The Texas Education Agency will remove the Fort Worth Independent School District’s elected board members and may appoint a new superintendent to oversee its operations, Commissioner Mike Morath announced Thursday morning.

The decision to assume control of the North Texas district follows months of speculation about how the state would respond to one of the Fort Worth campuses not meeting Texas’ academic accountability standards for five consecutive years. The district closed the sixth-grade campus at the end of the 2023-24 school year, but Morath in the spring that state law still required him to intervene. 

Dallas’ local news station first reported news about the takeover Wednesday evening. 

In a statement Wednesday night, the district said it was aware of media reports about state action but would wait for an official announcement before sharing information with families.

“Our focus remains on our students by providing uninterrupted learning,” the statement read. “We are grateful to our educators and staff for their continuous commitment to our students and families.”

State takeovers of districts can only be initiated if one of its schools receives a failing grade from the TEA for five consecutive years, and allows the replacement of elected school board members with state appointees. The state can also direct districts to shut down the failing schools rather than replace the school boards with a board of managers.

While Fort Worth ISD shut down Leadership Academy at Forest Oak Sixth Grade before the TEA gave it its fifth F rating, Morath said in a March letter that it would not halt potential state action.

Fort Worth ISD was among school districts at risk of a state takeover, a record number in Texas. Beaumont, Connally, Lake Worth and Wichita Falls independent school districts have all amassed five consecutive failing grades at one or more of its campuses. Morath visited Lake Worth ISD on , where Marilyn Miller Language Academy received five consecutive F ratings.

A state takeover of the North Texas district would be the second largest in the state, and Morath three of its schools in August as the TEA considered a takeover. 

With the state taking control of Fort Worth ISD, there have been 11 state takeovers of districts in Texas since 2000, including Houston Independent School District, which is the state’s largest. That takeover began in 2023 and was to 2027 in June. 

This first appeared on .

The Texas Education Agency investigation into teachers’ social media comments after Charlie Kirk’s killing has legal experts and public education advocates troubled by what they say amounts to a “witch hunt” that shows a lack of regard for educators’ free speech rights.

The agency said earlier this month that it was concerning teachers accused of making inappropriate remarks about the famous right-wing activist who was recently shot and killed at a college campus event in Utah.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ Newsletter

The announcement came shortly after Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath sent a letter to superintendents criticizing content he found “reprehensible and inappropriate” and promising to refer such posts to his agency’s investigative unit with a recommendation that the instructors have their teaching licenses suspended. Gov. Greg Abbott the move, accusing the teachers of calling for or inciting violence. The state has since released information on the increasing number of complaints but not their specific content.

From lawyers to restaurant employees, people throughout the country have faced for making statements about Kirk’s killing. In Texas, many school districts have responded to complaints with statements what administrators have described as hateful rhetoric and or employees whose comments they felt violated their local codes of conduct.

Legal experts and public education advocates say the state’s reaction to remarks about Kirk — who often and many hateful, inappropriate and reprehensible — is an attack on teachers’ right to express their opinions on matters of public significance, even if their employer finds them distasteful.

“What’s especially troubling is the political pressure surrounding these investigations and the demands coming from the highest officials in the state that teachers face investigation and punishment for their comments about a public figure,” said Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Public school employees do not surrender their First Amendment rights when they take the job, Terr said. When teachers speak in their personal capacity, even on school grounds but outside their official duties, they retain their right to free speech, he said.

In his letter to district superintendents criticizing teachers’ remarks, Morath said the social media comments under scrutiny could have violated and that his agency would review them to determine “whether sanctionable conduct has occurred.”

The state’s code of ethics lays out how teachers should behave within the workplace and sets standards for how they should interact with colleagues, students, parents and the school community. Physically harming a child or knowingly making false statements about another employee, for example, would clearly violate the code.

The code also calls on educators to display “good moral character,” meaning behaviors that indicate “honesty, accountability, trustworthiness, reliability and integrity,” and to not engage in “moral turpitude,” like fraud, theft or violence.

Generally, two processes can play out when a district or the state thinks an educator has violated that policy.

State law allows local school boards to fire or suspend a teacher at any time for “good cause” as determined by that body. After an educator receives notice of a district’s proposal to fire or suspend them, they can request that a state-appointed examiner conduct an investigation. The school board does not have to follow the investigator’s final recommendations. Teachers can then appeal the board’s decision to the education commissioner.

Meanwhile, when the state education agency receives about a teacher, it conducts a preliminary investigation to determine if further action is necessary. The next step is a formal investigation — when the state places a “warning” on the educator’s teaching certificate — which determines what disciplinary action the state may take. That could include revoking the instructor’s teaching license.

But legal experts say that if the state wants to take disciplinary action against an educator for speaking in their personal capacity, it needs to consider whether the teacher’s comments caused a significant disruption to the workplace or their ability to do their job. Courts rely on examining those factors and weighing whether a public employee was disciplined for speaking on a matter of public concern or a private grievance. The former could violate First Amendment protections.

Abbott recently to a social media post showing a teacher who, in response to Kirk’s killing, allegedly called his death “karma.” According to the post, the educator had also shared a graphic showing controversial comments from Kirk throughout his career. The governor criticized the post, saying, “Assassination is not Karma,” and that the state had added the teacher’s remarks to its investigation.

However, the post may not rise to the level of endorsing or promoting violence, said Elly Brinkley, a staff attorney at the free expression advocacy organization PEN America, who also noted that the state would have to meet “a very high bar” to prove that claim in court. Widespread complaints or outrage, Brinkley said, likely do not constitute a workplace disruption that would justify disciplinary action against a teacher.

Experts say the state’s implementation of policies or actions that cause employees to refrain from speaking on public matters out of caution could also the Constitution.

“We’re seeing so much pressure from lawmakers in Texas and around the country to crack down on this speech,” Brinkley said. “Even if the disruption may be coming from private citizens’ complaints, it’s also part of this larger climate of intimidation. So I think it’s tricky territory for the First Amendment, but I don’t think that we can deny the significance of all of this public pressure as well.”

The state education agency did not respond to questions from the Tribune about its investigation, including how it planned to factor in teachers’ First Amendment protections. Abbott’s office referred the Tribune to recent remarks from the governor, in which he said Texas “must send a signal that celebrating the assassination of a free speech advocate is wrong in a civil society.”

Zeph Capo, president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers, said he is worried that the governor, the education commissioner and state lawmakers are “whipping this frenzy up,” blurring the line between genuine complaints from Texans and those seeking to score political points through what he described as a “witch hunt.”

Across the state’s more than 9,000 public school campuses, Capo said, teachers have varying beliefs. If he looked hard enough, he asserted that he could find comments posted by educators that others would disagree with or find unflattering, such as during conversations about mass school shootings or the Second Amendment.

“Firing them,” he said, “is not really the thing that should be done.”

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.

A legal effort to block Texas from releasing school performance ratings has created a divide between district leaders who worry the scores are an inaccurate representation of their work and others who say parents need that information to make choices about their kids’ schooling.

A coalition of about 30 school districts recently sued the Texas Education Agency over the introduction of a computer system to grade the state’s standardized tests, which are used to calculate part of Texas schools’ performance rating. The year before, school districts filed a similar lawsuit arguing that the agency had raised too fast a benchmark that also goes into their score. Judges out of Travis County have sided with the school districts in both cases, ordering temporary injunctions that have kept the TEA from releasing the ratings for two consecutive school years.

The latest lawsuit has been met with wariness from some school leaders, a marked shift from when more than a 100 districts saddled up for the first suit to create a unified front against the TEA.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ Newsletter

While the state’s hands have been tied from releasing ratings this year, some school districts in Bexar, Dallas, El Paso and Harris counties have voluntarily released their own campuses’ forecast scores. One board trustee out of Midland’s school district unsuccessfully filed a petition with the court to intervene in the lawsuit, saying time and money were wasted on standardized testing if the public could not access school performance ratings.

“If I’m going to put billboards up and I’m going to put up a fancy website promoting our academic programs or early college high school programs, I believe I owe it to that same community, those same parents, [to] put out scores,” said Xavier de la Torre, the superintendent of the Ysleta school district in El Paso.

The TEA grades every public and charter school in the state on an A-F scale. A failing grade can trigger state sanctions and a district in the worst cases. Poor scores can also push families to leave the district and, since schools get money from the state based on enrollment, could lead to less funds.

Some school leaders criticized the automated computer system used to grade the statewide standardized test this year, saying a third party should have reviewed the tool before it was rolled out. They believe statewide drops in reading scores were due to errors with the system and would result in an unfair school rating.

School leaders also said they didn’t get enough notice when TEA introduced stricter expectations for how schools show they’re preparing students for life after graduation. High schools can now only get an “A” rating if 88% of their seniors enrolled in college, pursued a non-college career or entered the military, up from 60%.

Bobby Ott, the superintendent of Temple’s school district, said he never saw the changes to the career readiness benchmarks coming.

“It wasn’t even a target we could prepare for, and that was just completely uncalled for,” he said. “In no real-time situation do you measure progress improvement by doing a ‘ready, fire, aim’ approach. There’s no system built like that … There’s no chance to build to that goal.”

But critics question if back-to-back lawsuits are the best means to raise concerns about the changes. Families have now gone five years without a full picture of how their schools are doing. Texas did not release school ratings in 2020 or 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic; in 2022, Texas lawmakers ordered the state to only release A-C ratings.

Ott agreed a legal fight wasn’t the ideal way to settle disputes with the changes but he said lawmakers left districts no choice because they haven’t addressed their concerns.

The Dallas Independent School District was among the districts that joined in on the first lawsuit. A year later, it was one of the first to voluntarily release their own ratings.

“We’re all being held to that same calculation. So the fact that [the state’s rating system] is imperfect does not mean that we shouldn’t measure it at all,” said Dallas ISD Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde. “I feel like I owe it to our community, and, frankly, to the state of Texas to say, ‘here is where we are.’”

Elizalde said her district joined the first lawsuit because she wanted one more year to understand the new college and career readiness benchmarks before they went into effect. Now that that year had come and passed, Elizalde said her district needed to be transparent about its rating so her team could set performance goals — even if she does share some of the same computer scoring concerns listed in the latest lawsuit.

“If I don’t talk about where we are now, how can I explain how we’re improving?” she said.

Dallas ISD expects to get a C rating this year, a drop from the B it earned in the 2021-22 school year.

Parents lean on A-F scores to understand how their local schools are performing and, if they have the resources, they can use that information to make decisions about where to send their kids to school.

In the El Paso area, school districts in that region are open enrollment, which means families can apply to enroll their child in any school within the district regardless of where they live. The Ysleta, Socorro and El Paso school districts all released their ratings so parents could make informed decisions.

Charter schools leaders say they also benefit from having that information out in the open since many parents find them after assessing local public schools and removing their kids when they are dissatisfied.

“If parents and communities don’t understand the levels of performance of the schools in their neighborhoods … across a state standardized metric, then parents are left in the dark,” said Jeff Cottrill, the superintendent of IDEA Public Schools, Texas’ largest charter school.

The fissures forming between district leaders over the A-F accountability system come as next year’s legislative session looms near. Lawmakers are expected to propose new school voucher legislation, which would let families use taxpayer dollars to pay for their children’s private schooling. Districts are also expected to ask for a raise in the base amount of dollars they get per student after five years of no increases.

Elizalde in Dallas worries that withholding information about public schools’ performance might weaken their ask.

“We know we’re going to be asking for funding for schools. Am I really in the position to say our schools need funding, but I don’t want to tell you how we’re doing? It didn’t sit right with me.”

When asked about how he expects the lawsuit to impact superintendents’ legislative requests, Ott said he hopes the lawsuit will be a catalyst for overhauling the A-F system altogether.

Families in his district have lost trust in the standardized testing system, Ott said. Instead, they want school ratings to measure if schools are safe as well as the experience and tenure of teachers, he added.

“There should be accountability and transparency,” he said. “But they have to be good, solid systems that people can trust and have credibility. And that’s the problem right now. It’s an antiquated system.”

The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

Disclosure: IDEA Public Schools has been a financial supporter 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 at . The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at .

A coalition of more than 70 Texas school districts has called on the Texas Education Agency to delay full implementation of a new data reporting system they say has led to thousands of unresolved errors that could pose grave consequences to their funding and accountability.

School district leaders to the agency’s commissioner, Mike Morath, on Sept. 13 after dozens of them began sharing their concerns with one another about the transition to the new system used to collect student, staff, and financial data, which more than 300 districts piloted last school year. State officials use the information to determine whether schools are meeting performance standards and how much funding they receive each year. The Texas Tribune districts’ concerns about the change last week.

In the letter obtained by the Tribune, the superintendents say they have not been able to verify the accuracy of the thousands of data points entering the new system created by . They warn that, based on their experiences during the pilot, the system is not ready to go live. School district leaders also request the agency “take the necessary steps to provide a safety net for districts this year” and delay the implementation until the system is fully vetted.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ Newsletter

“The unfunded mandate to transition to the Ed-Fi system in the 2024-25 school year when no one is ready has dire consequences for districts in terms of funding, accountability, and reporting,” the letter states.

The Texas Education Agency did not respond to a request for comment on the letter, which offers the first comprehensive look at how widespread the problems with the upgrades are. More school districts have signed onto the letter since it was first sent.

Each of Texas’ more than 1,200 school districts is required to to the state, including information on attendance, enrollment, students who receive special education, children experiencing homelessness and the number of kids who have completed a college preparatory course.

The state launched the new system at the start of this school year. The goal was to make it easier for school districts and the state to share data and reduce the amount of manual labor required from school staff. Districts were supportive of the proposed changes.

Before the upgrade, school districts would submit data directly to the state after working with software vendors that would ensure the education agency didn’t have any problems interpreting the information. Under the new arrangement, the software vendors are now responsible for transmitting the data to the state, a change that school officials say leaves them without a chance to fact-check the information before it goes out.

They also say a litany of errors and inaccuracies surfaced during the pilot program. In some instances, thousands of student records — from enrollment figures to the number of students in certain programs — did not show up correctly.

“Understand the position we’re in as a school district trying to work on this,” said Stephen McCanless, Cleveland school district superintendent, “along with all the other requirements and mandates that districts work on for the state and for the federal government during an entire school year.”

Still, agency officials expressed confidence this month that districts will have ample time to resolve any errors between now and the fall reporting deadline on Dec. 12. The agency noted that districts have until Jan. 16 — just days after winter break — to resubmit any data needing corrections. The agency also said it has resolved more than a thousand tickets submitted by school officials reporting problems with the new system.

But, to date, school district officials say their staff don’t know how to solve some errors, nor are they clear on what steps the state has taken to resolve them. And state agency officials have not directly answered what would happen if the problems go beyond the deadlines.

“The amount of time to investigate even one error can be extremely lengthy,” said Lori Rapp, superintendent of the Lewisville school district, which helped prepare the letter.

Many school districts recently told the Tribune that they are still in support of the system. But they say they need more time.

“The accuracy of the information is so critical because it has so many implications across the system, with first and foremost being funding,” said Richardson school district Superintendent Tabitha Branum, who also signed the letter. “In the previous system, we had tools to help us do that. With this new system, right now, those tools don’t exist.”

In addition to their calls to extend the pilot program, school district leaders are also calling for the state to provide more training to ensure their staff are prepared for the transition; to hire an independent firm to conduct an audit of the data submitted in the new system; and to provide transparency on data security with the system upgrade.

“The potential consequences for the state’s data accuracy and districts’ financial health,” the letter says, “are too large to overlook.”

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.

About six years ago, the Kingsville Independent School District across the state to receive a failing grade under the state’s newly introduced A-F accountability system.

Many educators either stepped down or were asked to leave because of the abysmal rating. But the effects extended beyond the district: The F rating caused Kleberg County, home to Kingsville ISD, to lose out on a partnership with the U.S. Navy that would’ve spurred growth in the region, Superintendent Cissy Reynolds-Perez said.

“There’s a ripple effect,” she said. “These letter grades are not just something you take lightly, and that’s why they’re so high stakes. Not only do we need to make the grade because we want our kids to grow and improve, but we know how it can affect the whole community.”

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ Newsletter

That’s why Reynolds-Perez was one of several Texas school leaders who objected when the state announced stricter requirements to get a good rating: Under the proposed new rules, schools would have to prove that a significantly higher number of high school students were pursuing a career after graduating.

Kingsville ISD, along with 120 school districts across the state, the Texas Education Agency last year and stopped the update. A Travis County judge found that the state’s changes, which were to debut last fall, are unlawful and would harm districts across the state.

The TEA appealed the decision and the trial, which was supposed to be held next month, has been postponed. The release of the ratings, which help inform families and educators about their schools’ performance, won’t be released until the case is resolved.

“This ruling completely disregards the laws of this state and, for the foreseeable future, prevents any A-F performance information from being issued to help millions of parents and educators improve the lives of our students,” the agency said in a statement.

How to hold schools accountable for Texas students’ academic performance has been a contentious issue in recent years, with big implications for the state’s public education system and economy.

The state says it needs detailed data and higher benchmarks to measure schools’ performance to better prepare students for life after high school.

A from the George W. Bush Institute and Texas 2036 found that 70% of jobs in Texas will require a post-secondary degree by 2036, but when cohorts of Texas eighth-graders were tracked, only 22% acquire such credentials within six years of high school graduation.

School leaders agree with the goal but say the changes the state wants would be too abrupt, potentially setting them up for failure and creating an inaccurate narrative about their work.

And for schools, the potential ramifications of a bad grade could be big. Getting an F could lead parents to leave the district, which would mean receiving less money from the state since school funding is based on student attendance. In a worst case scenario, school districts with too many failing grades in a row face the threat of a — just like it happened at the Houston Independent School District last summer.

Accountability in Texas

, the Texas Legislature has mandated a system to evaluate public schools’ academic performance.

Mary Lynn Pruneda, senior policy advisor for Texas 2036, said accountability drives transparency that students, families and policymakers need to drive academic improvement.

“The harsh reality of this situation is that when Texas schools don’t have accountability ratings, the group that suffers the most are students,” Pruneda said. “After the pandemic, only about half of our students are on grade level, and we’re graduating more than 120,000 students each year who aren’t ready for either college or a career.”

Before the A-F system came into effect in 2017, the state only rated schools with one of three grades: “met standard,” “met alternative standard” or “improvement required.”

Now, districts and their campuses are assigned an A-to-F grade based on students’ performance on the state’s standardized test, academic growth and graduation rates, as well as schools’ efforts to prepare kids for careers after high school. Parents and community members use the scores to see how their schools and districts are performing.

The TEA says the 2017 law that required the creation of a new rating system also came with a mandate to keep adding rigor to how schools are graded.

The law states that the TEA commissioner shall “establish and modify standards to continuously improve student performance” to “ensure this state is a national leader in preparing students for postsecondary success.”

The law also stipulated that the agency would not make changes to how it evaluates schools’ academic performance for five years. That waiting period ended last year, and shortly after the agency announced it would revamp the A-F system. One change in particular irked school officials.

Under the current system’s college and career readiness portion, high schools earn an A if 60% of seniors either enrolled in college, pursued a non-college career or entered the military. The revamped rating system, announced in January, raises that benchmark and awards A grades to high schools only if 88% of seniors meet one of those criteria.

This change would’ve bogged down overall school ratings and many high school campuses would’ve received Ds or Fs, Reynolds-Perez said. Under the current system, Kingsville ISD’s only high school would’ve been close to getting an A for its performance in 2022; under the TEA’s proposed changes, the school would’ve gotten a C, Reynolds-Perez said.

“It would have created a false narrative,” she said.

The Kingsville superintendent said announcing the changes in January was not enough time to allow schools to adjust to the change and that the increase should’ve been phased.

At a Texas House committee meeting in February, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, D-Austin, told TEA Commissioner Mike Morath there could be other ways to improve postsecondary success without putting schools’ grades in jeopardy.

The law “certainly doesn’t say Morath must raise the bar for schools as they are recovering from a pandemic,” Hinojosa said.

Other criticisms

Schools have other criticisms of the accountability system, including that it still places an overly large emphasis on the state test.

“You’re measuring a child’s ability on one test,” Reynolds-Perez said.

School leaders also say the system tends to be punitive toward districts that serve low-income families. Under the current rules, a majority of campuses that would have received a D or F based on their 2022 performance serve students who live in some of the state’s poorest communities. That year, the TEA gave those schools a “Not Rated” label as schools were still reeling from the pandemic.

The TEA dismisses that poorer schools do worse because of the system itself.

When the 2022 ratings were released, Morath said there are challenges for high-poverty schools, but believes it is not impossible for them to rate higher.

“Poverty is definitely not destiny,” Morath said. “The idea that this is just some sort of rating of poverty is false. The question is how do we help spread what we identify as the most effective evidence-based practices in our schools.”

For Reynold-Perez, the best outcome of the lawsuit would be for the system’s career readiness requirements to be raised more gradually — or better yet, for the whole system to be revamped with a more holistic approach.

“We believe that we need to be held accountable,” she said. “We just believe that the accountability system needs reform, and it needs to be done lawfully and fairly.”

Resolution to the lawsuit — and the fight over how Texas schools are graded — likely won’t come until later in the spring or summer. In the meantime, families will have to continue waiting to see how their schools performed last year.

“This decision leaves local school system leaders, community members, and families without one of their only tools for understanding school performance and advocating for essential programs and resources specifically designed to lift up their most underserved students,” said Jonathan Feinstein, director of The Education Trust in Texas.

Disclosure: The George W. Bush Institute, Texas 2036 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 at .

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

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. 

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ: 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 Texas Senate on Friday unveiled its priority school safety bill that would create a safety and security department housed in the Texas Education Agency. And the legislation would give the education commissioner more direct power to compel school districts to establish safety protocols for active-shooter situations.

, filed by Sen. , R-Jacksonville, additionally beefs up current truancy laws. This comes after found that the Uvalde shooter was chronically absent starting in sixth grade and dropped out of high school. During a Senate committee meeting last month, Nichols said don’t have “teeth” with parents.

The legislation, which has the blessing of Lt. Gov. , will have the new department oversee mandated school safety measures, such as safety plans.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ Newsletter

Those plans — which must include active-shooter strategies — the Texas School Safety Center, a think tank at Texas State University created by lawmakers in 2001, since after the 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting.

But, a in 2020 found that out of the 1,022 school districts in the state, just 200 districts had active-shooter policies as part of their plans, even though most districts had reported having those policies. The audit also revealed 626 districts did not have active-shooter policies. Another 196 had active-shooter policies, but they were insufficient, according to the audit. In addition, only 67 school districts had viable emergency operations plans overall, the report found.

Under the proposed legislation, the education commissioner, in consultation with the safety center will create rules regarding security audits and other emergency operation plans. The bill also would create similar safety plans for community colleges.

Gov. to create such a department following the Uvalde shooting and appointed former U.S. Secret Service agent John P. Scott as the agency’s chief of school safety and security.

The bill makes it easier for the education agency to impose steep consequences for districts that do not comply. Currently, the education agency must be notified by the safety center for noncompliance before it can take action to impose a conservator or a board of managers that would replace the elected school board.

Under the new bill, the agency would have direct oversight and would allow education Commissioner Mike Morath to take over a school district and its board if it does not meet the security standards. This power is akin to current law, where the commissioner can replace a school board and its superintendent if the district or a school campus receives a failing grade for five consecutive years.

The new department will also set up a school safety review team in each of the state’s , which support school districts in different regions of the state. These teams will conduct vulnerability assessments twice a year of all the school campuses in their respective regions. These education service centers will act as school safety resources for districts, the bill states.

The bill also would increase the amount of money districts get for improving security on campus from $9.72 to $10, plus an additional dollar for every $50 that the district’s payment goes beyond $6,160. It would also include a base payment of $15,000 per campus.

Funding for school safety improvement is at about $600 million in both the House and Senate budget proposals

On truancy, the bill would be more strict on how many days students can be absent before parents are sent to court. A school district must inform parents at the beginning of the school year that if their child has six or more unexcused absences within an eight-week period in the same school year, then they are subject to prosecution, and the child could be sent to court. The Uvalde shooter was reportedly

The bill also will have school districts receive a copy of a child’s disciplinary record and any threat assessments when a child is enrolled.

Shannon Holmes, executive director of the Association of Texas Professional Educators, said the bill contains measures that Texas educators support and is pleased that Nichols will be spearheading the issue in the Senate.

“The legislation also commits significant state funding for school safety, which ATPE believes should be a top priority for lawmakers,” Holmes said.

Disclosure: Texas State University and the Association of Texas Professional Educators 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.

Texas students’ standardized test scores in reading and math moved closer to pre-pandemic levels after falling to levels not seen in a decade the year before, according to results released Friday by the Texas Education Agency.

Each spring, Texas students take the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness or STAAR test. In math, 40% of all students in grades 3-8 met grade level or above this year, a 5-percentage-point increase from the previous year. In reading, 52% of all students met grade level or above, representing a 9-percentage point increase from the previous year.

“This gives you a picture of what has happened statewide with regard to student proficiency and it is largely a story of recovery. It is a story of hope,” Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath said. “It is evidence that we have extraordinary people working in public schools in Texas.”

Brian Woods, superintendent of the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, credits students’ return to their physical classrooms and the work teachers have put in this past year despite disruptions caused by the spread of COVID-19, for the rise in scores.

“Let’s give the credit where credit’s due,” Woods said.

Friday’s announcement comes two weeks after the , who showed slight improvement.

The STAAR had a 98% participation rate this year among all students. Last school year, STAAR exams were optional for students, and districts weren’t rated based on the results. This year though, the scores will count and according to the results. Accountability results for school districts are scheduled to come out in August.

School administrators scores wouldn’t see much improvement this past school year because of school disruptions caused by surges delta and omicron surges. Already understaffed school districts had teachers and substitutes out with COVID, prompting many districts to ask parents to fill in.

While the 2021-22 scores showed improvements in math for third- through eighth-graders current math levels remain 10 percentage points under the 2019 math levels. Texas had been making successful strides in math scores since 2012, when only 34% of students met grade level or above.

It was different with reading, as this school year’s results surpassed those seen in 2019 and in the last decade.

By race, Hispanics, more than half of Texas’ 5.4 million public school students, saw gains as well, as 44% met grade level or above in reading, an 9-percentage-point increase from the previous school year and a 4-percentage-point increase from 2019. In math, 34% met grade level or above, an 8-percentage-point increase, but still 11 percentage points off their 2019 level.

Among Black students, 25% met grade level or above in math, a 5-percentage point increase from the previous year. In the same subject in 2019, 34% met or exceeded their grade level. In reading, 40% of students met grade level or above, an 8-percentage-point increase and 5-percentage-point increase from 2019. Black students represent about 13% of all Texas public school students.

English language learners and special education and economically disadvantaged students also improved their scores in reading and math.

In math, 30% of all economically disadvantaged students met grade level or above, a 7-percentage point increase from the previous year. But, this is still a 11-percentage point decrease from their 2019 scores, right before the pandemic hit.

In reading, 41% of all economically disadvantaged students met grade level or above, a 10-percentage-point increase from the year before and a 5-percentage-point increase from 2019.

While there were gains for these students, a significant gap still exists between them and non-economically disadvantaged students. In math, 55% of students who aren’t economically disadvantaged met grade level or above. In reading, 67% met grade level or above.

Among English language learners, 29% met grade level or above in math, a 9-percentage-point increase from the year before. In reading, 31% met grade level or above in reading, an 11-percentage point-increase.

For special education students, 13% met grade level or above in math, a 1-percentage-point increase from the previous year. In reading, 17% of these students met grade level or above, a 5-percentage-point increase.

Morath said the improved scores were the result of Texas teachers’ strong commitment this year and help from the Texas Legislature, specifically, which requires schools to offer students 30 hours of targeted instruction based on how many STAAR subjects a student failed. He also credited the state-mandated teacher training called . Teachers who teach K-3 must complete this training as part of an effort to improve student reading scores.

Historically, Texas hasn’t been the best at catching students up after a major school disruption. Students affected by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 didn’t meet state standards in reading until four years after the hurricane hit, and they never got there in math, according to the TEA.

In the latest , known as “The Nation’s Report Card,” in Texas performed at or above proficient level, and only one-quarter of eight graders performed at or above proficient level.

Woods, Northside ISD superintendent, said implementing HB 4545 has been difficult as school districts continue to struggle with staffing shortages. Once school is back with no COVID disruptions, Woods believes there is going to be more rapid improvement.

“Teachers are just simply going to have more time with students,” he said. “That’s the key.”

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