopened using a new academic framework. The Midland Independent School District partnered with a charter school operator to overhaul Travis Elementary.
Over the same 10-year span, Morath ordered seven district takeovers based on academic performance, concluding that school leaders consistently demonstrated an inability to govern effectively and stood in the way of kids reaching their full potential.
But critics of the accountability system say state takeovers penalize districts based on factors beyond their control. Schools alone cannot solve inequality tied to race and poverty. Yet that inequality, critics say, helps explain why many of the takeover trigger schools in Texas share nearly identical characteristics.
“Not everybody gets a hot breakfast and Mom taking them to school or putting them on the bus and giving them a kiss on the cheek,” said Jill Bottelberghe, superintendent of the Connally Independent School District.
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Critics of the system argue that the state punishes schools without holding itself accountable, particularly when it comes to providing resources for a public education system that serves 5.5 million children — most of whom are Hispanic and Black and come from low-income households.
Research points to several strategies for improving outcomes for Black and Hispanic children, including adequately funding schools, eliminating punitive discipline, diversifying educators and providing culturally relevant instruction.
In Texas, however, schools spent six years without an increase in the state money they typically devote to salaries and operations, before the Legislature passed a comprehensive finance bill in 2025. The state has made it easier for schools to suspend children. Districts can no longer factor race or sex into hiring decisions. And teachers are restricted in how they can talk about race and gender in the classroom.
Texas also fails to address educational inequality when it focuses attention on testing outcomes at the expense of other in-school factors that impede the academic progress of Black and Hispanic students, said Andrew Hairston, a civil rights attorney who directs the Education Justice Project at Texas Appleseed, an advocacy organization.
Students of color, for example, have faced discipline because their hairstyles violated the dress code. Some have sat through lessons that downplay their history. Others have reported incidents of explicit racism.
“What good is it to have moderately improved reading levels that come from a state takeover when the children are being called the N-word every day and cannot have a peaceful environment in which they learn and seek to grow?” Hairston said.
Hairston expressed frustration that the accountability system also does not consider the lingering effects of residential segregation, community resistance to integration, or cuts to federal and state resources. That means, he said, Texas is not adequately measuring schools’ ability to deliver holistic educational services to the students who need them most.
The best school leaders and education reform efforts take those societal factors into account, said Bob Sanborn, president and CEO of Children at Risk, a research and advocacy organization focused on poverty and inequality.
When that doesn’t happen, he said, students in need of the most help can end up worse off.
“If we want our children to be successful in Texas, we have to pay attention to those districts where parents aren’t making as much money, where there’s lower levels of educational attainment,” Sanborn said. “That often translates into immigrant communities, Black and brown communities, and I think people don’t like to talk about that in Texas.”
Basically, the state is holding schools and districts wholly responsible for things where they also have a share of the blame, often a significant one. I’ve said on multiple occasions that one of the key ingredients in the Mike Miles New Education System program is more money being spent on the targeted schools. Like, we’ve been saying for literal decades that we need to spend more on public education in Texas if we want better results, and it turns out that “throwing more money at it” is a pretty successful strategy. If only we could have tested that in an environment that didn’t include Mike Miles.