We must unite under a single banner to rally resources HISD needs to fix schools.

Mayor Turner is the only person who can rally Houston behind our failing schools.

Welcome to Houston’s latest political trainwreck. If you thought the city’s pension problems were a complex and explosive policy debate, get ready to deal with a potential state takeover of our local public schools. The ensuing fight promises to pit special interests against taxpayers, charters against the teachers union and local control against state authority.

We’re not alone: 46 independent school districts, including Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, Corpus Christi and Waco, all face state interference. So what happened? In 2015, without much fanfare or debate, the Legislature passed House Bill 1842, which allows the Texas Education Agency to shut down campuses or remove an elected board of trustees if a single school goes five straight years with a “improvement required” rating.

Few recognized the ramifications at the time, and now dozens of districts all across the state risk having schools shuttered or board members tossed aside.

Something is wrong with a law that can override voters on the basis of a single persistent trouble spot. HISD and other districts may have problems, but they’re far from the academic or financial struggles that have historically justified a TEA takeover.

The Legislature needs to rein in HB 1842. “One person, one vote” and “no taxation without representation” are more than political slogans; they’re the core values of our republic and should be reflected in our laws.

Routine superintendent turnover, or corruption, or district-wide failures all merit help from the state. A single-campus trigger is overkill.

And it is hard to fathom how the state expects schools to meet standards when it underfunds districts year-after-year while promulgating overly burdensome mandates.

However, a faulty state law does not change the reality at HISD.

Kashmere High School in northeast Houston has missed state standards for seven years. Wheatley High School, in northeast Houston, and Worthing High School, in south Houston, have each missed state standards for five years.

Anyone looking to the Board of Trustees for a solution will be tempted to call for the TEA cavalry. Meetings routinely descend into chaos. Debate is replaced with bullying and bluster. Individual members seem more interested in promoting their own myopic political agenda than educating students.

If trustees want to save their jobs, they need to let the superintendent do his. This means allowing Richard Carranza to set the agenda when it comes to hiring, firing and overall management of HISD’s 283 schools.

Carranza, too, needs to step up and push back against board members who treat their districts like a political fiefdom. While the nine trustees may have hired him, Carranza’s real responsibility is to the 200,000 students who fill the classrooms each day.

In fact, the entire Houston community has a responsibility to prepare these kids to become healthy and productive members of society. HISD’s school choice system makes it all too easy for families and businesses to leave behind our bottomtier schools and instead turn their attention to boutique institutions like the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts or top performers like Carnegie Vanguard High School.

Informed parents know how to apply for magnet schools. Smart kids test into elite programs. Often the only people left at neighborhood schools are the kids who struggle just to get to class and the families that have to confront poverty and crime before getting to homework.

HISD may be a district of choice, but we can’t choose to ignore these schools any longer. Businesses and community leaders, unions and charters, foundations and charities all must be united under a single banner to rally the financial and social resources necessary. Mayor Sylvester Turner proved himself capable of crafting a solution once thought impossible for Houston’s pensions, and we again look to him to save our failing schools. If Turner can’t do it, the only person left will be Mike Morath — commissioner of the TEA.