Superintendent Mike Miles wants you to hear the good news from Houston.
The chief of America’s eighth-largest school district was appointed in 2023 by Texas’s education commissioner, who controversially spearheaded a state takeover in response to poor academic performance and allegations of misconduct by local board members. The move, preceded by years of lawsuits, drew immediate protests by local officials.
Their outcry was, perhaps, foreseeable. Full-on takeovers are rare, usually only attempted in chronically struggling districts steeped in managerial problems. Houston Independent School District fit the bill in some respects, with large numbers of schools earning failing grades from the Texas Education Agency, but parents and educators still deplored the loss of autonomy and the appointment of an outsider.
Two years later, the outcry hasn’t quieted completely. Increasingly, however, local and state leaders are pointing to a competing narrative of revamped instructional strategies, swiftly rising student achievement and newfound plaudits from state authorities. According to the release of student evaluation data in June, Houston pupils are catching up with — and, in some subjects, outperforming — their peers across Texas after years of lagging far behind. This year’s scores largely improved upon last year’s, which themselves represented a leap forward from the pre-takeover status quo.
The most energetic evangelist for that progress is Miles, a former Army officer and diplomat turned educator. His trek to Texas from his home state of Colorado has not always been smooth, with a three-year stint as Dallas superintendent ending in 2015 after Miles lost the backing of the local board. Both in that city and at a previous stop in Colorado Springs, he angered some veteran educators by advocating for a switch to a pay-for-performance system that many saw as unfair.
He has pursued a similar course in Houston, along with a package of pedagogical and organizational reforms he dubs the New Education System: a heavy emphasis on coaching and blending curriculum and instruction, along with longer school hours. Since its implementation, the majority of Houston schools run under the NES model have seen major improvements to their state ratings. Critics have called the model top-down and restrictive, but Miles insists it’s about giving teachers the tools they need to succeed in schools enrolling historically underserved minority and low-income students.
In a conversation with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, Miles argued that wholesale, wide-ranging reforms are the only way to trigger lasting improvement for students.
“We are providing a proof point that it can be done, and that Black and brown kids challenged by poverty and language barriers can rise to high expectations. Don’t sell them short. Don’t say it’ll take eight years or five years to do it.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Superintendent, how do you interpret these results? Houston clearly saw big test-score gains across a very short span of time.
I’ve been around for a long time. I’ve led other districts and been a consultant in other districts, and I talk to colleagues all the time. These results are unheard of.
In 2023, 93 schools in the district out of 273 earned an A or B grade. One year later, we were up to 170. These are accountability scores from the state, and the 2024 scores for all the districts in Texas will be released soon. You’re going to see their A’s and B’s stay flat while their D’s and F’s go up. Meanwhile, Houston went from having 121 D- and F-rated schools to 41. It’s not easy to take an F school and turn it around, but we did it in spades in just one year.
Just looking at the schools in the New Education System program: After one year, we went from 53 F-rated schools to nine, and from 55 D-rated schools to 23. When we started, only 11 earned A’s or B’s, and now 87 do. We’re talking about mostly underserved populations of kids.
Think about what a difference that makes for their academic career and beyond. I challenge you to find an urban district that has seen these kinds of outcomes after just two years.
What does it mean for a school to have a D or F grade? What should parents know about those schools?
If you attend one of those schools, the likelihood of gaining proficiency — being able to read or do math at grade level — is low. Your whole career, you will be haunted by that lack of proficiency because we, your educators, didn’t bring you to grade level.
Down the road, here’s what these scores really mean: For Black and brown kids in this country, especially those who live in poverty, the system has not lived up to the promise America made to them. We’ve failed, in that sense. Across the country, the achievement gap has not closed in 20 years, and the opportunity gap has not closed. Black and brown poor kids are still mostly in failing schools. It’s like being on two tracks: Kids in well-resourced neighborhoods are on a track, and they can be expected to run one lap in one year’s time, but Black and brown and poor kids are starting 50 yards behind.
We’ve got a changing world and workplace, and if you can’t read or do math at grade level, your opportunities are going to be proscribed. So when I see data like this, and you ask me what a D or F school is like compared to an A or B? We’re giving these kids, finally, a chance.
We need to go bold and go big. There was a report earlier this year looking at how many high school graduates in the Houston area earned a livable wage. For the kids who graduated in 2017, the answer was 17%. Seventeen percent.
What’s the secret, if one exists, to turning that around?
I believe there’s a recognition among superintendents that piecemeal, incremental reform has not worked. One of the things we’ve done too often over the last 30 years is to focus on doing maybe one big, bold thing instead of several. Invariably — because it’s an interconnected system where a lot of issues impact other issues — people have to step back from that one big reform.
To take one example, if you want to change the way we compensate people, you have to ask whether compensation is going to be tied to an evaluation. And just asking that question suddenly becomes very controversial. Are you going to just give people money? Does the system have the resources for that? Should you get any outcomes from that?
Or say you want high-quality instructional materials. Will teachers use them? Will there be effective training? Do people actually understand the close integration of curriculum and instruction? Our profession is replete with stories of textbooks in boxes, still wrapped, in a teacher’s closet. So that one thing you want to do, which is both very expensive and a good thing, is tied to so many other things that the reform fails.
This brings us to something that’s become a mantra for you: “wholesale systemic transformation.” You invoke it often enough that your subordinates must have nightmares about it. Lots of people say that sort of thing when they take over a school district, but what do you mean by it?
It’s far-reaching, comprehensive reforms across the whole system, all at the same time. That will scare people unless they know what it means. Your image of someone waking up screaming about it at 3:00 a.m. is right for most people, but for us, it’s very clear what it entails.
So, take instruction. When we talk about transforming instruction, that means a change in curriculum. It means a change in lesson planning. It means a new instructional model. It means a change in how teachers are monitored and coached, including on-the-job coaching. It means that principals have to be instructional leaders, which means that the people who coach principals have to be instructional leaders. It means staffing in a way that gets the best instruction possible — for instance, in the 130 NES schools, there are no substitute teachers.
In other words, it means getting everyone on the same page about what high-quality instruction looks like, and then teaching and coaching the heck out of it. You monitor that, tie it to evaluations, and tie the evaluations to compensation. You’re changing the culture so that people focus on continuous improvement, high expectations, and accountability. And that’s just the start of it.
