In the fashion of American democracy, when someone believes there’s a problem with their local school, they may decide to make a call or send an email to their elected school board members, whom they almost always have to look up first.
Parents might take these minor elected officials by the figurative shirt collar and gently shake them, saying: “I want this thing to change.” They may then gather their surly neighbors and gang up on the school board to not-so-gently threaten their re-election until someone is thrown out of office or everyone else gives up.
Houstonians were getting arrested at rowdy school board meetings years before “critical race theory” made such things fashionable. In 2017, three women were arrested – and two charged – after getting into a shoving match when the Houston school board had been considering a plan to turn over its failing schools to a charter program, to get out from under the threatened state takeover. The board abandoned the plan.
But it’s one thing for activists to lobby someone who lives up the street and another when state lawmakers take control, as has happened in Houston.
Under a 2015 Texas law, if a school fails state standards for five years running, the state is obligated to either close the school – or take over the school district. In 2023, the entire Houston independent school district – the eighth-largest system in the country – became a dependency of the state.
Houston homeowners still pay school taxes. They even vote for school board members, though those elected officials have no authority. The state-run district places underperforming schools in the new education system, which critics describe as a reform model of inflexible lesson plans in a rigidly disciplinarian environment geared toward passing tests. The curriculum is questionable: in one instance, a school used instructional materials from the conservative non-profit PragerU that cast doubt on the human-made origins of climate change. In another, seventh graders were asked to imagine themselves as statehood convention delegates and asked whether slavery in Texas should be legal.
Parents have protested new rules that abandon state requirements for certified teachers in classrooms. They argue that Spanish-speaking students are no longer receiving adequately bilingual instruction. They see the conversion of a school in a struggling part of Houston into a military academy as a challenge to their values.
But now, there is no shirt collar to grab.
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The halls of Phillis Wheatley high school were quiet in the middle of the day in the middle of December. Testing was on. Testing is always on, but in this case teachers were administering end-of-semester exams. Three students carted boxes of pizza into the front hall.
The school, in Houston’s struggling fifth ward, was the first of several schools in Houston ISD to trigger the Texas law. After a years-long court fight, the Texas education agency opted to replace Houston’s elected school board with a state-appointed panel.
About 5.4 million students attend public schools in Texas, and about 200,000 are enrolled by Houston ISD. Children at Risk, a non-partisan research and advocacy non-profit in Texas, academically assessed 1,282 high schools in Texas for the 2022-23 school year, pairing test data with socioeconomic data to look at performance. A few Houston schools took several of the rankings’ top spots. But Wheatley ranked 1,236th. Eight of Houston ISD’s 43 high schools ranked lower still.
Wheatley is showing improvement, said Bob Sanborn, the CEO of Children at Risk. “But when you look at schools like Wheatley, they’re in such a hole to start. At least they’re trying something different. Most parents at these poorly performing high schools want to see a change as well. They’re less interested in who is doing it and more in whether they will be successful.”
Sabrina Cuby-King became Wheatley’s principal in 2022. One year later, the Texas education agency took over. Wheatley had been the poster child for reformers after repeatedly failing the state assessments. All eyes were on her, and on Wheatley.
Her first order of business was doing what she could to turn off the spotlight, she said. Cuby-King has not spoken to the press since taking the job – until now. The Spelman College grad spoke with care to avoid negative language about the school, about the takeover, about parents or politics.
“Students who are attending here see their school on the news being beat down. That had to shift first … the perception of the school had to change,” she said. “I didn’t want my students to go out and be embarrassed. That was my internal push. That was my motivation.”
The state rates schools using A to F letter grades. Houston ISD posted school test grades on 23 January. After a string of Fs, Wheatley scored a D. It’s an improvement that Cuby-King expected after a year of intense change. She’s a cheerleader for the model.
“The model that’s put in place has shown that the turnaround is successful,” she said.
But both Cuby-King and other administrators vigorously challenged the suggestion that students were being taught to the test, despite the constant classroom quizzing.
“The focus is on high-quality instruction and a reassurance that kids have content-knowledge acquisition,” said Joseph Sotelo, the senior executive director of Houston ISD. “So, at the end of class, we have a quiz. We make sure that you know it, and through the genius of the model, when kids do get it, they get to go to the team center and excel with their work.”
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Mike Miles, the Houston ISD superintendent, is a West Point-trained former army ranger and diplomat who also previously served as a school superintendent in Dallas and Colorado Springs, and ran a charter school network, Third Future Schools.
His critics complain of the military-like regimentation he has imposed on failing schools, over public objections, in the new education system modeled on his charter school approach – and of the questionable curriculum their children have faced. Both the PragerU and slavery material were removed after their appearance became public. But neither case threatened Miles’s job.
Miles “doesn’t have to act politically or in accordance with other peoples’ wishes”, Sanborn said. “And he has a personality that fits that. He doesn’t know how to spin things for the media. He doesn’t know how to spin things for parents. He has the best intentions, but sometimes he’s a bull in a china shop.”
Some of the changes are cosmetic, like replacing hall passes with 3ft-tall, bright orange traffic cones that a hall monitor can spot from orbit. Some changes are less abstract: in Miles’s system, lesson plans must be taught without deviation, with a quiz at the end of every block of instruction.
Students who pass the quiz are sent to what used to be school libraries – team centers, which have also been described as “disciplinary centers” – for other instruction. Those who fail the quiz are re-educated.
Critics of the state school takeover see Miles as the epitome of what they hate about it: an unelected outsider who refuses to listen to their concerns.
“I am speaking to the unelected board of managers, who consistently support the uncertified superintendent on his quest to remove all certified teachers, principals, staff members and counselors out of our schools,” Dr Pamela Boveland, a Houston college professor, said at the December school board meeting. “Obviously if he is not certified, no one else should be.”
In January, the district announced it would convert Cullen middle school – an economically disadvantaged campus that’s about 90% students of color and a solid C on the state’s academic achievement ratings – into a military academy later this year.
Until the state returns governing authority to the elected board, the elected officers of the district, like Plácido Gómez, who was elected last year, are left playing the role of a prison trustee negotiating with the wardens.
“People really are upset, and they have every right to be upset. Their voice was taken away,” he said of the takeover. He’s trying to give Miles the benefit of the doubt, though. “I’m willing to die on the hill of seeing the best in people. Though I could criticize the way that the superintendent came at things, I do believe that in his heart of hearts, he wants what’s best for students, and particularly, he wants what’s best for students who have historically been underserved.”
Miles argues that the takeover process itself was a product of a democratic process. Elected lawmakers enacted the legislation. Elected officials appointed attorneys to argue the constitutionality in open courtrooms, before an elected judiciary.
“I understand that people think that because they no longer elect the school board, at least for a period of time, that that process is non-democratic,” he said. “But the overarching process that allowed the takeover? Totally democratic. You may not like the results, you know, but the process was used and was vetted legally, through several iterations, right, several levels.”
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Parents generally understand that Houston has some troubled schools and want to see them improve. But under the new education system, they’re left trying to find ways around the government to help their children.
Jessica Campos’s daughter attends Pugh elementary school in the Denver Harbor neighborhood; it’s one of the feeder schools to Wheatley. Because it’s in the Wheatley school cluster, the district imposed the new education system on it. In 2022 it earned an A grade. Last year it slipped to a B.
“We had just got through having our last day of school, and it was a wonderful time,” Campos said. “Next year, my daughter was going to have the same teacher she had in third grade, which was the best teacher she ever had. A couple days later, we get a call from that same teacher, crying, saying that he just lost his job. I’m like: ‘What is that? What do you mean? You just got nominated for teacher of the year last month?’ And he’s like: ‘Yeah, we all lost our jobs. All the teachers.’ So yeah, that’s going to upset us parents because we had a great school.”
Campos was disturbed by some of the changes made at Pugh, like the PragerU video. District leaders apologized, but the decision to use them at all is a poke in the eye to any pretense of local control.
Campos said she’s particularly concerned about how dual-language instruction had been curtailed. Pugh’s student body is 96.4% Hispanic, according to school records. About 97% are economically disadvantaged and almost all have Spanish as a first language. Campos says the mechanisms to challenge a problem like this have been eliminated.
“It feels like our language is being removed from our schools,” Campos said. “And I think that it’s our right as parents to choose that. I don’t think that the parents in our community had a voice. They have eliminated us from the schools. We’re not allowed to ask questions. Actually, teachers have told parents that they have been told they cannot speak to us.”
Gómez has heard similar things from teachers.
“A lot of teachers feel there’s a culture of fear in the schools,” he said. But there’s little recourse to the appointed board of managers. “If I come to them with a logistical concern, or that principal is not effective, or this parent had a negative experience trying to observe what’s going on in schools, the board of managers really doesn’t have the power to do those administrative things.”
Campos and her daughter’s teacher don’t get a vote on how the system is administered. But both parents and teachers have been voting with their feet. Teacher turnover has doubled in the last year, according to Houston ISD reports.
“Today I went to a school where almost all of the cars that I went to said: Yeah, we’re moving our kid out of the school district,” she said. “That’s what they want us to do. They want us to run, they want us to leave.”
“We have to stay and fight this because these are our schools, we pay taxes. These are our children. And we have a say in how the curriculum is presented to our children.”
