HOUSTON—While students, parents, teachers, and school staff enjoy what remains of their summer, the nation’s literacy crisis continues to loom overhead. The results of three decades of educational “reform” reveal a dangerous backslide in education that has coincided with the broader backslide in democracy.
Among the many factors identified as contributing to the education crisis are an overemphasis on standardized testing, remote learning that took off during the COVID-19 pandemic, the elimination of free reading time in schools, declining rates of reading for pleasure among both children and adults, the rise of digital technologies that compete for attention, and growing economic inequality.
While each of these factors has played a role, another important cause is the rise of authoritarianism in schools and the erosion of democratic practices within public education more broadly.
Teachers increasingly have less power in making decisions over their practice. Communities have less of a say in what students learn and how they learn it. Student interests are hardly considered in curriculum planning. Houston schools are a microcosm of all these phenomena.
State takeover
A 2015 Texas law states that if a school district has a campus with a failing grade for five consecutive school years, the commissioner is required to appoint a board of managers or close the campus.
In 2023, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) took over Houston ISD (HISD) after underperformance at just one campus. Phyllis Wheatley High School received failing grades from 2010 to 2019 despite showing improvement each year and earning a C in 2022.
HISD was not a failing district. It received an overall rating of B+. This includes 35% of its campuses rated A and 94% of its campuses rated A, B, or C. It was also rated above Dallas and in the top half of Texas districts.
By 2023, the Republican court in Texas overturned an injunction allowing the takeover to commence. The unelected commissioner removed the local elected board’s real power and handed it over to the state-appointed “board of managers.”
This lack of democratic representation is not easy to overhaul. While the entry criteria were set by the Texas Legislature, the TEA has the final and unappealable authority over when a school district exits a takeover.
The exit criteria are even more strict, requiring that no schools in HISD have multiple years of D or F ratings. They must also improve special education compliance and improve board governance. The exit process is dictated completely by the TEA commissioner.
Taking public schools away from the public
The corporate education reformer, Mike Miles, has led this state takeover as Superintendent after his poor record in Dallas and Colorado schools. Mike Miles has converted 130 out of 274 campuses to so-called new education system schools (NES) in mostly Black and brown communities.
NES schools rely on scripted lessons, demonstrations of learning, regrouping, and frequent coaching sessions. Teachers have virtually no control over lessons and must use AI-generated, error-ridden district slideshows. This stripping of teacher autonomy leads to poor results and teacher dissatisfaction.
Over 8,000 teachers have been forced out of HISD in the first two years alone, and there has been an overall district-wide teacher turnover rate of about 40%. The principal turnover rate has been nearly 50% compared to approximately 20% in other urban districts.
The obsession with measurability and accountability necessitates that students take several 10-minute tests daily. These are known as demonstrations of learning (DOL). This kind of corporate approach to education assumes all literacy skills can be simply isolated and remediated. It is an extremely narrow understanding of how students learn to think critically.
This focus on accountability and measurability has pushed many essential services to the side. Field trips and enrichment activities are reduced or often canceled. Bathroom use is restricted, even for young children.
Many special education and emerging bilingual students are denied legally mandated support due to Miles’s rigid, one-size-fits-all approach, which cuts essential accommodations.
Initially, Miles even tried to ban novels from ELA classrooms, claiming, “They can read at home.” However, due to parent pushback, he reversed course, and some books are now allowed.
Though Miles has touted historic gains, these so-called gains have been a manipulation of data. He blocked 70% of NES ninth graders from taking biology to artificially raise STAAR scores and kept hundreds of high-achieving NES eighth graders out of Algebra I, placing them in more remedial eighth-grade math to boost eighth-grade STAAR scores.
Therefore, it is unsurprising that these corporate reforms to student learning do not improve educational outcomes. Rather, they give the appearance that a narrowly measured skill set can be demonstrated during state testing.
Where has all the money gone?
Similar to the dismantling of other public services in the United States, these education reforms are all about power and money. Who benefits?
One of the first actions after the takeover was for the appointed board to increase the amount Miles could spend without board approval from $100,000 to $1 million. Allowing this man to spend without oversight has ballooned the deficit. When Miles took over, HISD had a $118M budget deficit; it is now at least $450M.
His musical about himself cost taxpayers almost $470K. The hour and fifteen minute performance has been described as “narcissistic” and the Mike Miles show. Additionally, he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on adult-sized spin bikes for kids last fall.
On administration, Miles tripled the number of Central Office staff earning more than $200K while gutting homeless services (40 to 12) and other wraparound services.
Miles eliminated librarians and libraries in 130 out of 274 schools in under-resourced Black and Brown communities. These former libraries were quickly transformed into disciplinary centers. This squandered an additional $9 million in ESSER books by closing recently upgraded libraries.
According to Students Need Libraries in HISD, “Thanks to ongoing mismanagement of HISD funds since the takeover and before, libraries are seen as an expense without adequate return on the investment.”
Miles has already stated he is willing to close public schools. This takeover and closures pave the way for privatization and charter schools.
While Miles is clearly incompetent at best and deeply corrupt at worst, he cannot be blamed alone. This takeover of public schools is part of a broader nationwide trend to diminish democracy in public schools under the guise of reform. The class and racial implications of these efforts stretch across the nation.
A laboratory for similar takeovers
Unfortunately, this attack on public education is not an isolated incident. It is a microcosm of the attempts by reactionaries across the United States, trying to wrestle back public services from the public. We are already seeing many red states go after blue cities’ public school systems.
In Tennessee, Republican lawmakers want a state-appointed oversight board in Memphis-Shelby County schools. However, Memphis schools are not only improving, but they’re also exceeding state expectations for growth in both reading and math.
Mississippi has also taken over school districts, including Oklahoma, which is 90% Black. Similarly, this district had already improved from a D to a B rating before the takeover.
Republican leaders in Nevada and New Hampshire are also pushing for more state control over local districts. Indiana has followed their lead by mandating a new oversight board for Indianapolis public schools and has been reducing the power of the elected school board.
The Detroit takeover from 1999-2016 found $610 million in wasteful spending and rampant mismanagement when under state control. The state-appointed board “failed to even accomplish their purported primary task.”
NYU professor Domingo Morel, who studies state takeovers of schools, explained, “that if this type of trajectory continues, that it’s really not about improving schools, that it’s about undermining the political power of these communities.”
What can be done?
There is no easy solution to solve the education crisis in the United States. A myriad of political, economic, and cultural factors undergird this deterioration of public education.
However, the lack of democratic control can be overcome by local communities and working-class participation all over this country.
In the short term, we can vote and support school board members who are invested in improving public education. We can show up to school board meetings. Furthermore, we must campaign to keep public schools public.
In the long term, we need sustained campaigns to reject the simplistic notion that education is easily measurable through state testing. Critical thinking requires deep analysis, evaluation, and creation that cannot be displayed on a standardized test.
These campaigns must be led by community organizations, progressive groups, and labor unions. The democratic forces need to view public education as an essential site of struggle. Democracy and public education are inseparable.
We cannot rely on corporate reformers and the language of accountability and measurability to enforce narrow outcomes in our schools. We must trust our communities, organizations, and participants to shape education in ways that are useful to them.
As Paulo Freire argued, “Democracy and democratic education are founded on faith in people, on the belief that they not only can but should discuss the problems of their country, of their continent, their world, their work, the problems of democracy itself.”
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