The ‘Houston Miracle’ Shell Game
When Aubrie was a freshman in the Houston Independent School District (ISD), she was assigned to an Algebra I class. On the first day of school, her teacher recognized her talent and moved her into pre-AP Algebra I, where she thrived.
Two years later, at the beginning of the last school year, Aubrie was excited to take pre-AP Algebra II. She had always loved math and imagined a bright future in science. But three weeks into the school year, she and nearly 2,000 other juniors across Houston ISD’s 16 New Education System (NES) high schools were abruptly pulled out of Algebra II and placed into a remedial math course called Algebraic Reasoning/Texas College Bridge.
This move was not made to help students grow academically. Instead, we believe students were moved into this less rigorous course to artificially inflate campus accountability ratings, at the expense of student learning. Just sitting through the Algebraic Reasoning course and clicking through the online modules increases a school’s A-F rating, even if students never pass the state’s college readiness assessment attached to the class. It’s a loophole that state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles is exploiting at an unprecedented scale.
Records obtained from the Houston ISD along with publicly available data from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) reveal that the district’s state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles shunted about half of all juniors at NES high schools into this course. At some schools, as many as 70 percent of juniors were similarly demoted into less challenging classes.
NES high schools are all located in under-resourced, predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods, which have borne the brunt of the state’s destructive takeover policies. By comparison, less than 5 percent of all juniors at non-NES high schools in more affluent communities, including Debakey, Carnegie Vanguard, Challenge, HAIS, Heights, HSPVA, and Lamar, were placed in this remedial course.
