It’s their job to make it happen.
After forging ahead with a takeover of the Houston Independent School District, state leaders have outlined three conditions that must be met before transferring power back to the elected school board, a process that will likely take years.
Education Commissioner Mike Morath said he wants to make sure the underlying causes for intervention have been addressed before releasing the district from state control. Morath has outlined the following goals: No campuses should get failing grades for multiple years, the special education program should be in compliance with state and federal regulations, and the board should demonstrate procedures and behavior focused on student outcomes.
Local education experts say those criteria are reasonable and good benchmarks, although it will be important to hold the state accountable to those standards and get more clarity about how those goals will be met.
“They’re definitely achievable,” said Duncan Klussman, former superintendent for Spring Branch ISD. “The state’s now in control. It’s their responsibility to produce that result, and we’ll have to see what happens.”
Klussmann, now an education professor at the University of Houston, said the academic performance benchmark in particular is “a very strict requirement, a very high expectation.”
“The biggest challenge here is producing that level of academic outcome in a system that is as large as HISD, where you have those schools at that level,” he said. “In a system that large, it’s a very aggressive goal.”
The district has made academic progress in recent years under House’s leadership, lifting 40 out of 50 schools from the state’s D and F accountability list.
[…]
Catherine Horn, interim dean at the University of Houston College of Education, said the TEA’s outlined goals are actually similar to the current focus and ongoing efforts by Superintendent Millard House II and the elected school board.
“Those are really important indicators of the health of schools and the health of a district,” she said about the criteria. “I think that how those goals are achieved is going to be where the real challenge and opportunity lie.”
She said she hopes the appointed board will expand on the district’s ongoing progress and not pivot in a different direction.
Additionally, it will be important for teachers, parents and the community to get more clarity in the coming months about specific plans and decisions, she said.
“Teachers will want to hear from a board of managers their pathway for accomplishing those goals laid out by the commissioner and by the agency,” Horn said.
[…]
“The state is now responsible for their outcomes,” Klussmann said. “They’re now the entity that we all need to look at and say, ‘This is what you’ve said you expect of the system — and we’re going to hold you accountable to those outcomes.'”
Emphasis mine in all cases. For sure, it’s a big win all around if HISD meets these goals – the quicker, the better – and gets out from under the TEA’s yoke. Let’s just keep in mind two things along the way. One is that any delays, failures, hiccups, bumps in the road, what have you, are 100% the responsibility of the state of Texas. You wanted this, you got it. And two, HISD had already done a lot of the hard work to make this task easier for them, while already doing most of what the TEA says they need to do. The TEA will get credit if and hopefully when they succeed. But they’ll deserve a lot less credit for that success than blame for any failure that we all really hope doesn’t happen.
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