Thomas Jefferson Elementary School, nestled in the Timbergrove neighborhood of Houston, just north of downtown, enrolls some 340 students — 96% of whom are low-income and roughly a third of whom are just learning to speak English. 

Since the pandemic, student achievement has been hard to come by, during the 2020-21 school year, when 77% of students were below grade level in reading and 86% in math. And while scores rebounded some over the years, they were low enough during the 2023-24 school year to earn the campus a “D” rating on the state’s accountability system. 

That same year, the state took over operations of the Houston Independent School District, appointing a new hard-charging and controversial superintendent, Mike Miles, who, among many other things, has overseen the replacement of dozens of principals and put a premium on educators who deliver results. 

“We work really hard to make sure that we hire the correct people for the job,” said Jefferson Elementary Principal Claudia Florez, who Miles hired for that role the same year. “Teaching is not for everyone.”

“We make sure that people truly understand what it is that they’re getting themselves into,” she added. “When I meet with my teachers, I’m very clear with the expectations I have for them.”

In return, Florez promises to support her educators with the resources, planning time and professional development required to meet the needs of every child that walks through the front door. That’s why she wasn’t surprised when the Texas Education Agency released district and school ratings in August for the 2024-25 school year and saw that Jefferson had turned its “D” rating into an “A.”

As it turned out, Jefferson was just one of 20 schools in Houston that made that leap, signaling something even bigger may be afoot. In fact, Houston ISD went from having 121 “D” and “F” rated schools in 2022-23 to having 18 “D” schools last year and none rated as failing — meaning three-quarters of the district’s schools are now rated “A” or “B.” Fifty schools earned a “C” rating.

The results whisper of a new trajectory for achievement. Houston ISD — the 176,000-student school district where 90% are students of color, 78% are low-income and nearly 40% are learning English — earned a “B” in the state’s much anticipated accountability rating system, up from a “C” last year.

Yet as is often the case, the back-slapping and glad-handing that typically follows a sudden catapult in academic achievement, especially on the heels of a state takeover, has been undercut in equal measure by critics who say the improvements are too good to be true. They say the changes come at a steep price to the community and question their staying power.

After the release of the ratings, Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath and Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles touted the findings as evidence that the state takeover is working. And what better place to announce such progress than Jefferson Elementary itself.

“These historic outcomes are the result of wholesale systemic reform,” said Miles. “Two years ago, it was hard to believe that this could happen.”

“It doesn’t happen normally,” he added. “It would be hard for someone who isn’t steeped in data … to understand or believe that the transformation is getting these results.”

To be sure, state takeovers are inherently controversial no matter where in the country they occur — often garnering criticism from parents, teachers and local community members concerned that state-appointed district and school leaders are quick to implement drastic policy changes at the expense of local families. Many residents feel these top-down reforms aimed at improvement happen to them rather than alongside them. 

In Houston, the reception was no different. But the takeover of Texas’ largest district — and one of the largest in the U.S. — has garnered outsized attention due to its scale. The Texas Education Agency announced last week the , the second-largest takeover in Texas history, as just 34 percent of students across all grades and subjects are performing at grade-level on state exams and 20 campuses have been labeled “academically unacceptable” multiple years in a row.

As part of the Houston takeover, Miles targeted roughly one-third of its schools for wholesale reform rather than incremental changes sometimes seen in other state takeovers. In doing so, he prioritized funding to boost the quality of instruction and school building leadership, including having the most effective teachers instruct the lowest-performing kids; boosting teacher professional development; elevating the role of principals to coach teachers; hiring instructional executive directors to train principals; and attempting to institute performance pay. 

But at the Houston City Council’s economic development committee meeting in September, Miles was booed by parents in the crowd and grilled by council members about teacher turnover, principal displacement and a drop in enrollment. Fanning the flames of discontent, Miles had recently secured a $173,660 bonus — news that came on the heels of an included in a new five-year contract that increases his annual base salary to $462,000.

Miles pushed back on the accusations, calling them “conspiracy theories,” and asking naysayers to examine the data. 

“We do a disservice to teachers and kids when you hear the nonsense. It’s a disservice when there is a lack of professionalism and poo-pooing the results of teachers who work really hard.”

But the data that Miles is asking his critics to focus on also raises some questions, said Rachel White, professor of education leadership and policy at the University of Texas, Austin, and founder of The Superintendent Lab, a hub for data and research on school district leadership. 

Among them, between 2022-23 and 2024-25 the district experienced a 17% increase in the number of students identified as having a disability, but the number of state alternative assessments taken by Houston ISD students increased by 39% — more than double. Meaning, essentially, that there was a greater increase in students taking the alternative assessment than students who would qualify for that assessment. White noted that “these may be appropriate educational decisions — particularly since one reason for Houston ISD’s takeover was special education program-related failures. Nonetheless, it is important to keep an eye on shifts in who is taking assessments, and which assessments.” 

Moreover, the number of beginning teachers increased from 7% to 12% over the last three years — an unusually large shift for such a short time span, and a trend opposite that of the state, which saw a decline in beginner teachers from 10% to 7% — while the proportion of veteran teachers also sank.

Contacted by ����Ӱ��, district officials in Houston declined to comment on questions surrounding the data.

“This is not unique to Texas,” White said. “Accountability systems tell us some things, but they don’t tell us everything. And, while this absolutely may not be the case here, we’ve seen in prior research, accountability systems can be gamed. There are ways to shift things in order to get exactly what the accountability system wants.” 

Indeed, perhaps just as controversial as that state takeover is the state’s accountability rating system itself, which has been delayed twice by lawsuits filed by dozens of districts accusing the state education agency of using retroactive and shifting standards, overemphasizing standardized testing, treating districts with high poverty rates unfairly, and lacking transparency in its scoring methods.

“We don’t trust the validity of the scoring,” said Jackie Andersen, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers. “We’re comparing apples to oranges in terms of the tests that were administered and are being compared to one another. It’s data manipulation, plain and simple. He’s saying, ‘Everything is good, the scores are up!’ But we’re not looking at the same students, we’re not looking at the same tests, we’re not even looking at the same criteria for passing year to year.” Her criticism was of the Houston Chronicle.

“The whole thing is bogus,” she added. “In any other administration, if a school had gone from an F rating to an A rating, they would have been investigated. And probably the principal and everybody in the school would have been terminated because that’s impossible. Come on now. Something is not right.”

In the case of Jefferson Elementary, for example, it received an “A” rating overall despite receiving a “C” on , or a 77 out of 100 based on whether students are meeting expectations on the state assessment. In fact, just 59% of students at Jefferson are at grade-level in reading and 51% in math. That’s hardly an “A,” but the overall rating is reflective of the progress made. And during the 2023-24 school year, Jefferson earned an “F” in student achievement.  

One item that could mitigate the case against the doubters is that Houston has shown gains on other tests, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress and . The district can also point to the fact that chronic absenteeism dropped seven percentage points from the previous academic year, to 20%. And perhaps most importantly, improvements are especially concentrated in historically underserved areas that enroll primarily Black and Hispanic students from low-income families.

“We want Houston to be successful, because every one of these kids deserves a great education and one that’s going to prepare them for life,” White said. “…But we also have to be thinking about the broader system, and not just this short-term potential increase in accountability ratings. What does this look like in the long-term for the district in terms of stability of its principals and its teachers, as well as students’ love for learning and desire to continue to learn after they don’t have to do it just to get a good grade on a test?”

Looking ahead, the terms of the takeover are set to continue at least , the Texas Education Agency announced over the summer. Miles said that it’s a necessary move to ensure the longevity of improvements made and reduce the risk of the district reverting to past practices after the state hands over leadership to an elected board.

Next up on the docket for Miles: Cementing a policy priority even more controversial than school ratings, he wants to link teacher compensation to effectiveness, launching the “largest in the nation.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of schools in Houston ISD that received A and B ratings.  Nearly three-quarters of the district’s schools received those top scores.

The chief of America’s eighth-largest school district was appointed in 2023 by Texas’s education commissioner, who controversially spearheaded a state takeover in response to poor academic performance and allegations of misconduct by local board members. The move, preceded by years of lawsuits, drew by local officials.

Their outcry was, perhaps, foreseeable. Full-on takeovers are rare, usually only attempted in chronically struggling districts steeped in managerial problems. Houston Independent School District fit the bill in some respects, with large numbers of schools from the Texas Education Agency, but parents and educators still deplored the loss of autonomy and the appointment of an outsider.

Two years later, the outcry hasn’t quieted completely. Increasingly, however, local and state leaders are pointing to a competing narrative of revamped instructional strategies, and newfound plaudits from state authorities. According to the release of student evaluation data in June, Houston pupils are catching up with — and, in some subjects, — their peers across Texas after years of lagging far behind. This year’s scores largely improved upon last year’s, which themselves represented a leap forward from the pre-takeover status quo.

The most energetic evangelist for that progress is Miles, a turned educator. His trek to Texas from his home state of Colorado has not always been smooth, with a three-year stint as Dallas superintendent after Miles lost the backing of the local board. Both in that city and at a previous stop , he by advocating for a switch to a pay-for-performance system that many saw as unfair.

He has pursued a in Houston, along with a package of pedagogical and organizational reforms he dubs the : a heavy emphasis on coaching and blending curriculum and instruction, along with longer school hours. Since its implementation, the majority of Houston schools run under the NES model have seen major improvements to their state ratings. Critics have called the model top-down and restrictive, but Miles insists it’s about giving teachers the tools they need to succeed in schools enrolling historically underserved minority and low-income students.

In a conversation with ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken, Miles argued that wholesale, wide-ranging reforms are the only way to trigger lasting improvement for students. 

“We are providing a proof point that it can be done, and that Black and brown kids challenged by poverty and language barriers can rise to high expectations. Don’t sell them short. Don’t say it’ll take eight years or five years to do it.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Superintendent, how do you interpret these results? Houston clearly saw big test-score gains across a very short span of time.

I’ve been around for a long time. I’ve led other districts and been a consultant in other districts, and I talk to colleagues all the time. These results are unheard of. 

In 2023, 93 schools in the district out of 273 earned an A or B grade. One year later, we were up to 170. These are accountability scores from the state, and the 2024 scores for all the districts in Texas will be released soon. You’re going to see their A’s and B’s stay flat while their D’s and F’s go up. Meanwhile, Houston went from having 121 D- and F-rated schools to 41. It’s not easy to take an F school and turn it around, but we did it in spades in just one year.

Just looking at the schools in the New Education System program: After one year, we went from 53 F-rated schools to nine, and from 55 D-rated schools to 23. When we started, only 11 earned A’s or B’s, and now 87 do. We’re talking about mostly underserved populations of kids. 

Think about what a difference that makes for their academic career and beyond. I challenge you to find an urban district that has seen these kinds of outcomes after just two years.

What does it mean for a school to have a D or F grade? What should parents know about those schools?

If you attend one of those schools, the likelihood of gaining proficiency — being able to read or do math at grade level — is low. Your whole career, you will be haunted by that lack of proficiency because we, your educators, didn’t bring you to grade level. 

Down the road, here’s what these scores really mean: For Black and brown kids in this country, especially those who live in poverty, the system has not lived up to the promise America made to them. We’ve failed, in that sense. Across the country, the achievement gap has not closed in 20 years, and the opportunity gap has not closed. Black and brown poor kids are still mostly in failing schools. It’s like being on two tracks: Kids in well-resourced neighborhoods are on a track, and they can be expected to run one lap in one year’s time, but Black and brown and poor kids are starting 50 yards behind. 

We’ve got a changing world and workplace, and if you can’t read or do math at grade level, your opportunities are going to be proscribed. So when I see data like this, and you ask me what a D or F school is like compared to an A or B? We’re giving these kids, finally, a chance. 

We need to go bold and go big. There was earlier this year looking at how many high school graduates in the Houston area earned a livable wage. For the kids who graduated in 2017, the answer was 17%. Seventeen percent. 

What’s the secret, if one exists, to turning that around?

I believe there’s a recognition among superintendents that piecemeal, incremental reform has not worked. One of the things we’ve done too often over the last 30 years is to focus on doing maybe one big, bold thing instead of several. Invariably — because it’s an interconnected system where a lot of issues impact other issues — people have to step back from that one big reform. 

To take one example, if you want to change the way we compensate people, you have to ask whether compensation is going to be tied to an evaluation. And just asking that question suddenly becomes very controversial. Are you going to just give people money? Does the system have the resources for that? Should you get any outcomes from that?

Or say you want high-quality instructional materials. Will teachers use them? Will there be effective training? Do people actually understand the close integration of curriculum and instruction? Our profession is replete with stories of textbooks in boxes, still wrapped, in a teacher’s closet. So that one thing you want to do, which is both very expensive and a good thing, is tied to so many other things that the reform fails.

This brings us to something that’s become a mantra for you: “wholesale systemic transformation.” You invoke it often enough that your subordinates must have nightmares about it. Lots of people say that sort of thing when they take over a school district, but what do you mean by it?

It’s far-reaching, comprehensive reforms across the whole system, all at the same time. That will scare people unless they know what it means. Your image of someone waking up screaming about it at 3:00 a.m. is right for most people, but for us, it’s very clear what it entails. 

So, take instruction. When we talk about transforming instruction, that means a change in curriculum. It means a change in lesson planning. It means a new instructional model. It means a change in how teachers are monitored and coached, including on-the-job coaching. It means that principals have to be instructional leaders, which means that the people who coach principals have to be instructional leaders. It means staffing in a way that gets the best instruction possible — for instance, in the 130 NES schools, there are .

In other words, it means getting everyone on the same page about what high-quality instruction looks like, and then teaching and coaching the heck out of it. You monitor that, tie it to evaluations, and tie the evaluations to compensation. You’re changing the culture so that people focus on continuous improvement, high expectations, and accountability. And that’s just the start of it.

It sounds like this approach is drawn right from the education reform playbook, which is now mostly ignored. Are you a throwback to that era?

The reform era was 12–18 years ago. At that time, you had people like John Deasy and Dwight Jones and Chris Barbic and Cami Anderson and Michelle Rhee — there were reformers in big districts, and the movement had a lot of fans at that time. I was doing my thing in Harrison and Dallas.

We had a lot of support nationally from the philanthropic community, but there were also political discussions about reform during the debates about Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind. People were more willing to at least try new things. The problem was that there was such pushback and status quo bias, the reformers soon found themselves in the minority. And because they couldn’t change things quickly, their tenure didn’t last the time it would take to really make reforms. 

We’re now in a period when there’s hardly any discussion about bold reform. So to answer the question about whether I’m a throwback, the answer is partly yes. But I’ve learned over time, and one of the things I’ve learned is that you can’t do just one thing at a time; you have to do all these things at the same time. 

The challenge is that the more change you have, the more pushback there is, and the more status-quo bias gets in the way. You start impacting a lot of vested interests. So you have to have a team that can move quickly, and you have to generate proof that the change you’re bringing will actually work. If we’d only had modestly positive results in our first year, I’m not sure it would have been enough to satisfy the entrenched interests. But because we got such huge results, it put wind in our sails and took some out of the sails of the opposition.

So how does this “wholesale, systemic” style work in the context of a particular policy?

I’ll give you an example. Pay-for-performance had some success with Michelle Rhee , Tom Boasberg in Denver, me , and in a couple of other places. It wasn’t done well in most places that tried it — people confused it with incentive pay — and because of that, there was no proof point for the policy.

But in March of 2023, the National Bureau of Economic Research showing that the pay-for-performance system in Dallas, which is the largest in the nation, actually works well in driving achievement growth. D.C. continues to get kudos for its system, and in Houston, we’re now establishing a system that’s even larger than Dallas. So if it’s done right and done systemically, it can work. 

We also have a that hasn’t been seen anywhere else. It’s a combination of direct instruction and differentiated instruction, and it serves kids who struggle really well. That’s why our struggling students are growing the fastest in HISD. 

Without getting too technical, this notion of integrating curriculum and instruction is so advanced now that we can take new or inexperienced teachers and get them up to speed right away. We are providing PowerPoints, lesson objectives, demonstrations of learning, mini-quizzes, test material, differentiated assignments; we actually copy those materials for the teacher. If you’re a new teacher, you can still teach effectively because we’re giving you so much support and showing you the key steps. 

That is indeed a rare amount of influence for district leadership to exercise over classroom teaching. The interim results are impressive, but what do you say to teachers who complain about their lessons being scripted and worry that you’re encroaching in some way on their autonomy or professional mastery?

First of all, the lessons aren’t scripted. “You say this, the kids do this, you do that” — it’s not like that. You still have to be an effective teacher because, as we say all the time, curriculum does not teach. 

Just today I was training some of our executive directors, who each have four or five principals under their supervision. We were going over what we call the Great Eight and the Next Eight, which are strategies to improve instruction. Teachers, principals, and executive directors are all taught how to scaffold and when to scaffold. We teach them multiple engagement strategies, but teachers have to know when to use them and when not to use them. There’s a proper way to do for example, and it’s not right for some situations.

Today we talked about how teachers can take a question or answer from one kid, and instead of teaching that one student, they can expand the discussion to the whole class. That’s not scripted, in that there will be a time and a place to use that technique. 

So do your instructors actually like teaching this way?

Teachers like this, despite what you hear from a handful. Teachers in the 130 NES schools like that they get the curriculum and the resources. They like that they can leave 15 minutes after the last bell and be done. They like the PowerPoints they get, and they can always tweak them. 

The proof is in the pudding. In most of the non-NES schools, they are using our HISD curriculum even though they don’t have to. Teachers ask if they can use it, and the answer is yes: We created it, and it’s free for them to use. So 95 percent of the district schools are using this planned curriculum — in ELA, math, science, social studies, and the art of thinking — because it’s better for them. It’s already tied to the [the state standards], it comes with mini-quizzes, an answer key, and other texts and supplemental materials. I mean, what’s not to like? You don’t have to go on and hunt for resources. Even if I’m the most effective teacher, I’ll take the HISD curriculum and make it better. 

There’s a good lesson design model, which is not new to us. You direct-instruct the first part, you gradually release kids, and then you give them multiple opportunities to practice the objective. It’s divided into about 15 or 20 minutes for each part. Now, because we have inexperienced teachers, some of whom will spend 12 or 15 minutes just on the bell work, we’ve got a color-coded lesson deck. I believe the first 15 minutes are bordered in red, the next 15 are bordered in blue, and the last 15 are bordered in green. It’s not an exact science because every class is different, but they generally know that if they’re still in the red after 40 minutes of class time, their pace is way off. 

Do you think this kind of district takeover can be attempted elsewhere, and can its effects be sustained or improved upon? As you mentioned, the stories of backlash from the reform era may have been more numerous than the lasting successes. We haven’t heard much from Michelle Rhee in a while, even if her teacher evaluation system is still in place in Washington.

This is the right question to be asking. Every transformation has to fit the context it takes place in. What we’re doing in Houston probably can’t be replicated exactly in any other place. Having said that, however, a lot of people are looking for an answer. And most people recognize that we can’t keep doing what we’ve always done because times are desperate.

People from all over the country, including Alaska, are calling us to ask how we’re doing this. Boldness is what’s called for, and people are starting to have some hope that big turnarounds can be done. Kids will rise to the level of expectations, and we can narrow the achievement gap. What we’re doing would probably have to be tweaked in another place, but the underlying principle of comprehensive, wholesale reform can absolutely be accomplished. Everybody, whether you’re in a union state or a right-to-work state or whatever, can improve the quality of instruction.

But are most states and school districts even aiming at that goal? Between all the administrative concerns facing superintendents and the various non-academic priorities they have to deal with — absenteeism, social-emotional learning, discipline — teaching and learning can get lost in the shuffle.

Unfortunately, our profession has not really focused on it. We don’t have a lot of principals and superintendents who are instructional leaders because the focus has not been on instruction. In fact, we’ve had this notion that teachers need to be left alone to teach because they’re the experts. The truth of the matter is that effective teachers probably should be left alone to teach, but not everyone is effective. It takes a while to become effective, and even effective teachers can grow.

In this country, underserved populations have gotten the least effective and least experienced teachers. It’s a great shame for our profession, but it’s been an enduring problem. Do we want to leave those teachers alone to teach? No. We want to grow their capacities. We’re having teacher shortages in a lot of places, and particularly in Texas, we’re having to hire non-certified teachers. hired in Texas last year were not certified. That’s a lot! 

We need to be able to say, “Effective teachers, do your thing. But everyone else, we need to make sure you’re effective.” To me, the word “effective” only applies if you’re getting outcomes. I’m going to question it unless I see some results. For the vast majority of teachers, we need to guide them and coach them. They need to be coached by principals who know what they’re doing. I’m very sympathetic to a teacher who says, “My principal doesn’t know anything about instruction, so why should he evaluate me?” That’s absolutely fair. But other districts can do what we’ve done here, which is to make sure principals are instructional leaders, raise the quality of instruction, support teachers and raise the level of accountability and expectations.

Can I ask about Houston’s since 2023, when the takeover began? I’m aware that this decline is part of a bigger, ongoing slide that began before COVID, and that lots of districts are dealing with similar issues. But are you concerned at all that some families are looking elsewhere because they feel these reforms aren’t for them and won’t help their kids?

I’m glad you put the enrollment issue in context. Almost every large, urban district is losing enrollment, even in Texas. In Houston, we’ve had fewer kids being born for a few years now. And we’ve always had transfers from low-performing, D- or F-rated schools to charters, so it wasn’t surprising that people left in our first year. Now we have vouchers, which could also affect us.

Across the nation, since COVID, we also have kids dropping out of school. There are some economic forces at work in that some kids just haven’t seen the value in high school — or at least not value enough to stay. You’re 17 or 18 years old, you could have your senior year, but you can’t read at grade level, and you failed algebra. So you quit to drive for Uber or deliver packages for Amazon. The gig economy is competing for those kids.

All that is happening. But having said that, we are already seeing that the sentiment is changing among our families after only two years. Kids are getting the education they want, and they’re at A- or B-rated schools. One of my executive directors was at her hair dresser, who has a kid in the system. This parent said, “I was against the reforms at first, but my school went from a C to an A, and my kid is happier about doing better in school.” That was echoed by the other people in the shop, that things are changing and kids are getting a better education.

I know, that’s just an anecdote. But there are a lot of those anecdotes. Our sentiment survey shows that people are happy with what’s going on in their schools. I’m engaged in this stuff every day, but most people are not; they care about their kids, their kids’ teachers and the principal. The bigger reforms are nice to hear about every once in a while, but those are their priorities. We think we’ll get enrollment back up when these schools show, consistently, that they are A and B schools.

Some school districts have been able to win back families in a really impressive way. Newark, which was in a lot of trouble, during and after their takeover period. So could this be a marker to judge your successes in Houston?

We’re doing so much better than Newark ever did. The data shows that our underserved populations have narrowed the gap incredibly, have outpaced similar populations across the state, have done well on NAEP and have attended A- and B-rated schools for several years in a row. So yeah, I think we can compete with the charters.

The existing research on state takeovers has shown very mixed results. Success stories have been few, most of those have been rather small, and none have seen the effects you have in Houston. Does your experience here definitively show that takeover can work?

The most important thing is that once you put your team in place, they have to show that they can get outcomes for kids. Once a new team comes in, whether it’s in a takeover context or not, just making piecemeal changes or doing the same things as the old team will make people question what the point is. People should not be happy with a new superintendent or administrative team that just does what’s always been done and doesn’t get a change in outcomes.

Again, this is true whether it’s a takeover or just a regular superintendent and school board. If a district is struggling such that it could be subject to a takeover, then bold, effective reform is the order of the day. We are providing a proof point that it can be done, and that Black and brown kids challenged by poverty and language barriers can rise to high expectations. Don’t sell them short, don’t say it’ll take eight years or five years to do it. We went from 56 F-rated schools to seven, and eventually to zero. That’s making a statement that transformation doesn’t need to take five, six, seven years. It can be done quickly.

There’s no question, there will be challenges in achieving that. There will be capacity issues, leadership issues, public pushback. But those can be managed with good leadership and knowledge of how to get things done.

Education Commissioner Mike Morath had until June 1 to decide next steps for the state’s largest school district, whose former superintendent and elected school board members were ousted and replaced in 2023 due to years of poor academic outcomes at a single campus and allegations of leadership misconduct.

Since then, state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles has , a controversial figure in Houston who has ushered improvements on state exams while struggling to win over community support.

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Still, Morath decided to extend the intervention until June 1, 2027, applauding the district for its improvements but citing the need for more progress. That progress, he said, will have to include no school campuses with failing accountability scores across multiple years, compliance with special education requirements and improved school board governance.

Morath on Monday also announced the appointment of four new school board members, replacing four he selected in 2023.

“With the changes made in the last two years, Houston ISD is well on its way to being a district where all of its schools provide students with the educational opportunities that will allow them to access the American Dream,” the commissioner said in a statement. “Ultimately, two years has not been enough time to fix district systems that were broken for decades. The extension of this intervention will allow the district to build on its progress and achieve lasting success for students once the board transitions back to elected leadership.”

The Houston Chronicle the extension of the takeover.

Under Miles’ leadership, the district has experienced and. Miles, who inherited a district that for years ran an overall well-performing school system, has faced accusations of shepherding a militaristic educational environment where teachers have limited freedom to teach in ways they see fit and children are exhausted and disengaged from learning.

Miles, on the other hand, has touted on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR test, and progress in the district’s A-F accountability ratings as proof that his model is effective, an achievement that Morath and state lawmakers have publicly commended.

During the November election, Houston voters shot down a plan to approve in academic and infrastructure improvements for the school district — the largest proposal of its kind in state history — which many saw as a litmus test for Miles’ support.

This article originally appeared in at . The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Texas teachers may be increasingly fed up with their job, but they’re still staying in school.

State data shows Texas public school educators continue to return to the classroom at somewhat similar rates as years past, despite multiple surveys showing the large majority of them have contemplated quitting the profession.

While teacher turnover has slightly increased over the past decade, state data show there hasn’t been a large exodus of experienced teachers. In fact, the average years of experience for Texas public school teachers hasn’t notably changed since 2014-15, nor has the share of first-year teachers hired by districts.

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The numbers run counter to years of warnings that Texas teachers are primed to bolt en masse out of frustration with the job. At the same time, Texas does still face widespread issues with morale, as well as big challenges in finding certified teachers and filling several types of positions, including special education educators and bilingual teachers.

Steady hands in schools

While much has changed in Texas classrooms over the decade, students continue to be educated by mostly veteran teachers. The average tenure for Texas teachers has held steady during that stretch, ranging from 10.9 to 11.2 years of experience.

The state did see a slight dip in the share of first-year teachers — who, on average, have less positive impact on student achievement than other educators — during the late 2010s, then a slight uptick over the past few years. Still, novice teachers account for fewer than 1-in-10 Texas educators.

A small rise in turnover

Teacher turnover, a measure of how many educators don’t return to teach in the same district each year, has ticked higher since the pandemic. While it once hovered near 16 percent, it’s reached roughly 20 percent over the past two years.

Ultimately, a 4 percentage point difference equates to about 15,000 more teachers who aren’t returning to a classroom in their district. However, state data shows teachers of all experience levels are leaving at similar rates.

Still stressed

Teachers might be sticking with their jobs, but that doesn’t mean they’re happy about it.

A 2024 by the Charles Butt Foundation, an Austin-based education advocacy nonprofit, found nearly four-fifths of educators surveyed had seriously considered quitting the profession in the past year. Pay, quality of campus leadership and a sense of feeling valued ranked among the biggest factors in whether teachers had considered quitting.

Separate polls by two of the largest Texas educator unions — the and — also showed about two-thirds of teachers had considered leaving the profession.

Texas education leaders also are worried about the state’s ability to retain teachers and hire tough-to-fill positions. A state panel convened by the Texas Education Agency examined the issues and made numerous recommendations in 2023, though have been put into action.

As teachers leave Texas schools, district leaders are increasingly , who generally leave the profession sooner than certified teachers.

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Houston ISD voters resoundingly rejected a $4.4 billion school bond package Tuesday, a victory for opponents of the district’s state-appointed leadership and setback for the district’s years-long push to upgrade campuses.

About 58 percent of voters opposed , which promised to rebuild or significantly renovate roughly three dozen schools, improve campus security, upgrade schools’ heating and cooling systems and expand preschool offerings, among other changes. The school bond proposal was the largest in Texas history, and it became the first Texas school bond after the previous 23 passed.

HISD’s last school bond vote, held in 2012, received support from two-thirds of district voters.

The vote came a year and a half after a controversial June 2023 state takeover of HISD, in which the Texas Education Agency installed a new superintendent, Mike Miles, and school board. Since then, Miles has carried out a dramatic overhaul of the district, turning HISD into one of the . 

The bond vote garnered extra attention because it represented community members’ first opportunity to vote on an issue that will meaningfully impact district operations since Miles’ appointment. Many voters saw it as a referendum on Miles’ leadership, with his critics rallying behind the slogan, “No trust, no bond.”

Steve McHenry, 76, who cast his ballot at a polling location in Houston’s Frenchtown neighborhood, said he was voting against the schools package because of issues with the district’s leadership. All his children attended HISD schools but are now grown, he said.

“I don’t like the superintendent and I don’t like the state running (HISD),” McHenry said.

Usually, large Texas districts pass bonds roughly every five years to keep campus facilities up to date, but HISD . In that time, the district has put off roughly $10 billion worth of needed maintenance and repairs, HISD administrators said during several bond-related meetings. The $4.4 billion total represented HISD’s most immediate needs for safe and healthy learning conditions, they said. 

The district will now have to pay for some of those upkeep costs out of its general fund, leaving less cash for other operating expenses, such as staff salaries.

Miles expressed frustration with the bond result in a statement HISD released Tuesday evening, arguing students across the district would bear the brunt of the community’s decision.

“In this instance, the politics of adults beat out the needs of our children,” Miles wrote. “I cannot promise our aging facilities and systems will never be a barrier to student learning. We will do our best to keep long expired heating and cooling systems running, but on very hot or very cold days, we are likely going to have to close campuses to keep students safe.”

Jackie Anderson, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, HISD’s largest employee union, celebrated the early voting results as a sign that a wide coalition of community members oppose HISD’s leadership. She hopes the vote encourages Miles and his team to take the union’s concerns more seriously.

“We hope that this sends a resounding message to them that we’re not going away,” Anderson said. “It would behoove them to sit down and talk to us.”

Two education advocacy nonprofits that have been high-profile bond advocates, Good Reason Houston and Houstonians for Great Public Schools, released statements shortly after early voting results were published that treated the bond result as a defeat. Both groups are backed by some of Houston’s wealthiest philanthropists, who helped raise about $2 million to support the bond through a political action committee.

“We are deeply disappointed that the HISD bond measure did not pass,” Good Reason Houston CEO Cary Wright said in a statement. “This outcome means we must continue to work within the current insufficient infrastructure, even though we know students deserve and need more.”

Because HISD typically has held bond elections during the November of even-numbered years, the district may be at least two years away from another bond vote. If leaders choose to wait until the state returns power to a locally elected school board, the timeline would likely extend until at least the 2028 election.

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Things are different in the Houston Independent School District. One year into the state intervention in the district, our results show meaningful growth for students and schools because we’ve embraced wholesale systemic transformation.  

This progress is the result of some innovative practices, but also strategies that education leaders throughout the country already know. The biggest challenge has never been knowing which policies work, but rather summoning the will to do what is right for children, even when the politics are treacherous.

Twenty years ago, leaders willing to transform school systems and the lives of their students boldly dotted the national map. But as the politics got tougher, too many educators and elected officials learned the unfortunate lesson that doing what is right for kids doesn’t always lead to reelection or a contract extension. Today, most leaders don’t dare utter the words “transformation” or “accountability,” and school systems take a piecemeal approach or abandon any effort to improve instructional quality because it is easier on adults. Never mind that honest-to-God transformation of our school systems is exactly what students need. 

In Houston, we’ve embraced transformational change with our New Education System model.  What sets it apart from many previous reforms is its wholesale systemic approach. Unlike piecemeal reforms that often falter due to a lack of coherence and sustained focus, NES aims to build a new system from the ground up, ensuring that all components work in unison toward the same goals.

In particular, it changes how students are taught and how we approach training and professional development for educators. The model combines instruction with real-time feedback through mini-assessments, ensuring that students who are behind get the extra help they need. At the same time, those who are ahead are continually challenged with multi-disciplinary projects that focus on writing over multiple-choice questions. This allows students to demonstrate critical and creative thinking. 

Effective teaching is at the core. The district has invested heavily in training principals to be instructional leaders. They conduct spot observations to better understand how to support teachers and then coach them to help improve their instruction. A new, rigorous evaluation system for principals gauges how well they achieve these goals. 

We have also established leadership academies to train and develop aspiring teachers and principals. This is essential as we work to tackle a shortage of educators. The district hopes to have at least 70 graduates from the Principal Leadership Academy by May 2025.

In addition, NES provides instruction that helps equip young people with the knowledge and skills they will need in a rapidly evolving job market and world. Amid advancements in artificial intelligence and shifts in the economy, we are expanding our offerings of electives with a particular focus on AI. One semester-long course for 11th and 12th graders provides an introduction to generative AI and how to use it safely and ethically. In addition, the district has launched a FutureReady Cohort that trains 200 school staffers on how to use the technology and begin integrating it into lesson plans. For instance, a teacher might explain a couple of methods to solve a math problem to a high school class, then use generative AI to present additional approaches to prompt a discussion.

We also want to impart and foster critical thinking skills, as these are and will continue to be essential for millions of jobs. The district has introduced a curriculum known as the Art of Thinking at all NES schools. It includes lessons on how to combine facts with logic, understand bias and correlation, and devise questions that could be asked in specific scenarios. 

After just one year of implementing NES at an initial set of 85 schools, the district has seen significant . In grades 4 and 6, students at these schools improved their reading scores by 8 and 10 percentage points, respectively, while high schoolers jumped 10 points in algebra and 7 in English.

Coalition for Advancing Student Excellence Houston called these gains .

Because our professional development and focus on better instruction extends to all schools, our districtwide transformation efforts have had effects even outside the NES model. Across the district, preliminary state accountability data shows that the number of A- and B-rated schools increased by 82%, from 93 in 2023 to 170 in 2024. Meanwhile, the number of NES schools achieving an A or B rating skyrocketed 480%, from 11 in 2023 to 53 in 2024, and the number earning a D or F declined from 121 to only 41 during that time period.

None of this has been easy. Even when everyone in a community knows things must improve, systemic change can trigger fierce pushback. But no matter how hard it is, students deserve a quality public education. It is up to superintendents, school board members and elected leaders who have a say over education to deliver it. District leaders can’t afford to abandon large-scale reform to the past. In Houston, we are seeing incredible results. We hope other districts will find inspiration to pick up the tools of transformation and join us.

From purchasing alarm clocks, donating Uber gift cards, showing up on families’ doorsteps and even attempting to help parents plan their vacations, Clear Creek ISD employees are exhausting their options to get students to show up to school.

In the roughly 40,000-student district southeast of Houston, 17 percent of students were considered “chronically absent” during the 2022-23 school year – meaning they missed at least 18 school days. That’s up nearly double from five years ago.

The issue is not unique to Clear Creek ISD. Mirroring a nationwide, persistent trend, rates of chronically absent Houston-area students exploded after the pandemic. It’s a phenomenon that leaves many wondering why kids aren’t coming to school like they used to – and what it will take to fix that.

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Houston’s other largest districts did not make administrators available for an interview for this story.

School leaders and education experts say high absenteeism has devastating ripple effects on students’ academic performance, school district funding and society’s overall perceived importance of the classroom. Yet there is no clear solution, causing schools to scramble to improve attendance habits.

“There did become the feeling of, ‘Is schooling optional?’” said Holly Hughes, Clear Creek ISD’s assistant superintendent of elementary education. “We know that the habits start in pre-K, in our earliest years, with parents understanding the value and the intention. It’s a lot to get our students to school in the morning.”

When schools returned in-person after the pandemic sent classes online, most large Houston districts saw their chronic absenteeism rates double. Those rates decreased in the 2022-23 school year — the most recently available state data — but still remain much higher than pre-pandemic levels.

‘Do we even need the school?’

The pandemic shattered the routine of going to school each morning, and once students returned, the lingering option of remote learning was largely seen as an acceptable alternative for when students don’t show up in person.

“People became comfortable staying home and not going to school, where they could dial in or not dial in,” said Kevin Brown, executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators. “There wasn’t anybody there to enforce that.”

That’s created an issue larger than anyone knows how to fix, let alone any one district, says Joshua Childs, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education. To him, it signals to him a shift in the culture of American schooling.

“At this moment, we are wrestling, as a country, as a state, in terms of what we value when it comes to educating the kids under the age of 18,” Childs said. “Like, what’s the value of education, and what’s the purpose of the school itself? And do we even need the school?”

School leaders and education experts agree that a student’s attendance has major impacts on their academic achievement. The Texas Education Agency that chronically absent students are more likely to perform poorly on standardized tests, and they’re less likely to attend or complete college.

In a late June State Board of Education meeting, TEA commissioner Mike Morath hypothesized that increased absences could be a reason why studentg across Texas.

“Our broad hypothesis of this is that Covid caused much higher absenteeism from instruction, and as a result, much more mathematics gaps,” Morath said. “The linear nature of mathematics as a discipline is such that if a student misses little chunks of that discipline along the way, that may or may not cause them immediate problems, but it will certainly, at some point in time, prevent them from achieving higher levels of mathematics.”

But the problem lies in getting students and families to understand these stakes.

“One of the things that the pandemic … maybe raised more questions around, is, ‘What’s actually the purpose of schooling? If I can do it through my phone. I can learn through TikTok. I can learn through using technology in different ways, and arriving in a building every single day may not be what’s best for my kids or myself,’” Childs said. “It has big impacts, as far as academic outcomes, employment, post-secondary opportunities, social, mental, physical health outcomes. All of that is impacted based on a child’s attendance.”

Across-the-board issue

Chronic absenteeism affects students across different demographics – campus-level data shows that in some Houston districts, schools in both affluent and underserved communities post similarly high rates of absenteeism.

Students in underserved areas may miss school because they lack necessities like transportation, or because they have a job to support their families. Meanwhile, students from more affluent families may miss class to take regular vacations or visit colleges. Across the board, it’s easier to keep kids at home because parents are increasingly able to work remotely.

With no simple root cause, there’s no crystal-clear solution to keeping kids in the classroom.

Hughes, the Clear Creek administrator, said she found it isn’t as simple as providing more “wraparound” resources such as clothing and transportation. They’ve had to urge families to schedule doctor appointments and college visits on staff professional development days, supply suggested dates for vacations, and try to communicate the overall importance of the in-person school routine.

“It’s important to start those traditions, those expectations and those structures in the home early,” Hughes said. “Going to school on a daily basis and committing to that follow through every day, it takes a lot on a family unit. … I think it became hard for parents.”

A pricey problem

Brown said declining attendance is a circular issue – the more kids miss school, the less money districts have to rectify low attendance.

The Texas government funds schools based on their average daily attendance, meaning total attendance counts for the year are divided by the number of instructional days to produce the number of students a district is funded for.

Proponents of attendance-based funding say it provides incentive for improving attendance, while critics have long argued it more heavily penalizes schools with students dealing with socioeconomic factors that drive absenteeism.

Many school districts across Texas have outlined multimillion-dollar budget deficits this year, and several Houston-area school boards have pointed to declining attendance rates as a factor contributing to their financial woes.

“Schools are working really hard to try to get the kids in but it takes the parents and the kids, as well, to get them into school,” Brown said. “Schools can’t do much on attendance, other than encourage and try to build an environment where kids want to be there.”

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Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District leaders plan to cut their librarian staff in half next year, becoming the latest Houston-area district to reduce librarians amid budget cuts. 

Expecting a $138 million budget deficit for the 2024-25 school year, leaders of the Houston-area’s second largest school district are aiming to slash roughly 670 staff positions, including 50 librarians.

The plan would leave 42 librarians in a district with 117,000 students and 88 schools.

The changes have not yet been voted on by the district’s school board, but a district spokesperson confirmed the plans to the Landing on Monday. The district has until the end of June to adopt a finalized budget.

“Staff reduction is inevitable when almost 90 percent of the budget is allocated to personnel,” district spokesperson Leslie Francis said Monday. 

As Texas school districts reduce costs, librarians have taken blows.

Four of Texas’ largest school districts — Houston, San Antonio and Spring Branch, and now Cy-Fair — have either made plans to or have eliminated dozens of librarians in the last year. 

Texas lawmakers failed to significantly increase public school funding during the 2023 legislative session, spelling financial trouble for districts as they grapple with inflationary costs and the end of pandemic-relief funds. 

Tara Cummings, a parent with students at Cy-Woods High School and Spillane Middle School, feels like the district’s leadership has its hands tied as it tries to save money, but she wishes the changes didn’t have to gut “the heart and soul of a school.”

“I don’t know really what the alternative is. The cuts have to come from somewhere,” Cummings said. “The anger needs to be focused on our Republican-led state government. They have the money to fund public education. They just won’t do it.”

A Cy-Fair spokesperson did not respond to a list of questions about the reduction plan, including how the 42 librarians would be placed across 88 schools.

Cy-Fair Superintendent Douglas Killian assembled a group of community members and stakeholders to form a “budget reduction advisory committee” and make recommendations to the administration. 

However, cutting librarians was not included in a list of committee ideas or listed on the budget reduction plan presented to trustees at an April 22 board meeting. Board president Scott Henry did not respond to calls from the Landing Monday. 

In recent budget workshops, leaders have discussed their plan to offset $70 million of their $138 million deficit with their fund balance, or rainy day funds. The rest will come from cost-saving changes, such as cutting staff positions. 

Librarians in Cy-Fair earned annual salaries ranging from roughly $64,000 to $97,000 in 2022-23, the most recent year with state data.

“I think there’s probably a less worse option than (cutting librarians), but I don’t know what it is,” said Cummings, the Cy-Fair parent. “And regardless of what it is, it’s going to piss off somebody and devastate somebody.”

In an email to a community member obtained by the Landing, Superintendent Killian warned “this is truly the beginning of cuts” and the librarian reductions are “just the tip of the iceberg.”

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Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles will require roughly two dozen schools to cut 12 percent of their budgets next year, initiating a painful but expected process meant to bring campus-level spending in line with declining enrollments.

The cuts will target schools not participating in Miles’ “New Education System” next year, whose budgets are managed by campus principals. HISD manages the budgets of schools in the NES program and funds them at a significantly higher level than other schools.

On Tuesday, HISD provided half of the district’s principals with preliminary information about their campus budgets for next year and plans to provide information to the other half Wednesday. Most of HISD’s roughly 140 non-NES principals will have to make cuts in their spending, capped at a 12 percent reduction, due to decreases in the number of students attending their schools.

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Roughly 25 schools will have to slash the maximum 12 percent, while about 35 schools will see increases to their budgets, Miles estimated in a Monday interview with the Houston Landing. That leaves dozens more schools to reduce spending between 1 and 12 percent. HISD declined to say which schools will be subject to the steepest cuts.

The tough financial pill stems from a decision by Miles to end HISD’s pandemic-era policy to insulate schools from budget cuts, even when their enrollment and attendance decline. With pandemic relief money set to soon run out and with HISD expected to run a this year, Miles said it is time to bring spending in line with student counts.

“People have known this is coming,” Miles said. “If they’ve lost 100 kids, they are going to have to cut some staff. At some point, we do have to stop paying for kids who actually aren’t there.”

In recent years, HISD has lost about 32,000 students, . Since the policy of not reducing schools’ budgets based on attendance went into effect, more than 150 schools have lost 12 percent or more of their student enrollments, including more than 60 non-NES schools.

In total, the cuts will save about $15 million across the district, Miles said. The savings represent a of Miles has said he plans to make next year. However, they represent the first time Miles has outlined plans likely to result in widespread staffing reductions at the campus level.

Due to a in 2024-25 and a dramatic increase in the number of overhauled schools paying teachers salaries $10,000 to $20,000 above their typical rates, HISD plans to spend an additional $114 million on staff next year, including $74 million at NES schools, according to Chief of Human Resources Jessica Neyman. Miles has said he plans to present a draft budget proposal for next year’s spending to HISD’s board of managers in May.

Schools undergoing Miles’ transformation, which typically have a quarter to a third more employees than other HISD schools, also will be subject to limited staffing cuts if they have lost students, Miles said. He estimated  NES schools could lose one to two non-teaching roles.

Former Love Elementary Principal Sean Tellez, who resigned in early March, said he thinks the cuts fall unfairly on schools not participating in Miles’ overhaul program. The end of the policy insulating campuses from attendance-related budget cuts did not surprise him, because former HISD Superintendent Millard House’s administration had warned it was coming. However, he thought the whole district would be subject to the painful spending decisions, rather than just the half not participating in Miles’ NES program.

As a principal, Tellez had to make budget cuts, including last year reducing the work hours of the Love Elementary nurse and librarian, eliminating a technology role and cutting a front office worker. If he were forced to eliminate 12 percent of his spending, he would have to cut at least one teacher and it would be “virtually impossible” to keep students from feeling the losses, he said.

“The overwhelming vibe, or feeling, amongst the non-NES principals has been, because we’re not NES, we’re going to have to bear the burden of this increased budget for NES schools and we’re going to be on our own,” Tellez said.

Researcher Chad Aldeman, who previously served as policy director at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab and now runs the organization , studies school enrollment and staffing trends nationwide. Across the country, most school districts have seen increasing numbers of staff-per-student ratios since the pandemic, mostly due to student headcounts falling faster than staffing levels, he said, creating looming budgetary difficulties.

However, while making cuts to balance staffing levels may be necessary in many instances, it rarely is straightforward, Aldeman explained.

“Let’s say you lose 20 students across an elementary, they’re not going to be all in one grade. … So, you might lose two students or two-and-a-half students from every grade, and you can’t just reduce your staff by one fourth-grade teacher,” Aldeman said. “None of these things are fun. They’re not good for kids.”

Miles said he empathizes with principals now facing dreaded decisions, but said he had no other choice. HISD is easing the process for principals by covering certain expenses, such as approved curricular materials, he said.

“I’ve been a principal, I’ve been a charter school principal, and I know what it is to have to do a budget and I know what a cut looks like, even a 10 percent cut,” Miles said. “​​If I can protect the classroom from any cut, that’s what we’re going to do. But we do have to live within our means now.”

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“I accepted it, because I didn’t know any better,” said Tieu, who didn’t find encouragement from her own Vietnamese family either. “My father was like, ‘Oh, I’m so surprised that they selected you to be the principal.’ ”

A decade later, Tieu has not only been an assistant principal and principal, she’s now in charge of student support services for the Houston Independent School District — the eighth-largest school system in the U.S. But as an Asian woman and a single mother, she still feels pressure to prove herself in a male-dominated field.

“I spend double the time to make sure that everything I produce is 100% — nothing less,” she said.

The comment about Tieu’s height — and job prospects — is among the anecdotes district and state leaders shared as part of a first-of-its-kind of women serving in high-level school positions. Conducted by , a 300-member national network, the results show that despite ascending to senior roles in school systems and state departments, the vast majority of female leaders experience bias and think often about quitting. Over 80% of the 110 women who responded, from 27 states, said they feel they have to watch how they dress, speak and act because they are in the spotlight as senior leaders.

“I have found myself in high-powered meetings where men in leadership roles do not even look at me, but instead address my male colleagues,” said Angélica Infante-Green, Rhode Island education commissioner and a Women Leading Ed board member. “In a world where traditional notions of leadership have been predominantly shaped by men, there exists a profound need for diversity in representation.”

The survey, one expert said, comes at a time when districts could benefit from strengths many women bring to the table.

“Women who come up through this pipeline have often been elementary school principals and that sometimes precludes them from being selected as superintendents,” said Rachel White, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, assistant professor. She launched , a research center, last summer to improve data collection on school system leaders. It’s common, she said, for school boards to view high school principals, who are , as more authoritarian or to prefer someone with a background in finance. “The type of leadership we need right now around family and student engagement and curriculum and instruction — elementary school principals really get that right.” 

But many women leaders say they face a double standard. 

“When a man in leadership takes time to coach his child’s sports team, he is applauded,” Infante-Green said. “If I choose to attend my daughter’s dance recital over a meeting, I am judged much differently.”

One leader quoted in the report said she was told to wear a skirt instead of pants to a presentation so she didn’t “come off as intimidating.” , Hispanic and Asian-American women were even more likely to feel pressure related to their behavior — 55%, compared with 36% for white women. One Black leader’s colleagues said the way she greeted students with “What’s up” made them uncomfortable because she was “speaking Ebonics.”

Tieu, in Houston, said students are often surprised to see a minority woman, especially an Asian woman, in leadership. 

“I want to show these young ladies that there’s nothing wrong with having aspirations,” she said. “There are going to be moments in time when you have to overcome barriers, but be smart and learn from it.”

The survey results build on the conducted by ILO Group, a women-owned firm focused on education policy and leadership. Nationally, over 20% of the nation’s 500 largest school districts saw turnover at the top, according to the 2023 results. Among women, the rate was slightly higher — 26%.

The most recent analysis also showed that even with a modest increase in the number appointed to superintendent positions, women still represent less than a third of those leading school districts. Women, however, make up 80% of the teacher workforce and more than half of school principals. 

Julia Rafal-Baer, CEO of Women Leading Ed and ILO, called it a “glass cliff,” and said when women reach higher ranks, they“nearly universally experience bias that impacts their ability to do their job, how they feel about their work and their overall well-being.”

Sixty percent of women leaders said they think about quitting due to stress, and of those, three-quarters said they contemplate leaving on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Loren Widmer, director of student services for the Affton School District, outside St. Louis, left a neighboring system after unsuccessful efforts to advance into administration.

“I really felt like the only potential way to move ahead in that district was to be part of the good old boys club,” she said. “If you didn’t go to school there, play on the football team and come up through the ranks, there was no chance that you would progress.”

That became clear to her in 2017 when she was in line for an assistant principal job. The district offered her a 9 a.m. interview on a Friday, the same morning she was scheduled to have a C-section. She asked for an alternative time — even a virtual interview at noon the same day of her son’s birth — but the official turned her down. The position later went to a man.

‘Among all these men’

The new survey follows a that Rafal-Baer initiated on LinkedIn, asking women leaders to share some of the worst comments they’ve heard along their “professional journey.” Some of the nation’s top education leaders weighed in.

“A … colleague said (in front of the others), ‘You must be really proud to be the only woman among all these men,’ and then squeezed my shoulder a little longer than anyone needed,“ recalled Carolyne Quintana, a deputy chancellor for the New York City schools.

Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress, shared a comment she heard as a new mom. 

“An older male colleague bitterly complained he wished he’d gotten a three-month vacation after I got back from a horrible, miserable, painful maternity leave,” she wrote. 

And Daylene Long, CEO of a STEM education company, posted that someone told her, “Being competitive is not an attractive trait in a woman.”

‘You don’t have to choose’

But some leaders also see signs of progress. 

In Affton, Widmer’s district, half of the top-level staff and four of the five principals are women. She thinks the support women feel contributes to the district’s stability. 

“You don’t have to choose between staying home with your sick kids or leading a department,” Widmer said. “You can do both.”

And in the early months of the pandemic, Infante-Green participated in daily with then-Gov. Gina Raimondo and Dr. Nicole Alexander-Scott, the former state health director. A mother even sent the commissioner a card with Superwoman on it as a thank you for inspiring her daughter. 

“In that moment, it dawned on me that our presence together at those news conferences was more than just symbolic; it was a powerful statement of solidarity and resilience,” she said. “It sent a positive message that in Rhode Island, leadership knows no gender boundaries.”

Mike Miles, the superintendent appointed by the state in the summer to turn around the Houston Independent School District, said Saturday he would need the next four to five years to put it on the right path.

“We have to build a culture of high performance,” he said during a Texas Tribune Festival panel. “This is a long-term proposition to change culture. Culture is changed over time.”

He presented himself as single-minded in his goal to improve educational outcomes in Houston ISD, saying he’s acting quickly so students don’t lose more time and he can bring back the democratically-elected school board.

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“I’m trying to do this as fast as we can, but I’m not sure we can do it overnight,” he said.

During the event, Miles said he expects about 70 schools to receive a D or F in the state’s accountability system from an A-F scale, which takes into account state test scores. One of his main tasks at the district’s helm will be to change that: He’s required to ensure none of the schools receive a failing grade in multiple consecutive years.

He also gave himself a deadline to start producing results.

“If we don’t start to see the needle move in two years, you should fire me,” he said. “That’s accountability.”

Miles said lack of accountability is a problem in the educator profession. One of the ways he wants to hold educators accountable is by tying compensation to classroom outcomes. Teacher unions say that’s an unfair and ineffective way to gauge teacher performance since test scores are just a snapshot of what children learn throughout the year and may not reflect their true academic achievement.

Several Houston ISD teachers and community members have criticized him for his “my way or the highway” approach. He doubled down Saturday, saying those working in the district who don’t like his changes can choose to leave.

“If they don’t want to work in that kind of culture, they need to make the decisions that’s right for them,” he said.

Miles has been at the helm of Houston ISD for four months and has wasted no time implementing his vision, facing criticism for the abruptness and rigidity of his plan. Since taking over in June, more than 80 campuses have been placed under his so-called “,” which he describes as an “innovative staffing model that puts the focus on classroom instruction and improved student outcomes.”

The state’s takeover of Houston ISD was in response to years of poor academic outcomes at a single campus in the district, Phillis Wheatley High School; allegations of misconduct against school board members; and the ongoing presence of a conservator who’s been overseeing the district for years. Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath has said state law required his agency to respond by either closing Wheatley or appointing a new board to oversee the district.

Many parents and teachers have criticized the system as a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t bode well for students who learn differently. Educators are tasked with following a strict teaching schedule prepared by district leadership in an effort to save them time they usually spend preparing curriculum. Teachers say the district’s plans limit their ability to adapt their lessons and often need to be corrected.

Miles also converted some of Houston ISD’s libraries to discipline areas and reassigned librarians, which drew the ire of several panel attendees who defended libraries as an important part of a child’s development.

But Miles said the bad experiences some attendees described were purely anecdotal and framed them as examples of the “status quo” thinking prevalent in the state’s education system.

“We can’t keep doing the same things,” he said.

This article originally appeared in , a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Imagine a high school class where students use 3D modeling software to create blueprints, gather around a mixing board to produce a song or turn their custom artwork into streetwear. These experiences are far from what we see in many traditional high school classes. 

Innovative educators are using to make their classes more engaging and relevant. More than an academic buzzword, PBL involves students in their learning by embracing real-world issues with hands-on solutions. It also gives them a taste of life beyond classroom walls, especially when a school works with community partners in business, academia or the nonprofit sector. 

Educators at XQ high schools engage students in meaningful PBL year-round. They’re among schools nationwide where educators enrich and strengthen their approaches to PBL by embracing , one of the six research-based for successful high schools. Learning becomes more when students take what they’re studying at school into the real world, seeing how academic concepts apply to places and people they know. 

Here are 10 examples of projects to inspire educators and community groups for the upcoming school year. 

1. Nurture Entrepreneurs

in Oakland, California offers students the opportunity to do long-term internships, particularly during their junior and senior years. Students can spend a month working with tech companies, local businesses, the courts and nonprofits in the Bay Area. When the pandemic posed challenges in arranging internships, Dean of Students Christian Martinez organized a two-hour class on Mondays and Tuesdays for seniors to gain financial literacy. He focused the class on the stock market, and encouraged students to develop brands and messages that resonated with their identities, cultures and histories. He ensured the course aligned with the state’s content standards, emphasizing research and evidence-based learning. Martinez said he came up with his idea for the class after seeing how the seniors didn’t seem excited about school when they came back in person during the pandemic. 

His students learned graphic design with software programs. They also had to pitch their ideas to community members, incorporate feedback and articulate the story behind their brand through presentations of learning. 

Martinez said he leveraged a grant from Nike to give each of his 16 students $500-$1,000 to have their hoodies, T-shirts and tote bags printed nearby. They then sold the clothes at Latitude’s big celebration of learning in the spring of 2022. Their brand names included “Cruzando Fronteras” (crossing borders), “Truth and Lies,” and “Humble Beginnings.” 

By the end of the spring semester, Martinez said, “I saw the spark that I needed to see from them for them to end the year in a place where they feel successful — regardless of whether they go to college or work.” 

2. Make Music

The Memphis Artists United Project served as a powerful platform for collaboration in the fall of 2022 between eight talented musicians from Memphis, Tennessee and the students of music production class, led by teacher Ty Boyland. Together, they embarked on a musical journey to create “,” a song addressing gun violence with a bilingual verse by a talented 12th grader, shedding light on the impact of guns within the Latino community. The song got attention from local media and at youth conferences, leading to conversations about how young people experience violence and what solutions they can propose. Also at Crosstown High: science teacher Nikki Wallacemakes some powerful community partnerships by working with local researchers.

Want more ideas for rethinking your high school? The XQ Xtra is a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

3. Start a Small Farm

At in Endicott, NY, students designed a greenhouse in their math class, building scale models. The winning model is now flourishing in a garden with multiple raised beds, small fruit trees, native berry bushes, a fence and an underground water reservoir that redirects runoff from nearby tennis courts. Principal Annette Varcoe said the students collaborate with a local farmer who encourages their understanding of agriculture, farming and the marketplace. 

In July of 2023, students added a trellis arch for climbing beans. They also harvested zucchini, cucumbers and rhubarb. Some cooked rhubarb pies in their café. Five 12th graders received internships and mentoring from Kathy, Dave and Eric’s Flavored Coffee Company. Students conducted surveys to determine which baked items to make and sell in the café. They are now working on an online ordering system and backend software to track sales and inventory for the 2023-24 school year.

4. Collaborate with Artists

Members of ’s class of 2022 responded to a devastating storm that hit the Cedar Rapids region in August 2020 and destroyed up to 70 percent of the local tree canopy. Students contracted with local chainsaw artists to turn fallen wood into sculptures. They auctioned the work for Trees Forever, a public-private partnership dedicated to “re-leafing” the damaged tree canopy. Over the three-month project, students had to engage and organize artists for the carving effort, obtain permits from the city government, generate publicity through the local media, and execute the sculpture auction. By the end, their “Splinters” project raised $25,000, nearly four times the students’ original goal of $6,000. A majority of the funds went to , with the rest paying the local artists for their time and skill. Student-led projects with community partners are the defining feature of Iowa BIG’s design.

5. Let Students Choose Science Projects

Student voice plays a significant role in projects at in Tennessee. For one project, students selected genetic diseases and conditions to study, then interviewed researchers, teachers, health professionals and those affected by these conditions. They created infographics to share their research, which were printed and displayed in the science wing to inform staff and students about genetic conditions.

6. Build a Community Garden

In partnership with the Houston Parks and Recreation Department, in Houston, Texas created community gardens in the adjacent 900-acre Herman Brown Park and later on the high school’s campus. The gardens now house more than 100 fruit trees throughout the school grounds on more than two and a half acres, providing many spaces for students to learn about the natural environment and contribute to the community. The school’s Career and Technical Education program has an educator in charge of coordinating community partnerships in agriculture, food and natural resources.

7. Build a Hydroponic System

At in Indiana, students built a hydroponic system through a science project. They conducted extensive research as they designed and constructed a method for growing produce sustainably and cost-effectively. The students then identified how to use those vegetables to address real-world community needs, such as providing healthy lunches to community members in food deserts. Students at this network of high schools work on projects with community partners throughout the year.

8. Make a Micro Museum

At in Sanford, Florida, students constructed a series of mobile micro museums to take around their community, educating residents, tourists and younger students about the history of the city of Sanford and Seminole County. Students met with historians and exhibit curators from the Sanford Museum to learn how to conduct primary research, preserve artifacts and build interactive designs. The year-long project started with design thinking for students to find out what elements of their community residents wanted to learn more about. Then, they built their traveling exhibits on topics such as natural history, agriculture, sports and media, and industry and technology. 

“In an age where history is more controlled than ever, it was amazing to see the students really become energized knowing their local history and how it connected with their own studies,” said Sanford Museum Curator Brigitte Stephenson. “It showed not only the power museums have, but also how important it is to have various ages give their input on how history is presented.” Currently showcased at the Sanford Museum in commemoration of its 65th anniversary, these micro museums will travel to elementary and middle schools, downtown businesses, Seminole State College and the Seminole County Administration Center.

9. Explore Local History with Artists

The partnered with , a local arts nonprofit for young people, allowing 10th graders to take a nine-week course led by Diatribe artists, focusing on the history of housing inequality in Grand Rapids. They learned about red-lining — the practice of excluding certain groups, such as Black people, from particular neighborhoods — and its long-term negative impacts. Students toured various neighborhoods, explored the city’s gorgeous, dynamic and learned how discriminatory housing practices have shaped their city’s look and feel. 

But, typical of the school’s approach, the course was more than just lessons and field trips. Students discussed what they learned and grappled with their reactions by creating poetry, story-telling and spoken word pieces. Teachers wanted students to understand how historical events like the Civil Rights Movement were experienced nationally and within the Grand Rapids community.The partnership with The Diatribe fit closely with GRPMS courses, which aimed to blend history with social justice and English language arts in a way that makes the past feel relevant to students’ lives. 

10. Make Green Alleyways Possible

Students at in Santa Ana, California, partnered with the local architectural firm to think about a new green alleyway project for the city, working alongside professional architects to model and learn the ins and outs of drafting tools. Círculos became so adept with project-based learning that its school board and the approved four PBL courses that will count towards California’s “A-G” subject requirement credit. The four courses are now available as an elective to all high schools across the Santa Ana Unified School District, the sixth largest district in California — showing how community partnerships and projects in one place can inspire more schools to try them.

Share examples of how your high school uses project-based learning with community partnerships with #rethinkhighschool on social.

Community partnerships are just one way to rethink high school. For more, check out The XQ Xtra, a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of ����Ӱ��.

The Brazosport Independent School District is always in need of more teachers — and for a long time, it wasn’t able to find enough.

Located about 60 miles south of Houston, the 11,500-student district doesn’t have a big college of education nearby to churn out new teachers. It’s hard to compete with larger districts in the region for talent or convince educators to move to the small town of Clute, where Brazosport ISD is based. Over time, classroom sizes grew as vacancies stayed open.

That’s why the district created its own pipeline. Last August, it launched a unique “teacher apprenticeship” program that allows aspiring teachers to earn a bachelor’s degree and teacher certification — at no cost. In return, the teachers have to work in the district for at least three years. The plan includes a paid residency program in which apprentices are paired with a teacher mentor and work with them in a classroom for a full school year.

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“When the first bell rings for Brazosport ISD next [school] year for these folks, they’re going to be considered a rookie, but they’re not a rookie. We say it’s not Day 1. It’s actually Day 181 for our teacher residents,” said Becky Hampton, a senior education specialist working with the district.

Public education advocates are following the program with high hopes, believing it could become a blueprint for other Texas districts as they look for ways to stem the state’s critical teacher shortage.

Kristi Kirschner, chief human resource officer at Brazosport ISD, said the program started with 67 apprentices ranging from high school students with less than 30 college hours to participants with bachelor’s degrees.

Twenty-five teachers graduated from the program in time for the upcoming school year. Without these homegrown teachers, the district would have had to hire close to 60 teachers — now it needs to find just 35 more.

“It’s something we smile about often,” Hampton said.

About 42% of those participating in the program this past school year were already district employees like warehouse workers or teacher aides. Apprentices are paid anywhere between $19,000 to $30,000 a year — depending on how far along they are in the program — and have their college tuition and fees paid for as a result of a partnership with Brazosport College and Inspire Texas, a teacher certification program. All of the participants are from the area.

The district loses nearly 130 teachers at the end of every school year and has a hard time staffing bilingual and special education teachers. But with this apprenticeship program, Kirschner said the district can train new teachers to fill roles that have been historically hard to staff.

There are across the state, but most are partnerships between districts and universities in which students work in a classroom only during their last semester or year of college. What makes the Brazosport ISD program unique is that high school students can start the process of becoming teachers while still in school and, in some cases, it can be much more affordable than earning a four-year college degree.

Texas’ teacher shortage crisis

Teacher preparation has been in the spotlight since last year as Texas looks for better ways to recruit and retain educators.

Texas has year after year, and it got worse after the pandemic. Health and safety were top concerns for teachers, and their salaries largely stagnated while basic necessities got more expensive. More kids are in each school classroom as a result; in some cases, children are spending days without a teacher.

A task force formed last year by Gov. to study the root causes of the state’s teacher shortage that the state fund programs like the one Brazosport ISD is running.

“Research shows that teacher residency models increase teacher retention, effectively place teachers in hard-to-staff areas, and positively impact student outcomes,” the task force report said.

According to the National Center for Teacher Residencies, 86% of teachers who go through such programs are still teaching in the same school after three years of employment.

These residency programs help teachers stay in the profession longer because participants are usually paired with a mentor to guide them and, in most cases, they gain a deeper understanding of what challenges teachers face and how to overcome them, according to the Learning Policy Institute. The schools that employ them also have a chance to prepare them directly, the institute said.

“Residencies are a promising long-term solution to meeting district hiring needs, allowing districts to play a direct role in training their future workforce,” a Learning Policy Institute report says.

A failed legislative effort

During the Texas Legislature’s regular session this year, lawmakers tried passing a teacher preparation bill that would’ve given school districts funds to establish programs like Brazosport ISD’s. Most notably, , authored by Rep. , D-Houston, would have partially funded residency programs and offered teachers a slew of other incentives like free pre-K for their own children. , authored by Sen. , R-Conroe, would have also funded similar programs.

But after political fallouts between the Texas House and Senate. SB 9 failed after House Democrats stuffed their version of the bill with some of their priorities, like better pay for bus drivers and increases to school funding. HB 11 never made it out of a Senate committee.

“It’s unfortunate that many of the best approaches to address record teacher vacancies, including paid residency pathways, got stuck in the red zone at the end of the regular legislative session,” said Jonathan Feinstein, state director for Texas at The Education Trust.

“These strategic investments have support in both chambers and are urgently needed to prepare and keep highly qualified teachers in our classrooms.”

To pay for its apprenticeship program, Brazosport ISD freed up money in its budget, got financial help from the nearby community college and applied for grants to make up the rest. But finding the resources to establish such a program might not be as easy for other school districts across the state that are looking to fix their own teaching shortage woes.

With Abbott expected to announce a special session on education soon, educators and school administrators are hopeful that lawmakers will not only raise teacher wages but also provide funding to establish similar residency programs.

Dutton said he plans to file a bill similar to HB 11 and will name it after Tamoria Jones, a staffer in his office who recently died and had a fiery passion for education.

Creighton also plans to include language from his earlier teacher preparation bill into whatever public education package the Senate ends up proposing.

Kirschner said lawmakers should incentivize districts to start their own residency programs.

“We can’t solve the [state’s teacher shortage] here in Brazosport ISD,” she said. “But we do think that we have a really great solution that a lot of school districts are wanting to understand and going ‘how can they do this?’ ”

Dreams and second chances

For some participants of Brazosport ISD’s program, the apprenticeship has provided them with a chance to pursue a long-held dream.

Jennifer Martinez said going back to college wasn’t in her plans until she heard about Brazosport ISD’s program. She had been a teaching assistant at the district for the last five years but never thought she’d one day be leading the classroom.

Martinez teared up when talking about the opportunity the district gave her. She’ll be a full-time teacher in two years — and have more financial flexibility because of it.

She knows being a teacher in Texas might mean being underpaid — and in some cases, underappreciated — but that didn’t stop her from pursuing a place in the profession. For her, knowing she can have an impact on kids makes up for everything else.

“The kids love being there with you and make you feel like you’re worth a million bucks,” Martinez said.

Cody Scarborough, another aspiring teacher, has just finished his yearlong residency and will lead his own classroom in the upcoming school year. He said he would not have become a teacher if it weren’t for the free tuition and support that Brazosport ISD’s program offered. Scarborough said he’s been able to learn about different methods of teaching from his mentor and fellow cohort members.

“In Texas, apprenticeship programs are growing and people are seeing what’s happening at other school districts and trying to learn and grow,” Scarborough said. “This is the future.”

Alexis Burse, an apprentice who still has a year left, was a stay-at-home mom who could not afford to go back to college for a teaching degree. She said the program gave her a second chance at becoming a teacher.

“I feel like I’m almost to the point where I feel secure, where I can just kind of just breathe and know I will always have a good career,” she said. “Teachers are going nowhere.”

Disclosure: Brazosport College and Education Trust have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

This article originally appeared in , a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

More than 500 positions will be cut from Houston Independent School District’s central office staff, the first round of staff downsizing that will further clear the way for new Superintendent Mike Miles’ plan to overhaul campuses across the district.

Miles has been vocal about trimming a central office he described as “bloated” and “amorphous” upon his appointment last month to run Houston ISD by Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath. But Friday’s announcement offered the first glimpse into which departments will be impacted by his plans.

Miles said about 500 to 600 positions will be cut from academics-related departments, along with 40 from human resources. More departments will be affected in the coming weeks, he said.

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Miles estimated the cuts from academic departments total 30% of current positions, about 3% of which were already vacant.

“Reorganizations are hard. There are real people behind the numbers,” Miles said Friday. “We want to make sure that we do this in a way that’s respectful but also in enough time for people to apply for other jobs.”

Houston ISD had about 3,600 staff members classified as part of “professional support” or “central administration” in 2021-22, the most recent year with available state data. The district reported about 23,700 employees across Houston ISD.

District officials have begun notifying those affected by the first round of dismissals, which is expected to be complete by July 17, Miles said. More job cuts will impact communications, school leadership, operations, finance and professional development departments throughout the year.

“Those we didn’t want to disturb right now, because we’re actually in the middle of transporting kids [to] summer school and nutrition services,” Miles said. “They’re larger organizations and it takes more time to make sure we do it in a way that is sound.”

For the initial round of cuts, department chiefs first assessed the feasibility of cutting vacant positions before moving to those filled. Employees affected by cuts can apply for vacant positions that have been retained, Miles said.

Members of Houston ISD’s newly appointed board voted unanimously last month to cut $30 million from the central office budget, which will help fund Miles’ plans for reshaping schools in the district. He , including 28 campuses — coined the “New Education System,” or NES, schools — primarily located in the city’s low-income neighborhoods that will see immediate changes ahead of the next school year.

Miles’ plan for NES schools involves using large pay increases and stipends to attract highly rated teachers to low-performing schools. In addition, several principals have been replaced and job responsibilities will be restructured ahead of the school year.

Morath tapped Miles and nine new board members on June 1 and ousted the elected board. The punishment was largely tied to chronically poor academic ratings at Wheatley High School. Many community members and teachers and

But dozens of principals have signaled their interest in joining Miles’ plans ahead of schedule. Those who choose to of the NES program in the upcoming school year will see a more standardized curriculum, potential cuts to non-teaching staff and new employee evaluation systems at their campuses. Principals must decide by Monday whether to voluntarily join.

The decision to cut employees is a “people process,” Miles said Friday, and one that he recognizes will be nerve-wracking for affected staff and their families.

“This, by no means, means that people haven’t been working hard or that people aren’t doing the job that they were assigned to do,” Miles said. “This is about making sure we right-size central office, and also work most efficiently.”

This article originally appeared in .

As predicted four years ago by the state’s ed insiders, Education Commissioner Mike Morath’s appointed superintendent — former Dallas Independent School District chief Mike Miles — has revealed plans involving turnaround strategies that have worked elsewhere in the state. These include using big pay hikes to restaff the district’s most challenged schools with top talent and upgrading the skills of the principals they report to. It’s exactly what one side wanted and the other feared.  

Overshadowed by the political scrum, though, are the roots of the 2015 law that requires Morath to intervene when a district repeatedly fails to address chronically underperforming schools. The legislation, House Bill 1842, was, in fact, written by Harold Dutton Jr., a Black Democrat who for almost 30 years has represented a district that is home to several schools that he and others say Houston has neglected for years.

Dutton is a graduate of one of the schools, Phillis Wheatley High School, named for an enslaved woman who became the first published African American poet. Opened in 1927, the school at the time was one of the largest Black high schools in the country, in part because Houston’s white civic leadership was willing to lavish it with resources in an effort to prove that racially separate schools could be equal — then the law of the land.

As he recounts in this new 74 Interview, Dutton grew up a proud product of this legacy, only to realize — as a lawmaker frustrated with the stalemates that plague education policy — that his beloved Wheatley was failing his constituents’ children. Every year since 1930, his alma mater has chosen a high-achieving student — typically a senior — to serve as that year’s Miss Wheatley. In 2000, Dutton was trying to find all these distinguished alums so he could invite them to an event when he had the heartbreaking epiphany that fueled his advocacy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

����Ӱ��: What prompted you to author House Bill 1842?

Harold Dutton Jr.: When I got to the legislature, one of the things I wanted to do was be on the public education committee. I had always thought of Houston as a sort of education bastion, particularly in terms of Wheatley High School, which I attended and graduated from. I just wanted to make sure they were all right. 

Along about the year 2000, I sponsored an event for my high school for its 75th anniversary called the Purple and White Gala to recognize and honor all of the Miss Wheatlies that had come through at that time. I got all their pictures and their bios. I went around trying to find them and then communicate with them.

What I noticed was that the early Miss Wheatleys all had great accomplishments. The first Miss Wheatley was also the first Miss Prairie View A&M University. We had one who was an actress. There were all kinds of all kinds of professions. We even had a Miss Wheatley who had been a part of the moonshot at NASA. 

But as I put all their bios and pictures on the wall, and as I got to the late ‘80s, I could see a total decline in the education accomplishments of the Miss Wheatlies. I found one who was working at McDonald’s. That shocked me.

It was a beautiful event. But afterward, I started taking a look at all of the schools in my district. I realized there had been a huge decline in student outcomes and achievements. 

There’s another high school in my district, Kashmere High School. I found that Kashmere students never pass the standardized test because they never did well on the math portion. I called the superintendent of HISD at the time. I asked him, ‘What’s wrong with northeast Houston education? And in particular, what’s wrong with Kashmere?’ 

He told me students didn’t do well on the math portion of the test. I said, ‘I know that — but why don’t they do well?’ He said he didn’t know. I said, ‘Well, I do.’ I took a look at whether Kashmere students had the benefit of a certified math teacher. What I found was that they hadn’t had one in 20-odd years.

I went to the school board members on the west side of town and said, ‘This is crazy. Why don’t you help me do something about it?’ They said, ‘Why don’t you go and talk to your own school board member? I don’t represent [that school].’ I said, ‘No, you represent HISD — you got elected in your area. They insisted this was a problem that I had to take up with my own school board member.

In Houston, we have nine single-member districts where school board members get elected. What had happened was the school board members had become territorial, to the extent that they didn’t recognize that a problem outside their district was still a problem they needed to help resolve.

I went to him and said, ‘I got to figure out some way for the school board members to have skin in the game about all the schools. I need to put an amendment on your bill that says that if you have a campus in your school district that is failing, your whole school district is failing and the state could come in and take over.’

Now, some [lawmakers] asked me, ‘Why would you do that, when one school is the cause?’ I said, ‘Think about it this way: If child protective services comes to your house because one of your children is alleged to have been abused, they don’t leave the other four children. They take everybody.’ 

This — this is a form of child abuse. To the extent that we’ve had children go on and on and on in a failing school.

This wasn’t my first attempt at trying to change the situation. The first thing I did was sponsor a bill requiring HISD to be divided into four parts. Each part was going to have its own superintendent, because I thought having the superintendent closest to us would get us to where we needed to be. Well, that bill didn’t pass. 

I started researching again and came up with another bill that said we were going to create what was called an opportunity school district in Texas. It would be a school district that would take all of the low-performing schools, all the failing schools, put them in this district and the state would run it. We would fix the schools up and give them back to the district they came from. That didn’t pass. 

I kept at it. The [2015 takeover] bill passed, and so my amendment passed. Everybody was for it. The teacher groups, the NAACP, everybody. I think they were thinking like I was: No school district would let a campus fail for five consecutive school years. That just wasn’t going to happen.

But yet, in 2019, that’s what happened. Not at Kashmere, but at Wheatley. The schools in north Houston, they were all suffering. The children there were being shortchanged by the school district. 

Now, having said all that, HISD has always had its problems. I remember when Brown v. Board of Education was enacted in 1954. I was in elementary school. That Supreme Court decision said, ‘You should eliminate this by all deliberate speed.’ I don’t know if ‘all deliberate speed’ means as slow as you can, but by the time HISD implemented it, I was in college. So here we are. 

One of the things people said to me was, ‘We don’t know if it’s going to be better.’ Let me tell you something. I had a premonition one night when I was watching television, and it was all about slavery. Some of the slaves had gone into a room one night, and they were planning to escape. They went and woke this one slave up and said, ‘Come on and put your clothes on, it’s time to go.’ He said, ‘Where are we going?’ And the other slave said, ‘We’re going to freedom. While I can’t say 100% for sure that it’s going to be better, I can tell you, I’m 100% sure that we can’t stay where we are.’ 

From my perspective, this is offering a better outcome for students and families, particularly in north Houston. HISD could have done a number of things to eliminate failing schools. 

Do you think that Wheatley and Kashmere should stay open?

Absolutely. I don’t think ever we want to look at closing schools. 

Wheatley has a distinction that probably no other school in the state has. It was one of the schools that at one time in the not-too-distant past had three alumni serving in the Texas House of Representatives at the same time. It was a school where at one time we had a sitting congressman. We had a sitting county commissioner. We had a sitting state school board member. We had a sitting local school board member and we had a state representative.

All from that school alumni.

The challenges we face now in terms of getting it back? I don’t think we meet those by closing the school. I think we meet those by giving these children what they need. 

I heard one comment that offended me to no end: that these are poor children. And I said, ‘What the heck does that have to do with learning?’ Because I can tell you, we were not poor, we were po. We couldn’t afford the ‘o’ or the ‘n.’ And yet we learned.

This is the school where Barbara Jordan graduated. It’s the school where my good friend who just ended a term as president of Prairie View graduated. The former president of Brown University was a Wheatley graduate. The Jazz Crusaders all came from Wheatley. 

That’s why I’m hopeful that we’re headed to a place where these kids will get what they need in terms of the resources and we’ll move on. And all the noise we hear today will be growing pains.

Are you troubled by the current conversation about the takeover?

No. I anticipated there will be some people who didn’t understand that while I might be inclined to agree with them insofar as not wanting the state to take over, I’m more upset at failing schools. I’m more upset at denying students a future if they don’t get an education.

But I understand that there’ll be some people who will be against this. When you think about the past, whenever there was a change for the better, there was always — you can go back as far as Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt — there was people complaining about it. And thinking that they should go back to Egypt.

That’s kind of what this is. There’s some people who think we need to go back.

Almost every community of any size has a Wheatley, a beacon of excellence, beloved by its community, where the names of the alums are on the tip of your tongue. Yet expectations at some point slid, as did resources and accountability.

That’s the biggest problem — the low expectations.

When I first moved to New York, I wanted to go see Reverend Ike. I can never forget, when I got there, the title of his sermon that Sunday was, ‘The only thing wrong with poor people is they ain’t got no money.’

I thought about that. What is that supposed to mean in terms of education? In terms of education, it shouldn’t mean anything. We should educate those students so that somehow or other what God put in them we get the benefit of, because we educated them.

There are too many people, particularly Black males, standing around on corners who we didn’t educate. We don’t enjoy the benefits of what God put in that person.

There was an eleventh-hour proposal on that night’s agenda, but no vote took place. Instead, the meeting dissolved into a fracas, as trustees screamed at one another, members of the audience screamed at the board and police wrestled people out of the room. The board adjourned without addressing the looming deadline.

It was the fourth month in office for newly elected trustee Sue Deigaard, a longtime education advocate and the parent of two Houston ISD graduates. Now, almost exactly five years later, as the state appoints a board of managers to take over the sprawling school system, her feelings are … complicated.

The law in question — which Deigaard, like most Texans, refers to by its legislative file number, House Bill 1842 — was the brainchild of a Houston-area lawmaker frustrated by years of district inattention to the impoverished schools in his portion of the city. In 2015, a bipartisan majority voted to require the state to step in and take over when a district has had one or more “F” schools for five years. 

Lawmakers later amended the law to let districts stave off state intervention by closing the schools or giving control of them to a nonprofit partner such as a university, city government or charter school network. 

Because they can provoke vociferous opposition, school closures are among the most difficult decisions an elected board can make. And the prospect of charter school partnerships was anathema to the district’s teachers union. As Deigaard notes in this 74 Interview, the result was that small but impassioned groups of people shouted down every proposal for a local solution.

A few months after the Houston board adjourned without taking any action to head off sanctions, Texas officials announced they were investigating complaints that board members — not including Deigaard — had engaged in irregularities involving contracts and that a majority had violated state law by meeting in secret to work out a plan to replace interim Superintendent Grenita Latham. The results of the investigation also justified a state takeover, Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath said.

In 2019, the board sued the agency, claiming it had no authority to install a board of managers. In January 2023, the state Supreme Court lifted an injunction that had stopped Morath from moving forward. Dominated by new members, the Houston board voted to stop pursuing the lawsuit. Many of those who had opposed the changes were quick to claim that the ensuing takeover, which is slated to take place June 1, was a politicized move against a blue-city district by a Republican governor bent on privatization.

Deigaard will stay on after Morath appoints the nine-member board of managers, though she will be stripped of her official powers. current board members will be asked to serve as advisers to the appointees. The state will eventually return control to elected board members.  

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Set the stage for us. You ran for a seat on a school board that had been embroiled in one high-profile controversy after another for years. You must have both a titanium spine and a vision for transformation in Houston ISD.

I wanted to try to take the politics out of it. I wanted to transform what our public education system looks like. We have a system that was created in the middle of the 20th century, in a very different time societally, economically. That system was not designed to be effective and equitable for all kids. It was intentionally designed not to. And all we keep doing is trying to tinker around the edges — in a time where our society and our economy are incredibly different. 

It’s not like I entered the lion’s den having never visited before. I had been going to board meetings. I knew who the players were. I knew we were coming through this tumultuous time. I knew we were still transitioning to a new superintendent. 

Of the nine board members, three of us were new that January. Six weeks after we were sworn in, new superintendent Richard Carranza announced he was leaving to go to New York. In June, we rejected a proposed budget in the hopes that the [district] administration would bring us back something better. They didn’t. We ended up voting to adopt the exact same proposal. We were going to have our own district form of government shutdown, because we wouldn’t be able to pay the bills. 

At that point, it was just chaos. 

House Bill 1842 was looming. Houston ISD leaders knew, starting in the spring of 2015, that we were at risk of sanctions in the fall of 2018. In 2017, the legislature had passed a policy giving districts two options to avoid those sanctions: improve the campus in question or close it. By 2018, we had a third option, and that was to find a partner. 

A lot of districts around the state, like San Antonio, saw the writing on the wall and took action. Dr. Grenita Lathan, our chief academic officer at the time, had a very well thought-out plan how to address our chronically underperforming campuses — not just the ones that were going to trigger sanctions, but the ones that were on the runway coming up to the trigger point. 

There were community meetings to help impacted schools understand what the recommendations were going to be, but they basically got shut down by a small, vocal community of people who didn’t like whatever the recommendation was for a given school. They didn’t want their school consolidated. They didn’t want to close it, didn’t want to partner. So none of it ever happened.

We were eventually presented with a potential partner for the schools that were going to trigger sanctions later that year. We never voted on it. The meeting got out of control. People were arrested. We made . And we did nothing. We were the only district in the state, to my knowledge, that did nothing. 

I remember talking, when we first triggered the law in 2019, to somebody who had testified in favor of House Bill 1842 in 2015. He said, “Well, we never imagined that this would happen in HISD.” I said, “Because you thought they’d give us a path out?” And he said, “No, because I thought you guys would do what you needed to do to avoid it.”

We had the opportunity, and we didn’t. We interfered with the leaders that we entrusted to bring us good recommendations. We shut it down.

Do you think the things Lathan proposed would have made a difference?

If the board had supported Grenita despite the noise, and if there were real and meaningful community engagement. Grenita and her team could have worked with these communities: “Hey, we’re going to do a closure, or a restart. What do you want school to look like? What are your hopes and dreams for your children?” I think if the board had stood behind her on that, our story today would be very, very different. Student achievement would have increased. And I don’t think we would be in a position where we’d have a board of managers coming in. 

When the board decided not to endorse the plan that the interim superintendent brought forward, was there an alternate plan? 

You’re presuming nine people, plus at that point in time a superintendent, were all having constructive conversations together about a plan? I don’t think you should make that presumption. 

I was actually called the day [after the fractious April 2018 meeting] by somebody else who asked whether, if they come back next week with a partnership with another organization, would I support it? I said, I’m not going to vote for that. There needs to be a bigger, more comprehensive student-centered plan here.

This is about improving the learning outcomes for students in a way that is equitable. My objective wasn’t to save the board.

Between 2018 and now, were there more efforts to come up with an improvement plan, or was the idea to just wait for the suit to work its way through the courts?

We’ve had a lot of inconsistency in administrative leadership. We had a longstanding superintendent, Terry Grier, who left two years before I got on the board. We had an interim for a few months. We had Richard Carranza. We had Grenita as interim superintendent for 3½ years after that. We have all the battles between different factions of the board, including the ] and appointed somebody else one day, triggering a special accreditation investigation with the state. We came finally to the other side of that and hired Millard House, who’s now been here for a year and a half. At this point, me and Elizabeth Santos are the senior board members, and we’ve only been here for five years. 

So you don’t have a lot of continuity. Which in one way was good, because in 2020, when we had four new board members and I was board chair, I’m like, we’re going to double down on governance and build a foundation and figure out where we’re trying to go so that when we hire somebody to take us there, we’ve got a plan. 

We have board members who wanted to see large-scale, systemic changes in our incredibly large, diverse and complex system. Who can see the opportunities that exist, can see where inequities exist. Your board and your superintendent don’t have to agree on everything, right? I actually think you have to have diversity of thought. But you have to have everybody centered around a core set of beliefs and values on where you’re trying to go. And we have that on paper. But I don’t feel that we’ve ever as a board been partners in that work, and certainly not our superintendent.

We just got stuck. We’re grounded in this governance model, but we weren’t seeing things come from the administration that were really challenging the status quo of what an education system can and should look like for children — and almost a quarter of a way through the 21st century. 

There’s some irony there. You had an interim superintendent who had put deep thought into systemic change and a board that wouldn’t sign off. And then you ended up with a board that wanted change but an administration that wouldn’t advance a plan. When the Texas Supreme Court decided to lift the injunction, the board had the option of continuing with the suit, as unlikely as victory seemed. But you voted not to do that. 

I’m going to say this for me, because I don’t want to speak for my colleagues on this. There’s a saying: When the elephants fight, the grass suffers. We have been in an adversarial relationship with our state agency in some ways since before I was on the board, before we even triggered 1842.

I think there was a realization that we were unlikely to win. We could either move forward in a collaborative, student-centered way or we could continue to fight. For me personally, I made a commitment to always put students first. I don’t believe that the outcome would change if we persist in this legal battle. It prolongs a period of instability for our kids.

What matters most is, how do we make sure kids are learning and growing with the least amount of disruption we possibly could have? I’ve always believed that with all of what our district has gone through in the past five years, there has to be something better for kids on the other side of it all. And how do we get to that better other side as quickly and harmlessly as we possibly can? If it’s even possible.

If the appointed board of managers and new superintendent are going to succeed, they’re going to need community support. And at the moment, there’s still a lot of shrieking.

Our public school system belongs to the public. We want the kids who have been left behind for far too long to no longer be left behind. That is a shared value between our current district governance team of 10, our board and superintendent, and our state [education] agency and therefore, presumably, . That’s a shared value.

The divergence is going to be how that is achieved. On a Saturday afternoon, not at rush hour, it takes an hour to drive from one side of Houston ISD to the other. When you go from east to west, you’re going from oil and gas plants, the shipping channel with tankers coming in and out and all of that, to the west side. That’s also oil and gas — but in shining office buildings. 

If this group can come in, understand the diversity of need and build true partnership and collaboration with communities in their pursuit of systemic changes, I think they’ll be successful. If they come in thinking they have all the answers and they’re just going to put all these things in place, nothing’s going to really be different for kids. 

It’s all about making decisions with families. That’s where the magic can happen. And we haven’t done that.

What happens to you now? You’re still an elected board member, but you don’t have any power as of June 1. Do you have ceremonial duties? 

I don’t know. I think so. Keep in mind our state agency has overseen the transition to a board of managers in other districts before. But we’re the biggest. This is not something that one new superintendent and nine appointed board members are going to be able to do on their own as quickly as they’re going to need to ramp up. They’re going to need help being introduced to the community as something other than, you know, agents of a conspiracy. 

When you have an elected board, you have people — especially if they’re viable to win — who have relationships and roots in a community. And who build more through the campaign process, through the different civic clubs they visit with, the doors they knock on and all of that. As you build these relationships, you build an understanding of the fabric of the community. 

The board of managers, they’re going from 0 to 100 while skipping that process. I think there could be value in taking a second tier of candidates [for the board of managers who do not get appointed] and creating some kind of community council that helps support that appointed board.

I do believe in democratically elected governance of public systems and public dollars. But I also know that at least in our state, long before HB 1842 came into existence, there was a process supported by both Republicans and Democrats. As a school board, you have independence from other governmental entities. But if, in cases of financial impropriety, legal malfeasance and student performance, if you’re not serving kids well, if you are engaging in behaviors that create a risk to children, then there’s going to be intervention. To make sure that kids are learning and growing and that the dollars that you were trusted with are actually being spent on the children’s learning and growth.

I don’t know that there’s an easier right thing in that equation. It’s an imperfect democracy. We’ve known that since it started over 200 years ago. It’s all about how you just keep striving for something better within those values. 

Don’t let me push you off a cliff here, but I want to know how this feels. 

Back up before we get to that, because you’re going to lose me after that. We’re so big. We’re not a suburban district with a bunch of giant one-size-fits-all schools. We know one-size-fits-all doesn’t work for all kids and it doesn’t work for all families. 

We also know that money matters, but money not spent effectively doesn’t change outcomes. The unfortunate thing about the [COVID recovery] dollars is we’re probably going to learn that in a really harsh way in the coming years. How we chose to spend it actually either made a difference for kids or didn’t. 

But we’re stuck in this conversation where it’s just about more money. We need to evolve to new school design. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for traditional models for students for whom that works, but in a district like ours, with the number of buildings and students we have, there is absolutely room to try things out and to scale what we know works. That was always my vision. 

One of the most poignant stories from my early days of being on the board — I have all these kids’ faces in my head from visiting schools — was this little second-grader eagerly raising his hand in class. But he didn’t even have a teacher of record, he had a long-term sub. Is he going to be okay? 

I was visiting our disciplinary alternative education program, and I asked the school leader, “What’s your biggest challenge?” He said, “The kids are here for a certain number of days, so the first challenge we have is some kids start to self-sabotage so they don’t have to go back to their home school. The other challenge is kids that get back to their home school and self-sabotage so they can come back.”

That’s kids telling us what they need, and we’re not listening. The families who have left our system for charter schools, private schools, to homeschool, they’ve done it because we’re not giving them something they want and need for their kids. And until we start talking to families in a real way, we’re not going to be able to build a holistic system that meets the needs of all kids, and we’re going to keep leaving kids behind. 

So how do I feel? Angry that I couldn’t achieve that. Disappointed that I couldn’t achieve that. We stole five years from kids. Five years where we could have given all our focus to the needs of students without the distraction of a lawsuit and all the impediments that instability has brought to our system. We should all be angry about that.

The upcoming takeover of the Houston Independent School District by the Texas Education Agency is a bold action necessitated by a state law requiring that, in the case of persistently underperforming schools, the state intervene either by directly closing the campus or by implementing a temporary, districtwide governance replacement. The state has chosen the latter — a big intervention for a state agency.

There is a lot to be said about the move, the laws that triggered it, and the roles and intent of all those involved. I know this as someone who was on the ground as a teacher in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina, when the state’s Recovery School District was created; as a founding member and former deputy superintendent of Tennessee’s state-run school district; and as a systems innovation consultant who eventually got the full-circle experience of helping support the reunification of the state and local school districts in New Orleans in 2017.

These are each highly scrutinized and studied efforts, and yet the lessons learned don’t deliver a clear roadmap for state intervention.

I’ve learned a lot — from parent power to policy levers — about the potential for a huge impact and unintended consequences when a state intervenes in a district. With the June 1 date set, it is time now to lay the groundwork for a strategy that goes beyond a temporary fix. Those at the state, school and community levels do not need to see eye-to-eye, but they must get below the storm on the surface to create the conditions for success on behalf of the students impacted. Doing so requires shifting relationships and power for parents and students, the system and the broader community. 

The tools to transform schools and reimagine districts lie in how they work, not just what they do. The “how” matters both on an interpersonal level and in how solutions are generated. As the Texas Education Agency develops and prepares to execute its intervention strategy in Houston, here are some lessons learned from previous bold state interventions that I hope can inform this big Texas move in a way that improves schools and the system it operates in, with student and family voices at the center.

Understand the Challenge

Schools are a multigenerational effort and experience. While the state may have access to a wide range of historical data and analytics, the experiences of those in a school community — both within and outside the building — are key to understanding the real and perceived challenges of a persistently struggling school. Understanding challenges requires more than just an academic, curricular or performance lens. State leaders must make time to truly engage with the community, not for a broad listening tour or to share slideshows about the intervention, but to actively hear and empathize with the students, caregivers, community leaders and the school and district staff impacted. This can shine a light on ways that policies and programs designed to help might not make it to the classroom; lift up and engage great talent and partners who possess potential parts of the solution; and learn what “success” and aspirations the broader school community has for its kids. This empathy work is a front-end investment of time. A state team that is impatient for action (usually a positive), can get shortsighted when it comes to understanding the root causes of the challenge and planning to address them effectively. Any strategy that roots itself in analytics without empathy is void of the context needed to successfully and collaboratively implement an intervention strategy.

Move at the Pace of  the Agency’s Capacity

When intervening in a district, state-level leaders must be sure to have the capacity to truly execute their plan. Considerations include ensuring that:

1. The state agency’s team does not take on too many roles too quickly (e.g., school operator, regulator, support provider, coalition builder)
   
2. Implementation scales at a speed that doesn’t outpace the skills and capacity of leadership and local talent, forging of a political constituency or community support
   
3. The state is only one of multiple partners bringing together local talent, various school operators and nonprofit organizations as a coalition to support the intervention with shared purpose and collaboration.

Developing a shared vision for success rooted in the aspirations of the community, via building state-level capacity and local partnerships, can help set and attain clear, sustainable instructional goals.

Create Shared Understanding and Ownership

Elevating student and parent voices is key to unlocking school transformations and systems change throughout and beyond the state’s involvement. Carrots and sticks from the state will not be enough to shift the school and district behaviors and mindsets necessary to sustain any positive changes and impacts that come from the intervention. Those who were in the school community before state intervention must be a key part of determining what elements already in place can be part of a successful transformation of the school. Further, they will help identify needed district-level changes critical to supporting school change and sustaining the work after state intervention ends. This shared ownership must come with the humility to learn from all those in the community, share accountability for walking the walk of systems change in a way that builds authentic relationships and allows diverse perspectives  to be incorporated in the solutions-finding process.

For state intervention to make a real, lasting difference for students and families, the state, school, families and broader community must all work together to find and keep the right people engaged in developing and implementing solutions, and to make adjustments so the district will sustain positive changes. The Texas Education Agency’s existing work to make more strategic, with an emphasis on managing school performance and expanding quality school options; equip them with better data; ensure high-quality instructional materials are in use; and help expand local talent pipelines creates an opportunity to build an intervention approach that combines the best of state strategies with the wisdom of those impacted by state-, district- and school-level decisionmaking.

Transforming chronically struggling schools, which typically reside in marginalized and underinvested communities, is a moral imperative bestowed upon those taking action. Ultimately, it is the opportunities of the students, now and into the future, that will determine the intervention’s success.

The agency from Houston residents who are interested in serving on a board of managers that is expected to take control of the 190,000-student school system no earlier than June 1. Morath is also expected to name a new superintendent to replace Millard House II, who was appointed in June 2021.     

In a letter to district leaders and with the Houston Landing, Morath said he has three priorities for the new leaders he will appoint. He wants the managers, who he said will serve indefinitely, to improve conditions in Houston’s lowest-performing schools — some of which have failed to meet state standards for more than a decade. He wants them to concentrate on the district’s ongoing struggles to provide special education services to students with disabilities. And he said he wants his appointees “ on improving student outcomes, and not something else.” 

“Even with governance challenges, many students are flourishing in Houston ISD schools, due in no small part to the extraordinary work of the district’s teachers and staff,” Morath noted in his letter. “In fact, Houston ISD operates some of the highest-performing schools in the state of Texas. But district procedures have also allowed it to operate schools where the support provided to students is not adequate.”

Besides academic performance, a state investigator’s finding that some members of a previous Houston ISD board had engaged in irregularities was a factor cited by education officials when they first announced they were stepping in in late 2019. A state court put the takeover on hold pending the outcome of a district lawsuit that charged Morath was acting improperly.        

In January, the Texas Supreme Court lifted the injunction, ruling that Morath was complying with the law by intervening. Last week, eight of Houston’s nine elected board members voted not to continue the legal challenge.

“This is certainly not a situation that anybody aspires to when they run for office,” said Sue Deigaard, who was elected to the school board in 2017. “I believe that right now what kids need is for the community to support this district and its ambitions to improve learning outcomes for all students, especially our historically underserved students. And to offer that support no matter who is sitting at the table.” 

A second board member, Kendall Baker, acknowledged the district’s recent struggles to Houston’s ABC affiliate, KTRK. “What has occurred in the past has got us in a little trouble,” he conceded. 

In the weeks that followed the court’s order, local groups led by the Houston Federation of Teachers protested, insisting the takeover was a pretext by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to “further his public school privatization agenda.”

However, the law requiring Morath to intervene when local leaders would not was a bipartisan creation. Indeed, two current school board members have ties to Democratic state lawmakers who voted in favor of the policy.

Written by a Black Houston Democrat, Rep. Harold Dutton Jr., the 2015 takeover law was intended specifically to prod the district — now the eighth-largest in the nation — to invest in a number of deeply impoverished schools. Because locally elected boards often resist making bold changes, the law requires state education officials to act when one or more schools in a district have earned failing grades on state report cards for more than four consecutive years. 

Under the law, when a school earned a fifth “F” from the state, education officials had to choose one of two actions: Close the program in question or take over the district’s board. In 2017, as the first embattled districts realized they were staring down that deadline, lawmakers created an alternative.

A district could forestall sanctions for two years by turning the failing schools over to a nonprofit partner for a reboot. Because the eligible nonprofits included public charter school networks, and because the partners, which could also include universities and community groups, would control staffing, the teachers union protested.

Houston was supposed to meet the five-year trigger point for state sanctions in 2017. But because of damage from Hurricane Harvey, Morath granted a one-year reprieve. Simultaneously, school board members were supposed to notify the state whether the district would take advantage of the law’s new flexibility by seeking partners to run their lowest-performing schools.

A number of civic organizations had offered proposals to operate specific schools, but the meeting where the possibility was to be considered ended with board members — some of whom wanted to “send a signal” to the state by refusing to choose — deadlocked. At the same time, state investigations found past board members violated open meeting laws and engaged in contracting irregularities. 

Two years later, following another round of “F” grades for struggling schools and damning findings of board misconduct by state investigators, Morath formally notified the Houston district that the state was stripping the elected board of its authority and appointing a board of managers in its place. District leaders sued.

Evidence on the effectiveness of state takeovers of failing school systems is mixed, but the policies being tested in Houston are unique, said Ashley Jochim, a principal at the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Texas law gives Morath’s appointed board of managers the flexibility to take advantage of a number of policies pinpointing specific interventions.

“Having a menu of options allows them to tailor the solutions to the job,” she says. “It’s where they depart from other states.”

Before he was appointed state education commissioner in 2016, Morath spent two terms on the Dallas Independent School District board. There, he championed a combination of school-level reforms — many of them now part of a model known as Accelerating Campus Excellence — that enjoyed some success. He has promoted those tactics as head of the Texas Education Agency, along with efforts that showed promise in other districts, including engaging outside nonprofits to run underperforming schools.

In San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth and other communities where those strategies have borne early fruit, they have enjoyed enough centrist support to fend off the kinds of protests that have racked Houston in recent years. Still, local leaders say Morath would be wise to select a new superintendent who can generate the good will the temporary, appointed leaders will need if their reforms are to succeed.    

Watching her older brother lead a math club from the front porch of her family’s quaint coastal home in the Dominican Republic helped foster Rosa Aristy’s love for STEM education as a child.  

Like her brother, Aristy grew up surrounded by family members who taught her the value of investing in others — a commitment she now makes to not only the students in her kids’ homeschool co-op but also their parents.

“That front porch they would sit at was the very first math club I was exposed to,” Aristy told ����Ӱ��. “Seeing them laugh because they were having so much fun learning together became something I wanted to instill in others.”

Aristy’s upbringing served as the inspiration for , a Houston-based nonprofit that addresses diversity gaps in STEM education through math, robotics and coding programs for homeschool students.

Through the support of the , Bridges to Science has expanded its mission to train homeschool parents on how to teach their children math.

Today, Bridges to Science serves more than 50 homeschool students across Texas with the help of local universities, organizations and volunteers.

“It’s a very near and dear vision of mine…and the intent is to support our amazing students who have so much potential but don’t have access,” Aristy said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: How would you say your upbringing and being a homeschool mother influenced the creation of Bridges to Science?

When we first moved to Texas, I noticed the school system was really focused on annual testing. It was beginning to rob my children of the joy of learning and I didn’t want that to happen. That was the one thing my parents in particular instilled in me and I want my kids to be lifelong learners. 

One day the moms at my children’s homeschool co-op asked the students to vote on what courses they wanted to learn. They pretty much said they wanted more coding, robotics and STEM classes. The moms and I just stared at each other wondering who would have the courage to teach these classes. No one seemed committed to doing this and I didn’t want to let our students down. I had done some programming before, not the kind they wanted to learn, but I thought that I could learn something child-friendly and get up to speed. 

But before I did that, I was aware that homeschoolers in my community use a curriculum and approach to math that’s memory-based and very common in school systems. I knew that it wasn’t giving the kids the math foundation they needed to go into the sciences. So I said, let me first start off with a math club like my brother’s growing up and once the foundation is set we can do coding next. That’s how Bridges to Science first started out. 

How has Bridges to Science supported homeschool parents teach their children math?

We just got a grant for that and we’re super excited. This summer we’re going to launch a math workshop for parents similar to the ones we have for students. We want parents to have the opportunity to interact with mathematicians and see the beauty of math because it takes a village to impact our children’s lives. If we get parents to bring down their fears about math, they’ll feel more comfortable facilitating inquiry-based sessions with their children. 

I think the stress around math roots from parents wanting to solve the problem for their students and that’s exactly what we don’t want to do. We don’t want to rob them of the joy of discovering the way out of those problems. So that’s our intent. We’re using a very solid approach that is backed by research, but we’re tailoring it to the needs of homeschool moms that is culturally relevant and through methods that respond well to their educational scenario.

What is something important to keep in mind when it comes to educating homeschooled families?

Homeschool communities have grown in its diversity and flavors. Sometimes I sense that there’s a stereotype of who we are that doesn’t really reflect who my students are. For example, we’re seeing more families from underprivileged neighborhoods try out homeschooling. And we’re seeing many single moms stepping up to homeschool their children too. They’re not doing it for any ideological reasons but really just for practicality. So I think the world needs to know that homeschooling, at least here in Houston, is a little more diverse than what you may think.

I understand that Bridges to Science is geared for underserved students — primarily Hispanic students. As a Dominican immigrant, tell me more about why it’s important for you to bridge that diversity gap in STEM education.

I like to envision my organization through a spectrum. On one end, we have our amazing students who have so much potential but don’t have access. On the other end, we have universities, organizations and corporations we work with that have an abundance of resources. We serve as the bridge to unite them so our students can see beyond their existing scenario. 

It’s a very near and dear vision of mine because, in a way, I see myself in them. I grew up in a very small town and my father passed away when I was 12. I had to grow up really fast during my middle school years and get a job to help my mom. You don’t have to go through a big transition like I did, but my life was always at a crossroads. I want our children to explore all the beautiful things they can do in STEM without worry.

You speak about your work with so much love and conviction. Where would you say this energy comes from?

It must be from my mom and dad. Both of them were passionate educators and people who invested into the lives of a lot of people — especially youth. The one thing I learned, particularly from my mom, was to love my students and see them as a whole.

As a kid, I vividly remember my mom stopping me one day from watching videos because we needed to go to someone’s house. I was a typical kid and complained and asked her why me? Why was it so important for us to be there? She told me that she noticed one of her students was sad and realized that her parents were thinking of getting a divorce. So my mom went there to act as a counselor and see if there was anything she could do to help the parents. That really spoke volumes to me. My mom had five kids but she made the time to do those kinds of things. It taught me how important it is to invest in others.

As Bridges to Science continues to expand its reach, what do you hope families take away from their experience?

Half of our students have some sort of adversity attached to them. It could either be due to race, socioeconomic or neurodivergence. When I started Bridges to Science, I set out to give our children the privileges they didn’t have access to. As I’ve invested in my students, I always tell them that they need to pay it forward. And little by little, that’s the vision we have moved towards.

If the Texas Education Agency takes control of the state’s largest school system, it will be a test of a seven-year-old law that was designed to force state and local officials to take action when schools persistently underperform. A statement from the agency says the matter is under review.

Given the public’s waning appetite for standards-based reform, Morath may struggle to sell the Houston residents whose support he will need on the idea that a district with a B grade on state report cards merits state intervention. By law, he must act, given the continued underperformance of one notoriously low-performing high school. But it remains to be seen what the post-pandemic political landscape will allow.

State control is not as common as it was through the end of the Obama administration, says Ashley Jochim, a principal at the Center on Reinventing Public Education. But while overall support for accountability system-based school reforms has declined in recent years, Jochim says, Texas is unique. 

The state has created a menu of options for districts and charter school operators to choose from when deciding how to address a school’s poor performance, as well as agreeing to fund some of the efforts. 

Still, any state intervention will be an uphill climb without some public backing. “The politics are really the biggest risk,” Jochim says. “If you come in and have little support, you’re likely to be dead in the water.”

Bipartisan support for the law among Texas legislators remains high — in part, in recognition that school systems frequently don’t focus on their poorest, most segregated schools unless policies mandate the takeover of an entire district. Indeed during its last session, the legislature . 

The measure dates to 2015, when Houston-area Rep. Harold Dutton Jr. — frustrated by years of neglect of the city’s poorest schools, including two high schools that were at the center of the court case — introduced a bill to force the state to intervene when a school earns a failing grade for five consecutive years. The law gives state officials a choice: close the school or take over the district’s board. 

To give districts more flexibility, the law was amended during the next legislative session to let local officials stave off takeover by giving control of the underperforming schools to a nonprofit third party, such as a university, city agency or charter school network. School systems that chose this option would be eligible for extra funding. 

Saying none of the alternatives was acceptable, Houston school board members dug in their heels and refused to act. In 2018, with a superintendent search underway and fights between board factions bringing meetings to a standstill, an found that some board members had violated open meetings laws by gathering in secret, exceeded the scope of their authority and violated contract procurement rules. 

The state moved to seize the district, but Houston ISD filed suit. In 2019, a Harris County judge ordered a temporary halt to the takeover while it considered claims that the state was exceeding its authority. On Jan. 13, 2023, the Texas Supreme Court lifted the injunction, ruling that Morath’s office acted lawfully. 

While the case was working its way through the courts, however, Houston’s educational landscape changed. All but two of the board members in power at the time of the investigation have been replaced. The district has a new superintendent and an overall grade of B on state report cards. 

With a state conservator at the helm, one of the two persistently underperforming schools, Wheatley High School, has raised its grade to a C. The other, Kashmere High School, remains below acceptable state performance standards. 

On Morath’s watch, the Texas Education Agency has been quick to study innovative local policies that have enabled school improvement, giving the state a range of possible strategies to use in Houston. The commissioner pushed to make changes to state funding based on San Antonio ISD’s success with a socioeconomic school integration program, for instance. 

Another school improvement model state officials have repeatedly pointed to is Dallas ISD’s use of , from a longer school year and more planning time for teachers to efforts to recruit high-performing educators and incentivize them to work in schools serving concentrations of children with challenges. 

Texas’ state takeover law is unique in the range of options it gives officials, says Jochim. If Morath were to install a board of managers, as the statute allows, they would be able to take advantage of a number of policies pinpointing specific interventions. “Having a menu of options allows them to tailor the solutions to the job,” she says. “It’s where they depart from other states.”

The commissioner could also target individual schools for state intervention, she says, which may prove more politically palatable to Houston residents.

In any case, Morath should pay particular attention to explaining what the state intends to do and why, Jochim adds, especially if it involves intervening in a district where many schools are not low-performing. 

“The state needs to be able to tell voters why a community that has a B on a state report card is a candidate for intervention,” she says. “It might, in fact, be a good idea, but they need to be able to communicate it.”

Roughly 85,000 Afghan nationals have arrived in the United States as part of , President Joe Biden’s August 2021 initiative to aid those who worked alongside American military personnel and who were forced to escape after the U.S.’s .

It’s unclear how many of these refugees are school-aged but of those held at U.S. military bases upon arrival last year were children — and more are en route, according to the Department of Homeland Security. They’ve landed everywhere from Fremont, California, to Northern Virginia where Afghan expats can be found in numbers. 

Refugee resettlement workers and teachers alike say these students’ needs are unique: Some hail from highly educated families while others never before had the opportunity to attend school. 

Many Afghan girls lag behind the boys — even their own siblings — and most, no matter their gender, trail their U.S. peers. 

Despite this, their transformation has been remarkable, said Kathleen Renfroe, school liaison for the Fredericksburg Migration and Refugee Service office for Catholic Charities.

Renfroe enrolled between 120 and 140 Afghan children this past year alone. She said one student, a 14-year-old girl, was discouraged from attending school in Afghanistan — and in Virginia: The child was instead expected to marry and start a family, Renfroe said. 

But school officials alerted her parents to compulsory education laws — and to their daughter’s potential.

“Cultural pressures can be difficult,” Renfroe said. “We helped them understand that here in this country, we encourage education and that it’s not a barrier to later becoming a wife and mother.”

In the end, not only was the teen excited about the possibility of furthering her education and prospering in a career of her choosing, but her mother was, too: She knew her daughter could achieve more here than she could at home, where girls are now being kept from school beyond their elementary years.

In another case, a child with spina bifida, who would likely receive no education in her home country because of her disability, has flourished in America: She recently completed a month-long STEM program that had all students learning about aerodynamics, computers and virtual simulations. 

She was so thrilled to participate that she skipped breakfast every morning because she worried it would make her late to class, Renfroe learned through her mother. 

“She had never seen her daughter so excited,” Renfroe said. “Her mom was really grateful. It was the first time she felt like a 12-year-old child.”

Texas

Nazia Sadat, a mother of three who lives with her family 30 minutes outside Houston, understands the joy that comes after a difficult transition. 

Sadat does not speak English and neither did her children upon arrival in August 2021, making the last school year particularly difficult.  

“All of them were very sad at the beginning to go to school,” Sadat said through a translator. “They couldn’t understand anything, but the teachers really helped them. They used Google Translate to understand what they said. They were loving, caring and helped them every day. In this one year, my children became very happy. They changed a lot from the beginning.” 

A relative of hers, Kaynat Sadat, who lives nearby with her husband and three children, said her 7-year-old daughter Esra struggled with the loss of friends and family back home. All three kids clung to their mother and cried on and off  throughout the day last summer. 

School softened their loss, said Kaynat, who is fluent in five languages, including English. But even with her advanced education — she earned a law degree in Afghanistan in 2015 — Humble Independent School District’s policies were new to her and difficult to navigate. 

“When we came, we didn’t know how the system worked,” she said. “But everyone was so helpful. In this one year, they never let us alone. The school asked about everything, gave every information — and we attended every program they had. I appreciate all they did for us. I feel I have a family here.”

Nazia Sadat’s children, who attend Fort Bend Independent School District, remember the difficulty of those early days in America, how they were unable to communicate with their classmates. 

“When I first got here, I couldn’t talk to them,” said 11-year-old Mudasir, who also speaks Pashtu and Dari. “By wintertime, I was able. The kids are pretty friendly. If you say, ‘Can you play with me’, they will play with you.”

Asia, his 8-year-old sister, recalls being unable to answer what now seems like the simplest question. 

“My friend asked me, ‘What is your name?’” she said. “I didn’t know what she meant.”

Now, the little girl has an American best friend.

“When we go to recess, we always play together and talk,” she said. “We sit on the swings and go play on the monkey bars.”   

Nazia Sadat is hopeful her children will go on to college, that her son will make good on his pledge to become an engineer and that her daughter will pursue medicine. 

“The main reason why I came here and am happy here is that I want my children to be educated,” Sadat said. “Especially my daughter.”

South Carolina

While she’s embraced American values, other families are reluctant to adapt to such a stark change. 

Claudia Newbern, assistant principal at the Charleston County Newcomer Center in South Carolina, doesn’t want to lose Afghan students — particularly, girls — to the shock of the American school system. 

Their interaction with men and boys back home is largely forbidden, so walking into a massive building filled with both goes against everything they’d been taught. 

Newbern, careful not to rattle them so much that the students drop out, tries to familiarize them and their parents with their new surroundings: Some adjust easily while others struggle for months. 

Three teenage sisters who arrived in the district in February were particularly distressed by the American system. They hail from a conservative family whose values clashed with their school’s.   

“They were petrified,” Newbern said. “It was all very shocking for them.”

The district itself is enormous: It serves 49,000 students in 88 schools and specialized programs. Some 6,000 students are multilingual learners.

Recognizing their difficulty in navigating such a large school environment, the sisters were led around by a chaperone for much of their first two weeks on campus. And when they grew anxious around a male art teacher — he was friendly and accommodating but nevertheless such proximity made them uneasy — Newbern moved the trio to a class led by a woman. 

It wasn’t the only unusual adjustment. The girls’ teachers had already asked male students to keep their distance during their first months of school, a request the boys were glad to honor: Newcomers themselves, they know how difficult it is to absorb foreign customs. 

“We didn’t want them so overwhelmed that they didn’t go to school,” Newbern said.  

The early accommodations paid off: The girls are thriving. While they are still struggling to learn English — they had only limited schooling at a young age — they are happy inside classrooms led by male teachers and interact with ease around all students, Newbern said, including the boys they once avoided. 

All three want to attend college with two deciding on career fields. One plans to be a nurse and another a teacher. 

And they make frequent use of a prayer room designed for those students who must pray during school hours. 

The sisters are surrounded by their peers for much of the day but spend lunchtime in the library where they can sit on the floor, much as they would at home. Newbern was honored, recently, when the girls asked her to join them. It was an informative interaction: That’s how the administrator learned one of them, age 17, is married and that her husband remains back home.   

“I asked, ‘Do you miss Afghanistan,’” she said. “They said, ‘A little. Here better.’”

The Taliban has kept most girls out of school beyond the sixth grade. Some secondary schools have to them in the eastern part of the country, but their future remains uncertain. 

College-age women also are under threat. Those who chose to continue with their studies from their male peers. have erupted over the restrictions but large-scale disruptions are too dangerous for participants. 

, which promotes academic freedom around the world, has found that women have not been , that scientific conferences and other programs are gender segregation and that some for not attending prayers. 

The organization, launched at the University of Chicago in 1999, has relocated thousands of scholars to safer parts of the world through the years: It received more than 1,500 applications from Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover — including 20% from women. In a typical year, SAR receives 500-700 applications worldwide. 

“To have restrictions around their ability to teach and/or research is an incredible loss — not only to women in Afghanistan, who have hard-won their academic accomplishments despite myriad pressures, but also to the academic community inside the country which will now be stifled and missing these vital voices,” said Rose Anderson, director for Protection Services at SAR. 

Virginia

Tim Brannon, principal of the International Academy at Alexandria City Public Schools, said the number of Afghan students in his program has risen dramatically in the past five years: They accounted for roughly 25% of the population in 2017-18, but nearly half now, on par with Spanish-speaking students. The district currently serves 752 Afghans total — including 510 recent arrivals.

Brannon said the students, having seen the district honor its Latino population with cultural celebrations, asked that they have an opportunity to explain the Islamic holidays of Eid and Ramadan to their peers. During an April assembly, the students gave a brief presentation on Ramadan and did some traditional dances and, roughly a month later, shared a second presentation, teaching their classmates about the end of Ramadan and the celebration of Eid.

Brannon said the only discernible difference between Afghan students and their classmates is that the Afghan kids approach school officials as a group. 

“When one kid has an issue, they come to the office as six,” he said. “They want to show up for their friends.” 

The Afghan students’ presence, he added, has only made the school community richer. 

“We have people from everywhere with all sorts of different backgrounds and experiences and they all bring something positive to this school,” he said. “It’s a chance for us to learn from — and about — somebody from a different culture and that adds to our knowledge of the world and our place in it.”

This piece is part of “The Texas Story,” a four-week series produced in partnership with the George W. Bush Institute examining how well Texas students are being prepared for the workforce as the country recovers from the pandemic. Read all the pieces in this series as they are published here. Read our previous accountability series here and here.

This final article puts forth recommendations for civic leaders in Dallas, Austin and Houston. Part one focused on outcomes data and student perspectives. explored the importance of effective governance and community ecosystems. Part three addressed innovation in each of the three regions.

We define “governance” as both the school board and the opportunistic use of legislation and public policy. We define “ecosystem” as the broad coalition of organizations and community leaders focused on education and workforce outcomes across a city or region. Finally, we define “innovation” as the use of strong practice, sometimes new and sometimes not, with the goal of improving student outcomes.

The urban and suburban boom of Texas is full of both promise and risk. According to the 2020 census, Texas grew the fastest — and grew more diversely — than any state in the union since 2010. And according to, the state’s population is likely to grow to 10 million by 2036, Texas’ bicentennial. Over 71 percent of jobs will require some college, but only 32 percent of Texas high school students earn a degree or credential within six years of graduating high school.

According to the National Assessment of Education Progress, the gains that Texas students were making in the 1990s and 2000s have stalled, leaving many Texas young people behind in reading and math, the academic building blocks needed for future success.

Unemployment in Texas is low again, at 5.6 percent in September 2021, after hitting a record high of nearly 13 percent in April 2020. Texas companies, large and small, are adding jobs and competing for talent. Texas excels at importing talent thanks to a potent and attractive mix of incentives for businesses to relocate and expand, no state income tax, and job availability. The challenge for Texas is whether young Texans, the homegrown talent of all races and ethnicities, will have access to this growth in opportunity. 

As this series detailed, leaders in Dallas, Houston, and Austin are addressing the opportunity gap for young people in their cities in different ways. While there is no one correct approach, directly acknowledging the current state is essential for any meaningful change. Adults need a seriousness of purpose that supersedes politics and the gravitational pull of the status quo. 

Sometimes that means doing more of what is working. Sometimes it means stopping what is not serving students. It always means that the adult leaders across a region, not just those employed by the school district, need to meaningfully engage with their community’s education and opportunity challenges. Improvement is only possible when governance, ecosystem, and innovation are used together in service of young people. 

Lessons learned from Dallas, Austin, and Houston inform these recommendations for leaders in any city focused on improving outcomes for young people.

Put Outcomes Above Sound Bites

Outcome data from the state and districts are essential. Intermediaries like the and use that comparable outcome data to say true things about what is happening in the system. Outcome data reveals which students are on track for their next step and who is falling behind; it is impossible to make decisions about priorities and investments without considering the success of students. 

Successful intermediaries make a huge difference. They do far more than critique from the cheap seats, like some education version of Statler and Waldorf, the grumpy balcony-dwelling Muppets critiquing from above. Commit and Good Reason Houston provide concrete support for strong teaching and learning in districts willing to take improvement seriously. Because those organizations sit outside the school districts in their counties, they can use knowledge, incentives, and, when needed, public pressure to bring about change. Importantly, intermediaries help a wide range of people understand what is at stake.

Austin would benefit from a similar quarterbacking organization. The, which brings together Central Texas school districts, higher education institutions, businesses, and nonprofits to pursue policies that create an educational pipeline from pre-K through college, could be a place to start. The Austin Chamber of Commerce, which has a longstanding interest in local education, similarly has an opportunity to focus the region’s attention on the need for a better pipeline.

Keep the End in Mind

The goal of our education system is to prepare young people for a life with agency and opportunity, with all the stops along the way building upon each other. The launch process from high school into higher education, military, credential program, or career should be made explicit for students and their families. Families need information about options, pros and cons, and costs.

High school graduation rates alone no longer signal a win. Those diplomas need to lead to a two- or four-year degree, a certification, or the military to prove their worth. Dallas Independent School District’s work to build is an important example of how a district can create this more explicit connection between high school and what is next. The initiative is built upon partnerships with higher education institutions and corporations.

Innovate Where It Matters, Not in the Margins.

Initiatives du jour often litter cities, especially when it comes to education. New shiny objects can attract attention, especially when a high-profile champion is behind one. Too often, these well-intentioned but disjointed efforts fail to live up to their promise to meaningfully serve kids. Innovation doesn’t always mean new. Sometimes it means committing to do what works, to do it well, and to do it with fidelity over time.

Strong policy can pave the way, and , a landmark education bill passed by the 2019 Texas legislature, is one example. The wide-ranging bill provides districts with incentives and supports to improve student outcomes and support teacher excellence, while making some important changes to school finance in Texas. 

A hallmark of the bill is a concentration on K-3 reading support, with a particular focus on training all K-3 teachers and principals on the science of reading. Aldine ISD used that bill as a catalyst for change across its district to dump poor instructional practice and curriculum and instead build the capacity of their educators. HB 3 also provides incentive funds for districts to pay their best teachers the most, particularly if they are on the faculty of a high need and/or rural campus. Dallas ISD and Aldine ISD have taken advantage of this opportunity.

Teaching reading well and rewarding your best teachers are not new ideas. But students who can read — and who are taught by high quality educators — will be better prepared for their next steps. District leaders who ignore the incentives HB 3 offers should explain that choice to parents. Systems change can be slow. A focus on improving reading instruction and educator excellence can pay off for kids quickly.

Prioritize Governance, the Unsexy Building Block of Student Success. 

It is difficult to compensate for school boards gone awry. At best, they distract all the players from improving student outcomes. At worst, they disrupt, halt, or implode important student-centered work. Across the state, several districts are working with, the TEA initiative for developing and supporting effective board members. Trustees need clarity about their role in the district, and voters need clarity about what to expect from the board members.

American education is noteworthy for its local control ethos. Given limited federal mandates, states and local communities have significant influence on districts. When boards work well, they set policies and direction that reflects strengths and needs of the community. When boards don’t work well, the needless drama drives people away and erodes confidence in the district. Too much is at stake for governance to be an afterthought. Simply put, school boards must focus on the main thing — improving student outcomes.

Build the Bench for the Long Haul

Keeping the focus on quality education and workforce pathways requires stamina and a long-game mindset. The challenges are complex, so solutions will take time, commitment, and a sense of humility. Building a strong bench of stakeholders that will work to keep district and regional goals focused on student outcomes and opportunity matters. Leaders should prioritize developing future trustees and community leaders, recruiting staff (and funders) to intermediary and support organizations, and engaging business and higher education leaders in making strong connections to the region’s PK-12 districts. The ecosystem will be strengthened — and its influence increased — when more people understand what success means for all Texans. 

The current Dallas board has a stronger understanding of governance than previous iterations, but that current knowledge is not an inoculation of knowledge for future trustees. This is where the ecosystem really matters.,, and have made a meaningful difference in Dallas by engaging new people in the process and the key issues.

Prioritize Parent Input

Parents should be central to decision-making. Patricia Arvanitis, founder of , rightly notes that parents need to be a check on the system given how much they have at stake for their own children. Outreach to parents, centered on their child’s progress, is crucial. Parent perspective should play a role in allocating resources and determining priorities.

, based in Dallas, trains parents to be advocates for their students. Florencia Velasco Fortner, the organization’s president and CEO, describes a sense of urgency among parents coming out of the pandemic. After months of learning from home, they see their children’s academic needs in a new way. Input from parents can help shape priorities — and serve as an important accountability check for districts and programs.

City leaders can seek out organizations like which focuses on providing parents free, personalized support to find a school that is a good fit for their child. The organization, which works in Austin, San Antonio, and Tarrant County, largely serves families of color with a household income of less than $50,000.

Create a City Hall Champion-in-Chief

In Dallas, strong mayoral leadership matters, despite limited direct authority over Dallas ISD. Former Mayor Mike Rawlings certainly was instrumental in identifying Mike Miles as a superintendent candidate who would bring a sharp focus on student outcomes. And Rawlings pushed for Dallas ISD to enact reforms like a merit-pay system that recognizes effective teachers and develops those educators who struggle in the classroom. Former Dallas ISD school board chair Miguel Solis put it this way: “The mayor must consistently promote education, even if they lack line authority.”

Mayors in each city can influence, engage, and cajole others across the city to focus more sharply on outcomes for young people. The bully pulpit is real and can be powerful.

Put Corporate Skin in the Game

Districts in all three counties are preparing future employees for the region’s businesses — but also educating the families of today’s employees. Corporate leaders should seek ways to explicitly connect with high schools through partnerships like P-Tech, and they should also engage with organizations like the regional Chambers of Commerce to advocate for improvement. The Texas economic miracle needs talent for fuel. And there is a great deal of talent to unlock in these ISDs.

Corporations in Austin are particularly mute on education, which is somewhat surprising given the 34 percent population growth in the region since 2010. Many of those newcomers hail from out of state as companies relocate, expand, and launch in Travis County. Leaders from Dell Technologies have engaged the most, largely promoting charter schools in the area. But beyond Dell, the tech community is a non-factor in Austin’s education discussion.

The Austin Regional Chamber of Commerce should ensure that the new corporate leaders in town understand the promise of Austin ISD (as well as its challenges). Supt. Stephanie Elizalde just wrapped up her first year. Now is the time for Austin’s business sector to prioritize education, and to work with Elizalde to help connect Austin’s high-flying economic success to the Austin ISD students preparing for careers of their own.

Texas is fortunate to offer opportunity to so many people, including those coming from afar. Supporting lives with agency that lead to lives with dignity requires a strong commitment to readiness for all young Texans. Students across the state will need the right skills to land the problem-solving, creative-thinking jobs that tomorrow will offer. Unfortunately, the 68 percent of Texas students on track to earn only a high school degree will increasingly be shut out of higher wage jobs and career paths.

It doesn’t have to be that way. The recommendations listed above and highlighted in this series can ensure that students are not left in the lurch. Texas’s story can remain one of opportunity.  We can guarantee that the state has a pipeline of talent to sustain itself into a third promising century if we take action.

Catch up on this four-week series here.

Anne Wicks is the Ann Kimball Johnson Director of the George W. Bush Institute’s Education Reform Initiative.

William McKenzie is senior editorial advisor for the George W. Bush Institute.

“(Space) is an interest that most people enjoy,” Maximos said, “Everybody has a little curiosity in it whether it’s a little bit or a lot.”

Maximos, 14, along with a couple dozen other high school students, spent one Thursday in August at the Williams Indoor Pool, tucked in a cozy neighborhood just a few miles from Space Center Houston, the official visitor center of NASA Johnson Space Center. It’s the same pool where the last two classes of NASA astronauts have obtained their SCUBA licensing, a mandatory component of astronaut training.

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During their day at the pool, Maximos and her classmates at the weeklong Space Center U® program completed challenges in engineering and robotics, working in teams inside and outside the pool. Experts say these skills, and the love of STEM, are best developed in hands-on environments so many students went without last school year when remote learning, COVID-19 protocols, and truncated curricula made labs and field trips impossible.

“There were so few positive experiences,” said Daniel Newmyer, vice president of education for Space Center Houston. Teachers did what they could, but he knows they too were frustrated by the limitations. Space Center Houston is committed to helping students reignite their love of science, and to fan the flames of those, like Maximos, who have their sights set on all kinds of STEM fields. “These informal learning opportunities activate, or in this case reactivate, learning in the classroom.”

Informal learning abounds at Space Center Houston. The hands-on museum is open for field trips, families. Explorer Camps for younger students ran throughout the summer, and Space Center U®, for children 11-18, runs year round. Science clubs and school groups from around the world make up most of their school year attendance. Individuals like Maximos can join sessions as well, as their schedule permits.

While the more well-known Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama focuses on the astronaut experience, Space Center U® incorporates the many other STEM fields required to put humankind into space. NASA has always had its eyes on space, Newmyer said, but he regularly reminds students of all the earthbound innovation it has spurred along the way.

The day at the pool is a perfect example of the broad range of skills and content the Space Center U® students explore. On one side of the large garage-like building, a few pods of teenagers learned to use SCUBA equipment under the guidance of professional diving instructors. Once they knew how to breathe through regulators and manage their bright yellow oxygen tanks, they culled the bottom of the pool for painted rocks symbolizing nitrogen, hydrogen and other elements that make up the atmosphere of an imaginary planet.

They resurfaced from their mission, analyzed the rocks they had seen, and created a report detailing whether or not the imaginary planet could support life.

In addition to the biology and chemistry content, the exercise is designed to stoke imagination. The quest to find another habitable planet has occupied the mind of science fiction writers and NASA scientists for decades. Earlier that week at Space Center Houston, the students visited a special exhibit dedicated to the future of space exploration, in particular, the hunt for signs of life on Mars.

On the other end of the pool, Maximos and her team stood at the edge, navigating the underwater drone to collect data from laminated pieces of paper under the water. This sort of challenge, along with coding exercises earlier in the week, were particularly appealing to Maximos, the aspiring obstetrician.

“I know a lot of doctors nowadays are using robotics and robots,” Maximos said, “So learning how to code them could help me in surgery when I grow up.”

Once they had finished with the drone, Maximos’s group joined several other teams building robotic boats to ferry ping pong balls across the surface of the pool. Other than a mechanical core, the materials for the boat were far from high-tech — they included popsicle sticks, plastic bags, and the fasteners best known as “chip clips.” Once completed, all the teams would race the length of the pool.

The teams quickly realized that coming to the water with a finished product on the first try was not an efficient or rewarding use of their time and materials. Instead, most made repeated trial runs with various pieces and parts, studying the way the friction of the water affected each component. They assembled, disassembled, reassembled and tweaked their creations continuously.

They were, in many ways, learning from failure.

That’s science, Newmyer said, learning from what goes right and from what goes wrong. He wants the students to experience “the positive emotions associated with productive struggle.”

In other words: he wants them to fall in love with the doing of science, not just the end result.

As an educator, he understands the need for tests and content mastery, which schools will no doubt be laser focused on as they address the huge learning loss of the pandemic. However, a large part of scientific education is about questions that can’t be put on a test, because no one knows the answer. Engineering a lab exercise to create, say, a volcano can teach content about acids and bases. However, the process of asking “what happens when I combine elements that have never been combined?” or “How do I get a result no one has ever gotten before?” are also science. That pursuit, he said, is as much about the attempts that don’t get the expected results as the ones that do.

“It’s just dreaming and thinking as big as you possibly can,” Newmyer said.

That kind of learning takes time, which is what Space Center U® provides, and to the best of their ability, he said, they try to provide it equitably.

The kids at the pool were racially and culturally diverse, and the Space Center U program can be adapted for hearing impairment and sensory processing disorders. Also, Newmeyer emphasized, the kids need not be science prodigies. It is designed to appeal to any ability level. “It’s about moving them forward wherever they are.”

That said, he acknowledged, it is a paid program. The multi-day program offers both virtual and in-person experiences ranging between $149.95 and $674.95 per student per week depending on the size of the group and the accommodations. For schools and parents to make that kind of investment, most of the students have a pretty well-developed interest in STEM subjects.

He hopes the Explorer Camps, visits to the museum at Space Center Houston, and outreach programs with Houston area after school programs will stoke some of that early interest. Extracurricular learning took a hard hit during the pandemic, and the Delta variant has everyone on edge about the near future.

Every program at Space Center Houston is taking precautions, said Space Center Houston communications supervisor Meridyth Moore, but they are determined to continue offering something to spark curiosity, and to cultivate the increased interest from private endeavors like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic in the news.

Virtual programming was part of that during the initial coronavirus pandemic, but actually, Moore said, if anyone is able to turn a pandemic into a learning opportunity, it’s Space Center Houston.

During the pandemic, Space Center U® was able to create a full simulation of the kind of quarantining required to keep astronauts healthy before they go into space. Kids dressed in full “” coveralls from head to toe learned how to create sterile environments, conduct experiments with heightened safety protocols, and work as a team through layers of personal protective equipment.

While it may not come to that again, Moore said, Space Center U® is committed to finding innovative and creative opportunities, whatever the constraints. “We’re in the business of awe and wonder.”

On Fridays, Mariela Garcia listens with earbuds as classes from Eastwood Academy in Houston stream in through Microsoft Teams.

But she also keeps an eye on business.

When her mother lost her job at an adoption agency at the start of the pandemic, the senior began thinking of ways to contribute — and cover her college application fees. Each week, she spends three days shopping and prepping ingredients for her Mexican pastry business, Hecho con Amor, or Made with Love. To get ready for her weekly shift at a farmer’s market, she folds empanada dough over apple, pumpkin and cheesecake filling while signed into virtual classes.

“I’m listening to the teacher, but I’m also getting DMs on my Instagram — ‘Hey, what are your flavors?’” said Garcia. “That’s potential business, and I would hate to lose any customers.”

For many teens, a year of the coronavirus has meant not only the loss of in-person learning and time with friends, but added shifts at convenience stores and retail shops to help keep their families afloat during the recession. As kids adapt, many of their teachers and schools are improvising as well, extending deadlines and creating new ways to stay in touch. The huge workload is leaving many students stressed out, and some teachers worry they’re in danger of becoming a statistic: the estimated 1 out of 20 teens who drop out of high school each year, according to .

Jay Novelo, a dean at Tyee High School, near Seattle, was hired to handle student discipline. But with schools closed, his main job is keeping tabs on students and encouraging them to not give up on school.

For most, it’s a tough choice. “Do I want to … survive school or survive life?” Novelo said. “I can’t blame the students — a lot of them choose work.”

One of the 14 students he checks in on weekly is Swin Cobón Sanchez, who bounces between school and two jobs. By day, he cleans houses with his immigrant parents; at night, he mops, vacuums and empties trash at a downtown Seattle medical clinic — a second job he picked up in part to help pay the family’s bills.

That doesn’t leave a lot of room in the day for remote learning, but he makes time for weekly check-ins with Novelo. They chat about soccer, Sanchez’s 2017 Chevy Silverado and the extra class he’s taking to hit the 24 credits he needs to graduate this year.

“I like it, because I know somebody is staying on me,” Sanchez said.

Teens who have joined the workforce hail from families that are predominantly Hispanic and Black, front-line workers and first-generation immigrants who have borne the brunt of the job loss and brought on by the pandemic, teachers and counselors said. , four in 10 children live in families that have struggled to cover basic expenses during the past year. But the relief bill President Joe Biden signed last week aims to fill some of those gaps, providing most families up to $300 per week for each child through the end of 2021.

Some students, like Garcia, are thriving under the flexibility afforded by the pandemic: Despite the job, she’s earning A’s and B’s. But the lifestyle is not for everyone.

“There are definitely some kids who are having issues around time management,” said Joshua Weintraub, the director of college and career success at Lighthouse Community Charter School in Oakland, California. ‘There aren’t enough hours in the day. They’re prescribing themselves caffeine.”

Yasmine Esquivel, a senior at Lighthouse, works up to 30 hours a week at Gap, helping her mom with groceries because she saw “how tight money was.”

“I get stressed and I know my mom can see it,” she said. “She sometimes tells me to leave my job to focus on school.”

‘The lifeline our students needed’

Balancing work and academics is harder in districts where schools have reopened. When in-person classes resumed at Oak Ridge High School in Orlando, Florida, in August, only about 500 of the school’s 2,600 students returned.

Jenevieve Jackson, who teaches digital photo production, still can’t get in touch with who are supposed to be in her classes. Administrators, she said, have been “relentless in trying to find out what is going on with these kids.”

She suspects a lot of them supervise younger siblings or went back to jobs at places like SeaWorld and Universal Studios when the parks reopened.

Jackson drove to students’ houses in September to loan her remaining classroom cameras to those without cell phones so they could work on projects. And she gave them her own version of a “pandemic stimulus.”

“I said, ‘Your grades suck. Here’s 150 points,’” she said.

Teens don’t always work traditional jobs. Some young Black men in Atlanta have been surviving the pandemic as “” peddling cold drinks to motorists at freeway off-ramps. Javon Solomon, a ninth grader at Booker T. Washington High School, was one of them.

“My mom was working in the mall. She was released from her job,” Solomon said. “We didn’t have enough money or the resources we needed.”

He could pocket $120 a day selling water, but didn’t always feel safe. Many residents consider the young entrepreneurs a nuisance. Fights have broken out between kids competing for street corners and some have gotten arrested.

C.J. Stewart, a former outfielder for the Chicago Cubs, gave Solomon an alternative — earn $25 an hour as a coaching “ambassador” working with young Little Leaguers, often from affluent white families.

“If you’re not giving Black teenage boys an opportunity to make money, you’re not really helping them,” Stewart said. His youth baseball nonprofit — Launch Expose Advise Direct, or LEAD — connects families with resources for food, clothing, housing and jobs. Some of them, he said, would be homeless if their sons weren’t in the program.

Solomon has the potential to earn over $1,000 a month with private clients and group lessons, in exchange for maintaining good grades, attendance and behavior. Angela Coaxum-Young, principal at Washington High, called LEAD “the lifeline some of our students needed to stay in the game of life.” When schools were closed, Stewart was often her only means of communicating with students because the “family was without a phone or had abruptly moved.”

Keeping up with those transitions in students’ lives is why the Highline Public Schools near Seattle assigned staff members like Novelo at Tyee to stay in contact with students. Superintendent Susan Enfield called it “the most important thing that we do.”

Novelo still has students he can’t reach because of outdated phone numbers and addresses. Students are supposed to let schools know if they’re working, but he discovered many of them hadn’t bothered. In addition to weekly Zoom meetings or phone calls to 14 students, he makes socially distant home visits and even delivered an internet hotspot to a student working at Jiffy Lube. The teen offered him a free oil change in return.

If school resumes this semester, Sanchez said he’ll give up his second job cleaning the clinic at night. But he gets upset when his parents talk of exhaustion, aches and pains. He wants to keep helping with the bills. With Sanchez, they can clean more houses.

“My parents are getting older,” he said. “I want to leave them in a safe place.”

This is one installment of a special series published in partnership with The Guardian: ‘ See additional coverage of the past year for students and schools: ‘12 Million Students Still Lack Reliable Internet‘ and ‘Families Face Steep Truancy Fines, Contentious Court Battles As Pandemic Creates School Attendance Barriers.’

Lead Image: Swin Cobón Sanchez cleans a medical clinic in downtown Seattle in the evenings, a second job he picked up last summer. (University of Washington Medicine Primary Care at Belltown)

Longtime clerk Deanna Myron didn’t anticipate celebrating her 21st work anniversary with Curie Metropolitan High School on Chicago’s Southwest Side this way — remotely, and with an appearance on a union Zoom call talking about staff being denied medical accommodations during the pandemic.

But Myron, the daughter of a school clerk who remembers walking Curie’s halls herself as a student, felt she had little choice: her fiance has liver cancer, and her district had turned down her request for full-time remote work accommodations during COVID-19. Since getting that answer in September, Myron has used up all of her sick time and vacation days, and has been juggling spreadsheets from her home workstation five days a week while getting paid for just three days because she refuses to return to school.

“It changes you, you know,” she said of the virus, whose grip on Chicago forced an extension of the mayor’s this week. “You realize what’s important to you. And what’s important to me are my family and my job.” With memories of her fiance soldiering through chemo still fresh, Myron didn’t want to take any chances, opting to stay at home with her two dogs and her 6-year-old daughter.

She is one of countless American school staffers who are either immunocompromised or living with immunocompromised family members. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 1.5 million teachers — or almost one in four — have medical conditions that place them at of serious illness if they get COVID-19. Many are consequently hesitant about returning to buildings amid viral spread, afraid of falling seriously ill or bringing the illness home to their relatives.While that fear is present throughout the country, how school districts have responded to medical accommodation requests has varied wildly: in New York City, which has more students than any district in the nation and one of its most powerful teachers unions, officials granted about 34,000 of the 38,000 requests to work from home, for instance. Meanwhile, in Houston, the nation’s seventh-largest district, a union attorney said officials have denied almost 100 percent of staffers’ requests.

“There are lots of teachers who are older, at risk, or have family members who are at risk, and they have asked for medical accommodations,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union, told ����Ӱ��. “They’ve asked to teach remotely, and whether or not they get the accommodation has far more to do with budget and staffing than it does with need.”

The U.S. is indeed facing a national staffing shortage in schools, an issue that’s inextricably linked to the push-pull in some districts over medical accommodations, and to the greater tension over reopening schools for in-person learning. In Chicago, where Myron works, preschoolers and special needs students returned to school Monday amid an ongoing showdown between the mayor, district leaders and the Chicago Teachers Union over whether schools could safely reopen and the imperative to bring students back into the classroom after 10 months of remote learning. The union was advising teachers who had asked for a health-related accommodation but hadn’t received a response , Chalkbeat reported, while Schools Superintendent Janice Jackson said that teachers who did not receive an accommodation and resisted returning to work in-person would .

Some 678 teachers did not show up for work Monday at Chicago Public Schools, which, according to the union, has denied about 60 percent of accommodations sought by staff, and rejected 85 percent of requests sought by staffers whose family members are immunocompromised.

Meanwhile, two other forces are at work that could dramatically affect the equation over school reopenings: the vaccine and being weighed by the incoming Biden administration to spend some $42.5 billion testing all students once a week and teachers twice a week for the remainder of the current school year. Blanket testing, which aligns with Biden’s plan to reopen the majority of schools within his first 100 days, is just beginning to take shape, however, while the vaccine rollout has been stilted.

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In New York City, teachers union leader Michael Mulgrew announced Sunday that his members would be given priority, speeding up the shots for in-school personnel who want to be vaccinated. Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza told teachers with medical accommodations to stand by for further word on when they would be eligible.

According to data obtained by ����Ӱ�� through a Freedom of Information request, approximately 34,000 requests to the New York City Department of Education for COVID-related medical accommodations have been approved across 1,578 schools. Earlier reports have put the number of teachers within that group between roughly 17,000 and 21,000 of the city’s 75,000-member teaching corps. The DOE said of the 34,334 school-based employees with accommodations, roughly 21,000 are teachers, or 27 percent of all city teachers.

Efforts to refile a legal petition brought by a group of NYC teachers whose requests were rejected rolled to a halt after, one by one, the petitioners won their accommodations through negotiations with the district, according to Lydia Howrilka, a 10th-grade teacher who was part of the complaint. Those remaining on the document are mostly middle and high school teachers, who haven’t had to enter buildings since the mayor decided to prioritize the city’s youngest students, and those with significant special needs, for in-person learning.

The data on accommodations that were granted in nearly 1,600 schools across all five boroughs show the divergent impact the coronavirus has taken on staffing. While the median number of employees working remotely across all schools was 16, there is Walter J. Damrosch, a K-8 school in the Bronx with 714 students with significant special needs and 231 adults — or 48 percent of the school’s staff — out with medical accommodations. Just under 100 schools have five or fewer employees working remotely.

“Even in New York City, there’s lots of latitude for principals,” Weingarten said. “And I understand principals’ concerns saying that they don’t have enough staff, but you’re not going to get enough staff if staff believes that they are dispensable, and that those who are at risk are not being taken care of.”

“It validates the severity of the staffing shortage NYC schools is facing,” City Councilman Mark Treyger said of the data. “Staffing issues are still very prevalent today — it’s the number one reason, in addition to the rising number of infections across the city, why many schools cannot open five days a week.”

The pandemic forcing the socially distanced distribution of students has required school leaders to hire more teachers — and to hire them at a time when they also need to spend money on mitigating viral spread in other ways: through the purchase of PPE, hygienic supplies and computers to facilitate remote learning. Notably, not all districts are even offering in-person learning: a little over half of American K-12 students are learning .

Two on COVID-19 have revealed that opening up school buildings in communities where cases and hospitalizations are rare doesn’t speed up the spread of the virus. But doing so in places with more cases does, according to one of the studies, and it’s unclear from the other what that tipping point is.

Officials at the Austin Independent School District of the 1,156 medical accommodation requests they received from teachers for the spring 2021 semester, before saying they would . At first, the district said there would be no appeals process.

“I have no problem going back to work after a vaccine,” Austin high school teacher Annie Dragoo told station KXAN. Dragoo was denied a medical accommodation for the spring semester despite having a rare heart condition and receiving cancer treatment. “I have been trying to figure out a way for me to be distanced and still be there.”

The AFT has helped its local chapters settle disputes over medical accommodations around the country, according to Weingarten. In Fairfax County, Virginia, members against the district when officials asked them to declare their intention to return to school prior to learning whether they had received accommodations. In August, the local chapter in Cypress-Fairbanks, a suburb outside of Houston, asking a judge to intervene in school staff being forced to return to classrooms at the end of that month. The district, which the union president said has denied more than 90 percent of medical accommodation requests, is now operating with a hybrid model, and employees without accommodations are expected to be back in buildings.

Sonia Gonzalez is an attorney with the Houston Federation of Teachers who’s worked with the union for about five years. She estimates that the Houston Independent School District has rejected over 95 percent of staffers’ medical accommodation requests, a topic that now consumes half of all her phone calls.

“Whereas before it was one in 20 calls, now I see [it] coming up on our call logs all day, every day,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many teachers have high blood pressure; many are diabetic,” she added.

A Houston ISD spokesperson declined to comment. Gonzalez explained that the main law at play when a teacher disputes a medical accommodation request is the Americans with Disabilities Act, that prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of disability. For obvious reasons, she said, the law to this point has not been used to protect the employment status of at-risk workers during a pandemic nor their vulnerable family members.

Rebecca Haffajee, a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, says that beyond providing reasonable accommodations for staffers covered by the ADA, districts should secondarily try to accommodate those conditions that place individuals at increased risk for severe illness with COVID-19, as by the Centers for Disease Control.

Still, accommodating school staff with those conditions can become logistically tricky for districts, she explained — in particular, regarding those who are or might be pregnant, given the high share of the teaching workforce that’s female and of child-bearing age.

Many teachers who get rejected are reluctant to file grievances, said Gonzalez, the Houston union lawyer, partly because the process can take up to two to three months. Some of those who have become discouraged have resigned, she said: “They’re afraid.”

That was the case for Richard Littleton, a veteran science teacher in Polk County, Florida, who quit after his medical accommodation request was by the district. At the time, Littleton’s wife was pregnant.

“Over the last five years, I have sacrificed a lot for my students and education in Polk County,” he told The Lakeland Ledger. “But I’m not willing to sacrifice my wife or our first child for Polk County Schools.”

Dr. Katrina Harley, a teacher at Miramar High School, part of the Broward County Public School system in Florida, has been facing a similar predicament. The single mother of three has a daughter with multiple sclerosis, and after her medical accommodation request was denied, she started to consider retiring. Just 842 of the 5,000 teachers who have applied for remote work accommodations in Broward County, America’s sixth-largest district, ,  NBC Miami reported in November.

District officials wrote in an email this week that they have granted over 2,000 remote work assignments to employees since October — more than any other district in South Florida, they said. Currently, “remote work assignments continue to be granted for more than 600 employees,” the district said.

Haffajee, the public health researcher, says she’s heard about districts being forced to make difficult decisions, like choosing whom to grant medical accommodations based on who filed first or who’s at greater risk.

Moving forward, districts making these tricky determinations should keep an eye on local positivity rates, on scientific updates about the means of transmission, and on the new variant that’s emerged overseas and, more recently, , she said.

She’s in favor of staff reapplying for medical accommodations each semester — as has been required in Houston and Chicago — given how quickly what we know about the virus is changing. New York City said it would require staffers to reapply, but then dropped any review process, automatically extending the 34,000 existing accommodations for the rest of the school year with little fanfare in December.

Haffajee will also be looking to the Biden administration for new, coordinated guidance from the federal Education Department and the CDC on in-person learning during the pandemic.

“That’s really what we need is much clearer federal guidance on all of this from the DOE and the CDC,” she said. “I know Biden is intent on ramping up that area and having clear recommendations for schools as to what they should be doing. As it is, it’s basically been left entirely to localities, and a little bit to states.”

Ultimately, districts will have to reckon with the issue of medical accommodations, she added. Certain populations, including pregnant women, haven’t specifically been cleared for the vaccine yet. For them, the question of medical accommodations will still be on the table.

For many, not showing up in school buildings — whether as a result of quitting, as in Littleton’s case, or as a result of working remotely, as in Myron’s — hasn’t been easy.

“They were my kids before I had a kid,” Myron said. “I miss being in school with my students.”

Lead Image: Chicago Teachers Union advised teachers who had requested medical accommodations but not heard back to continue working remotely when schools reopened this week. In December, teachers and supporters participated in a car caravan to demand a safe and equitable return to in-person learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Getty Images)