HISD Suffers With ‘New Education System’ Turnaround Plan

With around 200,000 students, Houston Independent School District (HISD) is the 8th largest school district in the United States.  For years there was talk about the state possibly taking over the district and this finally happened on June 1, 2023.  The board was fired and replaced by Texas Education Agency (TEA) appointees.  Mike Miles, who founded a charter school network called Third Future Schools and was previously the head of Dallas Schools for three years, was hired as the new HISD superintendent.  While most people new to a job like this would take some time to get the ‘lay of the land,’ Miles instantly proposed some radical, and in my estimation, terrible, reforms which I will outline in this post.

He identified the three lowest performing high schools in HISD:  Wheatley, Kashmere, and North Forest.  Those three schools together with the 26 middle and elementary schools that feed into those high schools were to become part of a new ‘New Education System’ known as NES.  This NES is the latest ‘turnaround’ district.  Over the past 20 years there have been several of these, the most prominent are the Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans, set up after Hurricane Katrina in 2003 and the Achievement School District (ASD) in Tennessee, created in 2011 with Race To The Top money.  There was also Michigan’s Education Achievement Authority (EAA) in 2011 as well as a few more that have popped up around the country.  To my knowledge, there has never been a successful takeover of this sort in the history of this country.  The EAA has been shut down, the RSD has been merged back into the New Orleans school system and the ASD has floundered, never having any success at all in improving the test scores of the schools it took over.  It is funny/sad to see this hopeful panel discussion by the leaders of these districts before it was known how badly they would fail. (I’ve written a lot about the ASD, but here is something I wrote summarizing the history of these turnaround efforts.)

These turnaround efforts sometimes have school closures or staffs at schools having to reapply for their jobs and often have the schools converted into charters.  For the HISD NES model, the schools are not getting taken over by charters but teachers do have to reapply for their jobs.  Teachers at these schools will get raises and opportunities for bonuses with test score based merit pay.  Other changes that will happen at these 29 schools are a restructuring of the teacher role where the teacher is like a ‘surgeon’ doing the most important part of the job while other tasks like grading, lesson planning, and discipline are done by others.  Also, you may have read about elsewhere, libraries at these schools are converted into discipline centers where students are sent to watch a live streamed version of the lesson on a computer screen.

The reason that no turnaround effort like this has ever worked is that it is based on faulty assumptions about what the cause of the low test scores are at those schools so any solution based on those assumptions is doomed to fail.  It is like trying to treat a broken leg by giving a patient a complete blood transfusion.

As someone who has been teaching since 1991 – and my first four years were in HISD actually, looking at the list of changes makes me shudder.  Anyone who ever taught can see how most of these changes will make the schools worse but I want to summarize some of them here.

All teachers have to reapply for their jobs – When students come back and learn that many of their favorite teachers were not hired back, this can be very traumatic.  There is no guarantee that the teachers who replace those who weren’t hired back, even if those teachers have been successful at a different school, will necessarily be a good fit at this school.  This uncertain improvement coupled with guaranteed disruption is a pretty big risk.  Why not first see how the current staff does with these new supports?

Discipline handled by administrators – In every school the most competent teachers handle their own discipline problems and at these schools it will be no different.  When the teacher, building on the relationships they formed with the student and the families, handles discipline in class it is a lot more effective.  When administrators do the discipline, it involves a student having to leave the class and fall behind.  So in a way this is like every school where the administrator handling discipline is the last resort.  But I think they are implying that the administrators are going to be so tough on the students, sending them to a detention center (in the room that used to be the school library) to watch the lesson on a live feed, so the discipline will be so much more efficient that teachers will choose to go right to that rather than ‘waste time’ doing discipline by building relationships with the students.  So when the students are all in the former library watching a lesson on a video that they were struggling to concentrate on in the actual classroom, they will have even more trouble watching it on the video where they can’t even ask questions if they have them.  These detention centers will surely be places where students suffer and don’t learn much and I just don’t see this model working.  It will depend on whether or not teachers really believe that they don’t have to deal with discipline anymore since they can just send the kids out right away as it is no longer their jobs to do the discipline.  If that is the case, those former libraries could get really full really quickly and they might have to find another room, maybe the band or art room, to convert to an overflow room.

Lesson plans and materials provided by curriculum developers – It sounds like teachers at these schools will be mandated to follow scripted lessons and pacing schedules.  It is so unlikely that these scripted lessons will be good enough and the pacing schedule so perfect for all classes.  There are times where a concept takes more time than you thought it would and especially if the next topic builds on that one, you cannot just go on until you finish the first topic.  If you are forced to stay at a pace produced by someone who does not know your classes, it can be a very miserable experience for students and for the teacher.  Creating your own lessons based on standards maybe, is one of the most important parts of teaching.  There is no way a scripted lesson can be as good as a teacher made lesson tailored specifically to their student.  I wonder how much flexibility teachers will have in adapting the lessons, at least, to make them more appropriate for their students. In my experience, bad lesson plans lead to discipline problems. And even if administrators are handling those discipline problems, it still is frustrating if you are forced to use bad lesson plans that are almost guaranteed to result in this.

Differentiated assignments copies made by support personnel – Yes it would be nice to have someone make copies for me, but I’ve been at schools where the materials have to be submitted a week in advance and teachers cannot touch the copy machine.  I’d be concerned that with all the copies made by the support staff, the copy machines might be off limit and potentially if you want to make copies of something that is not part of the scripted curriculum, maybe you will not be able to.

Papers graded by support personnel – Grading is a time consuming process. And, yes, there are times where my ‘grading’ is little more than glancing and seeing if any effort was put into the assignment. But grading is also an integral part of the teaching process. It is where you see what the students produce and get to assess if they learned the concepts. With math, the end result of grading is not just what percent of the final answers did the student get correct, but what are the common errors that I’m seeing. So if someone else is being paid to do my grading for me and I don’t even have the time to do the grading myself because under this model maybe my day is filled with the other teacher responsibilities, then I’m not able to teach as effectively since I don’t have all the information I need. Logistically speaking, I can’t see how this would work. What is the ratio of people whose job it is to ‘grade’ to the number of teachers. I think that one ‘grader’ could probably only help about four teachers a day so this would be a pretty big staffing issue. And who would ever want to be a full time grader? The thing that makes grading a tolerable task for teachers is that the teacher is invested in the results. The teacher wants to know how the students are progressing and how the lessons were received. Just grading a stack of papers from kids that you don’t know anything about would be extremely tedious to do all day. Are these graders expected to write feedback on the papers? Or is the net result of the grading merely to get a numerical grade on the assignment. This is one of those that sounds good on paper but doesn’t work so well in reality. It’s like saying that assistants will eat lunch for the teachers.

Four periods of duty in a month (75 minutes each time) – Once a week doing something for the school seems reasonable, it happens in a lot of schools.  But I’d want more details about what they have in mind, what if you are manning the library/discipline room?

$10,000 stipend – For sure they have to offer something to compensate for the frustration teachers are going to experience in these schools.  I suspect that many of them will find that it wasn’t enough money to make it worth it.

$3,500 incentive pay – Usually these are based on some very opaque ‘Value Added’ algorithms leaving some of the most talented teachers not getting the bonuses.  There is not evidence of this kind of merit pay having any impact on student achievement..

A bizarre recent development is that in addition to the 29 NES schools in the Wheatley, Kashmere, North Forest feeder pattern, a whopping 57 schools have volunteered to become NES ‘aligned’ schools (NESA) where they will get some of the financial incentives if they agree to follow the NES blueprint.  I was sad to see the school I used to teach at, Furr High School, on this list, especially as it was so recently reformed by the XQ superschool program and was featured in the three network simulcast funded by Laurene Powell-Jobs.  I am not sure why any school would voluntarily apply for this.  I don’t know that those schools get the $10K stipends, probably not.  Maybe they like the idea of other staff members planning lessons and grading papers, I can’t say what motivated them, but I expect that many of the staffs at those schools are going to regret this being foisted on them when they weren’t even targeted for it.

Turnaround efforts like this have never worked and they have even gone out of style in recent years since there have been so many failures.  I would like to do some updates with anecdotes from actual teachers at these schools throughout this turnaround process.  If you have any information, go to this form if you want me to write about it.  I will keep your names anonymous and even which school you are at can be suppressed if you are worried that you will get in trouble for reporting this stuff to me.

Here is the link to the form.