Who wins when states take over ‘failing’ schools?
Texas now running Houston district as national research questions value to students
HOUSTON — Steve Lecholop stood in front of a hostile audience on the morning of May 18 to ask for help. It was two weeks until the Texas Education Agency, where he’s a deputy commissioner, would remove Houston’s elected school board members from their jobs.
In their place would be people handpicked by agency head Mike Morath, an appointee of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. Lecholop told sitting members they could help the new board by serving as liaisons to the community. “You guys know your communities. You guys have spent, each of you, many years deeply engaging with your communities, and that is incredibly valuable,” he said.
Board member Bridget Wade, a conservative Republican, was skeptical. The TEA was taking away board members’ official email addresses starting June 1, she noted, so how could they be liaisons if citizens couldn’t reach them? “That’s a compelling point,” said Lecholop. “Let me go back and do some more thinking on this.”
On June 1, the TEA took over Houston’s school district, removing the superintendent and elected board. Critics say it’s an effort by a Republican governor to impose his preferred policies, including more charter schools, on the state’s largest city, whose mayor is a Democrat and whose population is two-thirds Black or Latino. In other districts where state-appointed boards have taken over, academic outcomes haven’t improved. Now red-state governors increasingly use the takeovers to undermine the political power of cities, particularly those governed by Black and Hispanic leaders, according to some education experts.
Supporters of takeovers say they help jolt failing school systems into better performance. Backers of the takeover of Houston Independent School District say it’s needed to improve performance in a few schools with a history of poor academic outcomes.
The seeds for the HISD takeover were planted in 2015, with the passage of a state law mandating that the TEA step in if any school in a district were rated academically unacceptable for five consecutive years. Another law passed in 2017 incentivized districts to contract with outside entities, including charter school managers, to assume control of schools that aren’t meeting state standards.
By 2018, four of Houston’s 274 schools hadn’t met the standards for four years running, putting the district at risk of a takeover. But that December the school board voted down a proposal to have the district seek bids from outside entities to run the four schools.
Nationally, takeovers are relatively rare: Between 1988 and 2016, states took control of 114 school districts, about four per year. The first came in Jersey City, in 1989 after Republicans gained control of the governorship and state assembly.
Though the first state interventions were by Republican governors, in the 1990s and 2000s education-reform-minded Democratic governors began doing the same, said Domingo Morel, a New York University political science professor who wrote a book on the history of takeovers. Now that’s changed: The Democratic base is pushing back against takeovers, and Democratic governors are now far less likely to support them, Morel said.
At least three studies have found that takeovers don’t increase academic achievement. The latest, a May 2021 working paper by researchers from Brown University and the University of Virginia looked at all 35 state takeovers between 2011 and 2016. “On average, we find no evidence that takeover generates academic benefits,” the researchers concluded.
Takeovers are premised in part on the idea that improving school board governance improves test scores. But the 2021 paper concluded that may be wrong: “These results do not provide support for the theory that school board governance is the primary cause of low academic performance in struggling school districts,” the researchers wrote.
Race, meanwhile, plays a role in the likelihood of a district being taken over. The paper found that majority-Black districts were more likely to be taken over even when their academic performance was similar to that in White districts not taken over. The same was true for majority-Hispanic districts, but the effect was less pronounced, said study co-author Beth Schueler.
And takeovers are more likely in states where Republicans control both the governorship and the state legislature, the paper found.
In Texas, Republicans have both, and its state interventions show those same patterns. From 2008 through 2022 the state removed elected boards in seven districts, all but one of which had higher proportions of non-White students than the state average. But it’s impossible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about the role race plays in an individual state like Texas given the small number of state interventions, said David DeMatthews, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin College of Education.
In Houston, by the 2018-2019 school year, all but one of the district’s four failing schools was meeting state standards. The exception was 96-year-old Phillis Wheatley High School. It narrowly missed the mark, though district officials pointed to a 2018 technical change the state made in how it calculated school ratings. That new rule tipped it from a D to an F under an A-F rating system Abbott had signed into law in 2017.
In December 2019 Morath, the TEA head, sent a letter to the district announcing the state was taking over. A key reason, he said, was Wheatley, as well as allegations of misconduct against former HISD board members.
But during the three years it took for the Texas Supreme Court to decide for the state, Wheatley improved. Its 2019 score of 59, an F, rose to 78 in 2021-22, a high C, during a period when academic outcomes around the country were getting hammered because of the pandemic.
Wheatley principal Sabrina CubyKing credits several moves for Wheatley’s gains: professional development for teachers on how to fill gaps in student learning caused by COVID-19, holding teachers accountable for “bell to bell” instruction to wring every minute out of each class and pairing each student with a teacher or staff mentor.
The improvement at Wheatley didn’t dissuade Morath. On March 15, he sent a letter to superintendent Millard House II and the board announcing they were being replaced. That prompted protests and student walkouts. (House was later named superintendent of Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland.)
“I’ve not talked to a single student or teacher who’s for the takeover,” said Amarion Porterie, an 18-year-old senior at Stephen F. Austin Senior High School.
Morel, the New York University professor, said Texas’s move may be a sign that Republican governors intend to use district takeovers more often.
“They may be weaponizing state takeovers in ways that they didn’t before,” he said. “The reason I say Houston might be pointing in this direction is because the Houston school district itself is not struggling.”
“I’ve not talked to a single student or teacher who’s for the takeover.”
Amarion Porterie, 18, Stephen F. Austin Senior High School in Houston