Texas State Commissioner Mike Morath took control of the Houston Independent School District in 2023. Morath fired the respected superintendent, replaced the elected board with an appointed board, and named Mike Miles as the new superintendent on June 1, 2023.

Miles had already served in a similar role in Dallas, where his top-down style alienated teachers and drove many of them to quit. Morath, a computer software guy, served on the school board in Dallas. Otherwise, he has no education experience. Gina Hinojosa, who is running for Governor against Greg Abbot, has said the first thing she will do if elected is to fire Morath.

Miles’ tenure in Houston has been controversial. He imposed a lock-step, scripted curriculum. He has fired large numbers of respected principals, and many teachers have quit. But test scores are up!

This column by Lisa Falkenberg, Pulitzer-Prize winning senior columnist for The Houston Chronicle, provides a different perspective on Miles in this article.

She writes:

Stuck in traffic one morning in October, I tried to make small talk with my 13-year-old daughter in the back seat.

“What are you reading these days?” I asked.  

“Nothing,” she said.

Nothing.

I felt a thud in my soul.

This was the same big-eyed girl, the same consummate straight-A student who, just a few years earlier, had to have her nose physically dislodged from a book several times a day so the family could reacquaint ourselves with her face.

In elementary school during the pandemic, she finished “Little Women” in two days. If you had asked her if she loved reading, she might have responded similarly to Scout Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird”: “I never loved to read. One does not love to breathe.”

“You’re not reading anything?” I prodded the middle-schooler. “Not even in English class?”

She paused, giving me a look that said I should know better.

“Mom,” she said. “I don’t even have an English teacher.”

Ah, yes. I had forgotten.

For months, I had written about other schools within Houston ISD, scrutinizing superintendent Mike Miles’ reforms in the state’s takeover, his closure of libraries and sidelining of storybooks, all the while harboring some relief that my own three kids’ campuses had been somewhat insulated from the changes.  

Until this year, that is, when the district’s instability, fluctuating expectations and teacher exodus hurt my kid, too.

Some like to pretend that Miles’ move-fast-and-break-things approach is only affecting students at the poorest-performing schools for whom any change must be better than what they had. That’s not true. The Houston Chronicle has reported that aspects of Miles’ controversial curriculum or instructional model have seeped into virtually all of HISD’s 274 campuses.

That includes some of the highest-performing schools that never needed academic rehabilitation in the first place. These are schools for which families sweat lottery admissions to gain entry, and some even buy houses or rent apartments just to be zoned to them.

My middle child attends one of these, an “A”-rated Vanguard campus for advanced students that we entered through a lottery. When I tell people what’s happening there, some don’t believe me. I can’t blame them. Miles’ effect on HISD’s best schools isn’t what grabs headlines.

Still, here’s a glimpse of what we’ve seen. I’m not naming the school because my goal isn’t to have this column tied permanently to the campus name in Google searches. It’s to open eyes. 

 A week or two before that conversation with my daughter in the car, she told me she feared her English teacher would quit because district observers were prodding him about his lackluster use of whiteboards and response cards — key tools in Miles’ New Education System.

The observers even handed out their own worksheet packets, she said, as the teacher stood by and watched. By October 24, an administrator informed parents that the teacher had submitted his resignation. 

I couldn’t understand why the district was meddling with a good school that supposedly had autonomy. Miles has argued that even some top schools need NES methods because achievement gaps persist. That’s apparently not the case at my daughter’s school, which earned high marks in achievement, progress and closing gaps.

Miles’ methods — top-down management, strictly controlled curriculum, frenetic pace and high-stakes quizzes — appear to have led to some testing gains in schools where students were severely behind. HISD has gone from 56 “F” campuses to zero. That does seem like progress. 

But Miles’ charter-like approach is less effective with advanced students, such as those attending Vanguard or International Baccalaureate programs known for rigorous, often individualized and project-based curriculum that go far beyond worksheet packets.  

Miles’ strict protocols have driven away thousands of teachers at all levels of talent and tenure. In the 2024-25 school year, one in three teachers didn’t return, nearly double the state’s rate. This school year alone, more than 30 of the 73 teachers at my daughter’s school have left, double the annual average of the first two years of the takeover, according to Chronicle reporting and district records I obtained through a public information request. 

Miles argues that high teacher turnover isn’t a problem. He says HISD retains around 90% of exemplary teachers. But most teachers we lost at “A” schools were clearly doing something right. The problem is that Miles defines “exemplary” in part by obedience to his program.

Our loss is someone else’s gain. When my daughter told me in tears that her cherished cheerleading sponsor was leaving to teach science somewhere else, I hugged her and asked if she knew where the teacher was going.

“St. John’s,” she told me. [St. John’s is an elite private school.]

Yes, St. John’s School in River Oaks, one of the most prestigious private high schools in the nation.

In some ways, higher-performing HISD campuses are more vulnerable to the instability caused by high turnover. Unlike Miles’ NES campuses, they don’t have a “teacher’s apprentice” ready to take over if a teacher quits.

When my daughter’s English teacher left, the class was led for weeks by a string of substitutes who mainly assigned worksheet packets — sometimes ones they’d already completed.

“I don’t mind,” my daughter told me at one point. “We’re not learning anything anyway. It’s English. You just pick the longest, best answer.”

When I was her age, growing up in Seguin, Texas, I was holding my breath with Anne Frank in the attic. I was losing the feeling in my toes as a Jack London protagonist struggled to light a fire in sub-freezing temperatures. I don’t remember my eighth-grade English teacher being particularly inspiring, but we read some inspiring literature that stays with me 30 years later.

My daughter’s class was without a teacher for several weeks before the school announced a replacement. The new teacher’s start was delayed by training and illness, emails explained, but finally, she was in the classroom.

After a few days, I asked my daughter if the teacher was actually teaching.

“Yes,” she said. “She reads from the slides.”

Just before Christmas break, I attended a parent meeting that filled the library with worried, frustrated moms and dads complaining of even bigger problems. Several described how their straight-A students were failing algebra because the teacher refused to teach or answer questions about the district slides she was reading. Some parents said they had to hire tutors. It was affecting their kids’ confidence. School administrators assured parents they were bringing over kids from a nearby Vanguard high school to tutor the middle-schoolers in algebra.

My daughter wasn’t affected by that situation. But in English, midyear testing showed she’d dropped 10 points – “low average growth” – putting her back to where she’d been a year earlier.

In late January, yet another note came from administrators: “An Update On Your Child’s English Teacher.”

The new teacher had resigned as well.

The administrator wrote that he was “pleased to share that there will be no gap or delay in the continuity of instruction for your children.” A language arts interventionist had agreed to step in to teach the class. She had been at the school for a while, and our kids were “in good hands.”

“We know that changes and transition can sometimes cause anxiety,” the email noted in closing. “We are here to support your children.”

I didn’t doubt the administrator’s sincerity. I doubted that he had any real power in this top-down regime to fix things.

The new teacher soon assigned a book, an actual book. I started to celebrate. Turns out, my daughter had been assigned the same book the year before. (She tells me she’s read “The Giver” several times, first in elementary school.)

In a parent meeting, I asked the principal why, when whole books are so rarely assigned these days, students were repeating titles. His response was unresponsive.  

“We didn’t read it anyway,” my daughter told me later. “We just read parts of it.”

This middle school, to which I sent both my girls, is still excellent in many ways.

It has some dedicated, truly inspiring teachers who are hanging on. It’s a racially and ethnically diverse campus that offers rigor to smart kids from all kinds of neighborhoods. It molds bright minds into award-winning debaters, dancers and leaders. It still provides some high-quality instruction to kids whose families can’t afford private school or prefer a public school for their child.

For a long time, it was a shining example of what a public school could be.

I thought the point of this takeover was to make more of those. Not fewer.

My daughter’s situation is nowhere near what some special-education students are facing amid district-ordered relocations.

She’ll be OK. She began her own reading regimen this semester and was able to boost her end-of-year English score by several points. I’ve bought a copy of Anne Frank’s diary, which we plan to read this summer before she heads off to high school.

Hopefully, she’ll have another teacher down the road — perhaps a book whisperer like her Harvard Elementary librarian, Ms. Garcia — who can help rekindle her passion for reading.

But let’s not pretend what my daughter got this year in English class was quality.

Let’s not pretend it exemplified the “high-performance culture” that Miles champions, a culture that leaves no time for hallway chatter or holiday parties, no time for the small rituals that make school feel like school, and yet, somehow, tolerates the incessant disruptions of thousands of teacher departures, including from the best schools.

Miles said he could bring up the bottom in HISD without bringing down the top. I wanted to believe him.

I’ve seen something else. 

Lisa Falkenberg is a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the Houston Chronicle’s senior columnist. Falkenberg formerly led the Chronicle’s editorial board as vice president and editor of opinion. In May, Falkenberg shared a Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing for a series on the dangers of stopped trains in Houston. In 2022, she led the editorial board to their first Pulitzer Prize for a series debunking the “Big Lie” of voter fraud and examining Texas’ long history of voter suppression.