There is still plenty of work to do at Houston ISD, Superintendent Mike Miles said. But the fact that it no longer has any F-rated schools is among the many ways he says that he and his team are changing the traditional narrative about K12 turnaround in large urban systems.
“We are breaking the myth that it takes five, six, seven years to turn around a district,” Miles, who was appointed in a state takeover two years ago, told District Administration.
“We’re breaking the myth that there aren’t enough instructional leaders,” he said. “We’re breaking the myth that there’s a teacher shortage in urban areas, and you can’t overcome it. We’re breaking these myths right and left.”
The Houston Independent School District is the country’s eighth-largest district with 176,000 students in 273 schools. When the state took over, 121 of those schools had received a D or an F on Texas’ grading system, which measures graduation rates, state assessments and other benchmarks.
The dismal ratings reflected a “huge” achievement gap, with Houston’s underserved populations struggling way behind their Texas peers, Miles said. Heading into 2025-26, all 56 F-rated campuses have improved their grades, and the number of A and B schools has grown from 93 to 197, he added.
Two years ago, a map of the district’s D and F schools would correspond with Black, Hispanic and lower-income neighborhoods. Now, nearly 75% of Houston ISD’s students will be attending an A or B school. “For the first time ever, we can say that ZIP code is not destiny,” he said.
Houston ISD’s big shifts
Miles, who formerly served as superintendent in Dallas ISD and Colorado Springs, Colorado, focused systemic reform on about 80 Houston schools when he took the helm in 2023. He calls the program the New Education System, and it now covers more than 130 schools.
“We fundamentally changed how we operate, how we staff, how we pay people, how we professionally develop people, how we monitor and evaluate, how we do the curriculum, how we do the instructional model—all of that at one time,” he said.
The key to Miles’ reform is ensuring Houston ISD teachers are as effective as they can be, guided by principals who excel at instruction. That means principals receive coaching from strong executive directors.
“It also means that you have to have a curriculum that’s tied closely to instruction,” Miles said. “In other words, curriculum follows instruction, instruction doesn’t follow the curriculum, and that’s a paradigm shift for most districts.”
Substitute teachers aren’t used in Houston’s New Education System schools. Those buildings are staffed with teacher apprentices who are well-versed in instructional practices.
“What we’ve done with teachers is, we give them everything, the curriculum, the PowerPoint, the lesson objective, the demonstration of learning,” Miles said. “We give them the answer key. We give them the text, we give them everything, and indeed, we even make the copies for the teachers.”
Only 28 of 10,000 teaching positions were vacant at the start of the 2024-25 school year.
‘The Art of Thinking’
Raising the grades of dozens of schools should counter enrollment declines exacerbated by the COVID pandemic. Miles recognizes that school districts need to provide value by giving students more reasons to come to school.
Those reasons must include quality instruction and connections to college and careers. Houston ISD keeps the year 2035 in mind by, for example, offering an “Art of Thinking” class in third through 10th grade. It covers information literacy, critical thinking and problem solving.
High schoolers can now take an AI in the workplace elective as part of the district’s overhaul of its CTE programs. Those investments include a second career and technical education center.
“They’ve got to see some benefit to their future,” Miles said. “The strategy is to get schools back to A and B status and change the paradigm so that kids see that we’re trying to support them with high-wage, high-demand, high-skilled jobs and careers of the future, and college for those who want to go to college.”
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