Dive Brief:
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Houston students did better than expected on the state standardized assessment in the 2023-24 school year, the first year after the state took over its largest district, Houston Independent School District Superintendent Mike Miles said last week.
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Although the number of students meeting or exceeding expectations is still not ideal, Miles said, preliminary data shows students in grades 3-8 and high school students districtwide had "one of the highest years of academic growth the district has ever experienced." Scores from students attending schools designated for the state's New Education System for underperforming HISD campuses were almost double the score of the average district student.
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This year, Miles said, he expects many of the 123 schools previously rated D and F will be able to move up. Paired with positive NWEA middle- and end-of-year assessment results, Miles said this could be the beginning of a positive trend in student performance that — if it continues — could see the district exit state intervention sooner and transition into an elected board in the next few years.
Dive Insight:
Eyes nationwide are on HISD after its state takeover in 2023. The move, riddled with political controversy, was one of the largest such takeovers attempted.
Complicating the decision was community resistance to the new state-appointed leadership, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on academic performance and morale, and political divides between a Democratic community and Republican state leadership.
"It's been a tough year — a lot of changes, a lot of new systems, a lot of new practices for students, for teachers and our principals," said Miles during a press conference Wednesday. "And the community also felt some of that change, some of that angst."
Whether the takeover of one of the nation’s largest public school systems is ultimately deemed successful depends on a number of factors, according to experts, including academic benchmarks such as assessment performance.
Miles' update suggests the district is making progress in that area.
"The overwhelming majority of our kids had a good experience academically," he said. "And the overwhelming majority of teachers, principals and students stepped up and engaged in the process and came in with some of the highest scores that the district has ever seen despite the changes."
Out of 274 schools in the district, HISD has designated 85 — or about a third — as New Education System schools. Next year, the district plans to add 45 New Education System schools, bringing the total to 130.
HISD's New Education System schools are targeted for wholescale, systemic reform rather than incremental changes as sometimes seen in other state takeovers of school systems. The district calls it "the largest and most significant effort to transform K-12 education in the United States."
The New Education System schools approach includes:
- An innovative staffing model.
- Consistent high-quality instruction.
- Higher salaries and differentiated compensation based on subject and teacher evaluations.
- A specific instructional program with extra resources and support, including critical thinking and problem solving courses.
- Specialty classes taught by community members and in addition to elective courses, including fitness, music and fine arts, 21st century media and technology, and hands-on science.
- Free field trips for middle school students.
Miles said that while differentiated instruction has helped, he hopes to make a few changes going forward. "There's a lot of things in hindsight we would've done differently," he said, including making curriculum content interdisciplinary and more clearly stating the impact of instructional changes on higher-performing schools.
"This is not a one-year thing," Miles said of the takeover. "We've got a lot more work to do.”
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