About half of Houston ISD schools are like Fonville, adopting Miles’ expensive reform effort in a takeover where the state ousted the locally elected board and superintendent for appointees over chronic academic underperformance.
Miles has poured tens of millions of dollars into the New Education System, or NES, to supercharge standardized test scores with extra support staff, higher teacher salaries, longer school days and new equipment. HISD budget documents reveal the estimated additional cost to adopt the reforms is about $700,000 per NES school in the first year and about $2,200 more per student at those campuses in the years after.
At the same time, Houston ISD has lost tens of thousands of students since the takeover began in 2023 as enrollment declines at a rate faster than any of its urban peer districts, translating into roughly $190 million in less state funding in that time, according to a Texas Tribune analysis.
Texas didn’t give Houston public schools extra dollars for the state intervention. Since the start of the takeover, HISD leaders quickly drained much of its massive rainy day reserves and put up dozens of district-owned buildings and land for sale. School finance experts have sounded alarms because such cost saving measures can be easily exhausted.
“That’s just a gamble,” Jonathan Travers, the CEO of Education Resource Strategies, said of districts dipping heavily into reserves for ongoing costs. “You’re just gambling that you’re going to somehow be able to raise revenue — ongoing revenue from taxpayers, from the state — in a few years to cover the gap that you’re using up your reserves to cover.”
HISD officials also shed hundreds of central office jobs and slashed transportation and social work services to curtail the shortfall in the district’s $2 billion budget. Those spending decisions were made amid parent protest, which later came to a head when voters rejected a $4.4 billion bond for building and technology updates HISD had advertised for the district’s most urgent needs.
As the state readies to end the takeover and relinquish control back to the local school board, HISD must confront how to keep its academic gains from unraveling in the face of another major transition.
“He will have stripped us of our resources,” Heather Golden, a parent whose kids graduated from HISD schools, said. “It will be almost impossible to even maintain these results because we don’t have a financial cushion anymore, especially with all the students leaving.”
The stakes of the financial strain go beyond Houston as Texas leads the nation in takeovers over poor academic performance. Since 2023, seven districts had their elected school trustees and superintendent replaced with state appointees, a pair of whom were former HISD administrators under Miles.
About a dozen more districts are at risk of the same fate. Some districts in a takeover are already changing their classrooms to mimic Miles’ strategy but without the war chest of savings that HISD had to absorb the costs.
It’s a long story and there’s a lot more to it, so read the rest. There have been questions about Miles’ finances since he first got here. This is now a look back to see that the doubters were right about it. And what does Miles care? He’ll be out of here before the shit hits the fan and will be able to say till the day that he dies that if only the leaders who came after him had done exactly as he would have there wouldn’t be any problems. The truth of that won’t matter because it will be a good quote, so it will be in every damn story.
I couldn’t find it in my archive searches, but I also noted that the key to the academic improvements in HISD was basically that we threw a bunch of money at the problem, thus proving the point that us liberal scolds have been making about Texas’ public education inadequacies for years. I’ve also said for a very long time that nothing will change until the people in charge are changed, and maybe next year we’ll get to test that premise, even if only in part. You can add to Mike Miles’ long list of sins the fact that he never advocated for the state to cover even in part the extra costs he incurred, which instead he paid for via shell games and a once-healthy reserve fund. He’ll be more than happy to hand that bag off to whatever poor sucker comes in after him and tries to clean up the mess. Everyone in one of the other taken-over or soon-to-be-taken-over districts, pay attention: This is your future too, a few more years later.