I wish him well, but more than that I wish the students, teachers, parents, and other stakeholders of Fort Worth ISD well.
A Floridian who briefly led one of the nation’s largest school districts will captain Fort Worth ISD while it is under state control.
Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath appointed longtime Florida educator Peter B. Licata as FWISD’s new leader. Licata, who served as Broward County Public Schools superintendent for less than a year, is now charged with driving rapid academic gains for FWISD’s nearly 68,000 students.
He is Fort Worth’s fourth superintendent in just as many years and comes to a district facing similar challenges he faced in Florida.
Alongside the new superintendent, Morath named nine managers who essentially replaced the district’s locally elected trustees. The managers assume governing authority over the district’s nearly $1 billion budget, buildings and what children learn.
Licata served as superintendent of the 236,263-student Broward County Public Schools for 10 months starting in 2023. He resigned and stepped away from day-to-day leadership over health concerns.
Licata spent nearly three decades working in Florida schools, primarily in Palm Beach County, where he rose from classroom teacher and coach to principal and district leader.
After taking the Broward job, he described his approach to equal opportunity as ensuring students receive additional support without lowering academic expectations.
“You can’t raise the floor by lowering the ceiling,” he said in a 2023 interview with South Florida NPR station WLRN.
Broward students saw modest increases in proficiency rates during Licata’s tenure during the 2023-24 school year. His superintendency occurred alongside Florida introducing a new state test that measures progress at the beginning, middle and end of the year.
See here for the previous update. As noted in the story, Morath also appointed a Board of Managers, one of whom is Pete Geren, former Secretary of the Army and Congressman from CD12. I don’t know enough about new Superintendent Licata to have any specific thoughts about him, though I do have some questions about his health given that he resigned as Superintendent of the Broward County school system ten months after being hired for health reasons. The story didn’t go into any details (I presume most if not all of that would be confidential) so who knows. I hope he’s up for the challenge. And I hope that the appointed Board of Managers is actually representative of the community and isn’t a bunch of lapdogs.
The main thing I’m interested in, and have been since the TEA first announced the takeover of FWISD, is whether they see the Mike Miles experience in HISD as a template, a one-off, or something else. I don’t see anything in this story that says “this guy is a Mike Miles clone” or anything like that, but that’s mostly because there’s not much about him in this initial story. We’ll know more as reporters start to nose around and get a chance to visit with him and ask questions about his approach and philosophy. Does the TEA see every takeover as its own unique problem to solve, in which case they wouldn’t necessarily be looking for a Mike Miles, or do they see this as a one-size-fits-all situation and they’re going to hammer that nail without worrying about the correctness of their tools. We don’t have enough information to guess at that yet, but that’s what I’m looking for.
UPDATE: Morath also appointed a new Lake Worth ISD Superintendant, who “said he has no plans to introduce new priorities and will remain focused on the instructional framework already in place”. Which I’m sure is reassuring to Lake Worth ISD, but it makes me wonder if this trip was really necessary. LWISD is much smaller than FWISD, so I don’t expect its experience to shed much light on what the TEA has taken away from the Mike Miles saga. But it’s still worth watching.