Houston ISD will be allowed to extend the school year and begin it earlier after the district’s state-appointed board of managers unanimously approved a “District of Innovation” plan Thursday, marking the end of a process that began in September.
The plan, which exempts the district from seven state laws, is part of a Texas initiative designed to give districts more flexibility. In addition to changes to the academic calendar, the plan also opts the district out of requirements to use the state’s teacher evaluation tool, seek state waivers before hiring uncertified high school teachers and more. (A full description of all the changes can be found here.)
HISD Superintendent Mike Miles, who was appointed along with the board in June as part of state sanctions against HISD, has argued the plan is necessary to drive gains in student achievement, and that the current 172-day academic calendar is too short. HISD’s calendar will be no longer than 180 days next year and no longer than 185 days after that under the plan.
HISD has said it plans to present the proposed 2024-25 academic calendar based on the new exemptions from state law to the school board on Feb. 8. The first day of next year will be between Aug. 7 and 14, HISD has said.
But community members voiced concerns that hiring uncertified instructors could lower academic standards and extending the school year could spur an exodus of teachers.
The eight board members present for Thursday’s vote did not discuss the plan. Miles was not present at the meeting but released a written statement after the board passed the plan.
“We are making the bold changes required to improve instruction and help students develop the competencies they will need to succeed in the future,” he said. “Having the (District of Innovation) designation is long overdue and will allow us to accelerate our work in important ways.”
The vast majority of Texas districts have already received the District of Innovation designation, but the step has been controversial in HISD. A district committee shot down a similar proposal in 2021 when HISD’s elected school board governed the district, halting the approval process.
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The final draft of the plan included key revisions in response to community feedback. After pushback from families, the final plan abandoned measures that would have raised elementary school class size limits and nixed a requirement that families be notified when their child’s teacher does not have a certification. The original proposal included 10 exemptions to state law, compared to the final draft’s seven.
Another key provision of the final plan allows HISD to decide the punishment for students caught in possession of vapes on a case-by-case basis, rather than automatically sending them to a Disciplinary Alternative Education Program, as required under a new state law.
Exactly how some of the components of the innovation plan will function in practice remains an open question.
The plan includes “implementation guidelines” that are not legally binding, but Miles has promised to follow. For example, the guidelines limit the hiring of uncertified teachers without state certification waivers to high school positions.
Community members have expressed concern that there is no legal avenue to hold HISD to the implementation guidelines.
See here for the previous update. Again, I have no objection to the idea of the DOI designation, and I think some of the specific items on it are unquestionably good. I commend the District Advisory Committee for their work, and for their responsiveness to community feedback, which has not exactly been a hallmark of the Mike Miles regime. There are still a lot of details to be filled in, and as noted many times before we are all being told to trust Mike Miles and his process when there’s often little transparency and no oversight or mechanism of accountability on him. We are so often left in the position of hoping like hell it all works without any reason to truly believe it. I’m almost used to it by now.
On a related note:
Three of HISD’s elected trustees — Dani Hernandez, Sue Diegaard and Judith Cruz — spoke in favor of an agenda item which will add annual student achievement benchmarks for NWEA MAP testing to the district’s goals, and a monitoring calendar that will require the board to hear monthly updates on their progress.
“Fifty-nine percent, over half, of our third graders are not reading at grade level. That happened on our watch, and yet I don’t hear any outrage about that,” Diegaard said. “I commend the board for setting the most ambitious goals in the history of this district, and in achieving them will make more progress toward closing the achievement gap than any district in the nation. I hope you can achieve what we couldn’t.”
Jane Friou, a parent of a special education student, however, urged the board to wait until the parameters for those benchmarks were fully completed. The baseline data for special education students will not be available until January 29, 2024, according to the district, and thus their NWEA MAP goals have not been set.
“It would be wise to delay this important vote until the public can review the completed documents and make an informed comment on them,” Friou said. “The superintendent works for you, and you can ask for more.”
The district’s goals are commendably high, and I believe that the change to a phonics-based reading curriculum (third item) will be a big step towards those goals. We still have to actually achieve those goals – note in that linked story, Miles warns that the year one progress is likely to be minimal, which I can understand but also recognize as a bit of ass-covering. This comes back again to the enforced hope about the Miles agenda, which also means hoping that all of the other chaos Miles is bringing to the district won’t have other negative effects. And now we’re being told we won’t really know if any of this is working for at least two years. That’s asking for a lot of faith. It better be worth it. The Press has more.
Sounds like a lot of HISD patents are going to support the voucher program.
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