Houston ISD state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles said Wednesday that the number of the district’s schools that earned a D or F rating in the Texas Education Agency’s accountability ratings dropped by about two-thirds compared to the unofficial ratings the district calculated last year under revamped, harder standards that were protested by districts across the state.
The TEA typically assigns annual A to F ratings to each public district and campus based on standardized test performance, student growth, and progress on closing racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps, although it hasn’t done so for all campuses since 2019 due to COVID-19 and legal challenges. The agency plans to release official scores on Aug. 15 based on performance data from the 2023-24 school year.
HISD reported that 41 schools earned D or F ratings in 2024, which is down from 121 in the unofficial 2023 ratings, and the number of A- and B-rated schools increased from 93 to 170, according to preliminary data. In 2022, prior to the most recent overhaul of the state accountability system, 10 HISD campuses received Ds or Fs.
The district must keep all schools from earning consecutive failing grades, along with meeting certain additional criteria, to end the state takeover and restore an elected board.
The district’s reported decline in D and F-rated schools comes after it saw several percentage point gains in student performance on the reading and math State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, even as average performance statewide on the exams largely declined.
Miles said he attributed the district’s decline in D and F schools this year to what he described as improved quality of instruction, additional training for campus leaders, efforts to implement a stronger curriculum and a “high performance culture.”
“The (TEA’s) exit criteria calls for zero campuses that have a D or F rating, so we took a big chunk out of the 121 and if we continue to work hard and work well, we’ll get that 41 down to single digits at the end of this school year,” Miles said.
Let’s be clear up front that this is great news. It’s great for the students, and it’s great for the End of the Takeover Countdown. One of the many infuriating things about this whole situation is that you have to root for Mike Miles to succeed so that we can be rid of him. Grit your teeth if you must, but him succeeding is the vastly better option than him failing, no matter how satisfying the “told you so” would have been.
I think implementing the change in how reading is taught was a big part of this. HISD was already headed in the direction of making that change, though whether Superintendent Millard House and the elected Board could have made it happen last year is unclear. He got it done, so he gets the credit for it. Putting more resources into the NES schools has helped – and again, I marvel at how the official solution to underperforming schools is to throw more money at them, just like we’ve always said they should – though I remain concerned about how sustainable it is given the state’s continued fiscal penury and the fact that HISD has taken away a bunch of money from other schools to make this work.
In the end, we have to ask, could we have gotten something like these improvements without all the turmoil and turnover and utter indifference to how anyone felt about any of this? We will all be deliriously happy to see the back of Mike Miles when he finally leaves not because he was incompetent but because he’s an asshole who made so many of us miserable, for reasons we still don’t understand. Not that I’d wish it on them, but maybe some other large urban district will have to go through this, but will get a less bulldozer-like Superintendent to do the job, and then we can get some kind of comparison. In the meantime, we are one day closer to getting rid of Mike Miles. If you want to grit your teeth a little harder, you can hear him talk about the accountability grades and avoid answering some questions on Monday’s CityCast Houston podcast, and Houston Landing has more.
I believe what Miles claims as much as I believe what DJT says.
Vote NO on the bonds.
You never take blame or credit for student outcomes the year after so much transformative change? There is always a lag effect as people, culture, and systems transition. I wonder how many of those successful schools are losing their administrators?
You make the mistake of believing that the results Myers reports, and the results reported by the people who imposed Myers on Houston, are factual, when conservative lying ought to be taken as given unless outside corroboration is provided.
I firmly believe these numbers are being cooked to justify conservative takeover of other school districts with similar if not identical policies designed to long-term wreck public education in Texas.
(sorry, Miles, not Myers- don’t know why I made the substitution)
Before we come to the conclusion that interested parties are fudging the truth or telling outright lies, howabout we wait until the report comes out on Aug 15th ?
Folks are starting to sound like DJT, pre-determing that the report’s findings are incorrect a week before the findings are released. Everything’s a conspiracy.
My, how quick to judge we’ve become.
Please tell us, CL, how will you determine if something is true?
Again, you play with words, and your MAGA tendencies appear.
It is not DJT. It is almost all the MAGA cultists up and down the MAGA cult who have a propensity for telling lies. There are always useful idiots to defend them.
I teach at a HISD high school i have no issue with miles but this does go against the narrative that he’s trying to destroy the district. There are only 2 F rated campuses this year out of over 200 campuses. Then 80 schools got out of the D and F rankings. He may not have the best implementation or relations skills but data is data and the schools are improving tremendously. People should realize this is not about personal feelings or vendettas against old leadership or even a red and blue political thing. This is about student achievement and being a NES teacher with my own qualms about the program i will say our teacher pay went up substantially so more work is to be expected considering cuts had to be made to raise that pay because the budget actually decreased.
Manny, the same way science does – through empiracle review of the data presented… In this case, I’m going to need to see the report first.
cant speak to other schools but our campus is keeping every admin from last year and some have been there several years.
The Miles spokes person makes his appearance, that is you ADIII.
CL science would require much more than one set of scores.
MAGAs lie.
At the risk of being tedious, I would like to point out that the purpose of our public school system is to graduate students who are college/career ready. The danger of making everything depend on the STAAR scores is that it incentivizes districts to put test preparation ahead of genuine education. If HISD is putting test prep first, the needle is not going to move much on college & career readiness. If the students are actually getting a better education, those readiness numbers should show substantial improvement. I doubt that HISD parents truly realize how awful the HISD college readiness numbers have been, despite HISD’s “B” rating. Since most colleges test the incoming students, the true readiness numbers are going to show up, no matter what efforts may be taken to hide them. And, college/career readiness is one of the 6 metrics that are supposed to be used in deciding whether HISD is ready for self-governance again.
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