On June 1, 2023, the Texas Education Agency took control of the state’s largest school district, Houston ISD. State officials tapped Mike Miles, who had previously led Dallas ISD and the Third Future network of charter schools, to lead the district, bringing a new reform approach to Houston. After one year, 55 of Houston’s 274 schools moved from “D” or “F” under the Texas school rating system to “A” or “B.” FutureEd Policy Director Liz Cohen spoke with Superintendent Miles about his reform agenda and the prospects for lasting improvements in the 187,000-student Houston district.
You’re calling your reform strategy the New Education System (NES). What does that mean?
In a nutshell, it is systemic reform. We’re doing several large-scale initiatives at one time. Piecemeal reform in the American public education system has not worked. We haven’t closed the achievement gap, and we’re not going to unless we do bold things, reform that’s comprehensive, systemic.
How do you do that?
We have six components. We have an instructional model that both helps teachers differentiate instruction and provide grade-level direct instruction in the same lesson. The second thing is high-quality instructional materials. The third is what everybody strives to deliver: high-quality instruction. The quality of instruction is the number one variable in raising student achievement. But if you want high-quality instruction, you must define it. Then you have to train for it, support it, measure it, assess it, and train principals on it. The fourth component is staff capacity—how you grow staff and how you use staff. Fifth is leadership, and we’re really focused on principals. Finally, there’s culture, which is having higher expectations and a level of accountability with support. Accountability without support is just fear, but we don’t apologize for raising expectations. Kids rise to the level of expectation. They do what you ask them to do. They thrive when they’re getting good instruction. The potential is huge.
How did you introduce NES in schools?
We started with 85 of our 274 schools. Principals received eight days of training that first summer, and then they got a full day of training every month from me and the leadership department. We worked on how to provide on-the-job feedback with spot observations of principals. In turn, every administrator had to do six spots a week, and they had to do on-the-job coaching and be in the classroom every day.
That first summer [of 2023], we created a differentiated curriculum. Our curriculum department created lessons with a demonstration of learning, PowerPoint slides, the answer key for the demonstration of learning, and four differentiated assignments. We did that in one summer, so the teachers could start the year focused only on instruction, not lesson planning. We also have copy clerks in every building—think about a new teacher who doesn’t have to make copies, who doesn’t have to go out and look for their resources and knows what the quality of instruction is, gets on-the-job coaching because that’s the most important sort of feedback.
What’s the response from Houston educators?
This year we had 48 teacher vacancies out of 10,640 teachers. So we were very close to zero vacancies.
Even schools that aren’t officially NES schools are opting to use the curriculum. We feel confident that an overwhelming majority of our teachers that have returned this year are really bought into this reform model.
I’ve heard that families are leaving Houston ISD, that they don’t want to stay to see if these reforms work.
Instead of improving Houston’s low-performing schools, the response for the last decade has been, “Let’s put our time and energy in making sure kids get to an A and B school through the [district’s] choice process.” Our strategy is, let’s make every one of our schools great.
We think once people see that the scores have gone up and that they’re continuing to go up and that the kids are finding success and people see the celebrations, they will come back and we’ll be able to compete with the magnet schools and the charter schools.
It’s one thing to come in with a bold vision, and another to have the resources to back it up. Could you talk about how you think about aligning your budget to your priorities?
Almost always you have enough money to do what you prioritize. If you prioritize athletics in stadiums, then that’s where your money goes. If you prioritize just making sure everybody gets a panoply of different types of positions, then that’s what you do. We prioritize instruction. And so, we’ve increased our teacher salaries in one year by about $9,000. It used to average around $68,000. Now the average salary is $77,000. In our “New Education System” schools, they’re even higher. So that’s the priority. It’s instruction. It’s what’s happening in the classroom versus what’s happening in central office and what’s happening outside the classroom.
We had to cut a lot of positions and a lot of purchased services. Despite declining enrollment for years before I got here, central office had ballooned the number of employees and the amount of purchased services, mostly because of ESSER. The district had put too much ESSER money into recurrent expenses, just like many other districts. Last year we right-sized the budget so we wouldn’t go off the fiscal cliff [when ESSER funding winds down]. It’s been painful. There’s been a lot of criticism about cutting staff, especially central office staff. But the real question is: what do you prioritize?
This isn’t your first rodeo—you’ve worked in Dallas and other places. What are some of the lessons, either from successes or failures, that you brought with you to Houston?
I learned in Dallas that we can do big, bold things, and they can work, but there’s less of a chance of them surviving if they’re not systemic. Luckily, there are a couple of things in Dallas that have survived. The Pay for Performance System for teachers has survived, and so has a program called ACE, Accelerating Campus Excellence, which was a program to put the highest performing teachers in the lowest performing schools. Both of those things are now statewide initiatives and funded statewide. I also learned what really worked in changing struggling campuses and a lot of that is now reflected in Houston.
But it does come with a lot of turmoil, at least initially. One of the challenges of our profession is that the reform environment has changed. There’s a cost to doing this work, and it’s not just on the superintendent. I tell my staff, “Look, I will take the hits, but I can’t stop all the mud from flying off me. Some of it’s going to hit you.” It shouldn’t be this way. You should not have to give up your career or your reputation or just have a digital footprint of negativity follow you because you’re trying to do transformative things for kids.
What are your biggest worries?
Like any superintendent, I worry all the time about school safety. We’re not yet where we need to be with regards to a single point of building entry, cameras, things like that. And I think about sustainability, six or eight years from now. The worst thing would be that my team and I leave, and the district relaxes our changes.