The state takeover of Houston ISD should end “relatively soon,” Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath said Friday, signaling that a transition back to a locally elected board could be near.
State-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles and a board of managers have led the district since June 2023, after Wheatley High School received years of failing ratings, triggered the intervention. Over the last three years, Miles has made sweeping reforms aimed at improving the district’s annual A-F ratings.
Morath previously said he would decide on ending or extending the state takeover in June 2027.
“I would anticipate that that should all be resolved relatively soon and that then we can revert back to local electoral control,” Morath said.
To regain local control, HISD must complete three “exit criteria”: no schools with two consecutive years of D or F ratings; improved board governance; and special education department in full compliance with state and federal law. Since June 2023, the district’s A-F ratings have improved sharply, although four schools were F-rated this year.
Just three HISD schools received back-to-back years D- or F-ratings in 2026 and 2025. Morath said the state agency is more concerned with campuses that receive failing grades for several consecutive years.
“There will be times where we will stumble and we will fall. Our teams, despite their best efforts, will err,” Morath said. “I have every confidence that those four schools will not be multi-year failing schools, because you have a local school system that has fundamentally changed the way that it’s organized to no longer allow that kind of long-term neglect to occur.”
Morath said special education compliance remains a key benchmark for HISD.
See here for more on that previous statement, which indeed suggested that June of 2027 was the earliest point at which Mike Morath might consider paroling HISD from takeover jail. Given that, it doesn’t look like he’s saying anything different, just reiterating the timeline. I’m not going to try to parse these very unspecific words, or read into his tone or body language, which I really couldn’t do anyway since all I have is this story. Maybe he was offering some encouragement, maybe he was just saying that he wasn’t moving the timeline back, I dunno. When he says something that has a date or a number in it, we can talk.
I feel compelled to add that all this just adds to my bewilderment about the special ed situation. If the TEA remains unsatisfied with the changes Mike Miles implemented, or with his seeming refusal to meet their demands for communication with affected parents, what if anything does that do to the timeline? I’m trying to imagine a scenario where the TEA says we’re good on the academic benchmarks but still out of compliance on special ed thanks to Miles’s shenanigans, and so they’re keeping us under takeover to fix that but installing a new Superintendent because they’ve lost faith in Miles’ ability to deliver on it, but it made me blue-screen. I feel like we’ve wandered into “making this up as we go along” territory. I have no idea how this will play out or how it might affect takeover status. Again, until Mike Morath says something with specifics in it, we’re all just reading tea leaves.