The School Reform Movement Driving Texas’s State Takeovers
After the letter went out, the district took aggressive action to overhaul its most chronically struggling campuses. Meanwhile, Craig and other parents in the district formed an alliance to try to spare their neighborhood schools from the heavy-handed reforms they’d heard about in Houston ISD and several other Texas districts the state had taken over. Some organized a group, Families Organized and Resisting Takeover, or FORT, and launched their campaign to stop the takeover, speaking with any elected leader who would take their calls.
None of it would be enough.
Public school advocates and parent organizations fearing state intervention often point to Houston ISD, the state’s largest district, where a TEA takeover has led to the departure of 21,000 students. In 2023, Morath installed Mike Miles, a former Dallas superintendent, to lead the district and gave him broad authority to remake it using his philosophy of reform. Miles quickly rolled out his New Education System, or NES, a highly centralized instruction model built around scripted curriculum, tightly timed lessons, frequent testing, and intensive teacher evaluation. It started on a few targeted campuses, but by the 2024–25 school year, NES was in operation on 130 of the district’s 274 campuses. Teachers and parents fiercely resisted the changes, citing staff turnover, library closures, and the fact that the reforms were imposed by an unelected, state-appointed administration; Houston Public Media reported that 633 HISD teachers had resigned by early 2024, nearly twice the number the previous year, while a standing petition demanding Miles’s removal gathered more than 21,000 signatures.
