TEA takeover led to academic gains but also turmoil in Houston. Is Fort Worth next?
When Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath warned Fort Worth school officials this month of the possibility of a state takeover, he acknowledged that such an intervention would be a major step, but said it was necessary for students who haven’t received the quality of education they deserve.
But if the Texas Education Agency does take over the Fort Worth Independent School District, it wouldn’t be the first time it’s intervened in one of the state’s big urban school districts. In 2023, Morath took over Houston ISD, Texas’ biggest school district, after one high school received a failing grade for five straight years.
Now two years into the state takeover, Houston ISD could offer a glimpse into where Fort Worth schools might be headed in the coming months.
State takeover may be coming for FWISD
Earlier this month, Morath sent Fort Worth ISD officials a letter notifying them of the possibility of a state takeover. Morath told district officials that state law requires him to intervene after one campus, Forest Oak Sixth Grade Center, received a failure rating for a fifth consecutive school year. The school received its fifth F rating in the 2023 A-F accountability ratings, which were tied up in court until last month.
State law requires the education commissioner to do one of two things when a campus receives five consecutive failure ratings: Close the school or take over the entire district, replacing its elected school board with a state-appointed board of managers. The commissioner may also replace the district’s superintendent as part of the takeover.
Once the commissioner decides to take over a district, TEA calls for applications from district residents who are interested in serving on the board of managers. TEA officials screen the candidates, ask them to go through governance training and conduct interviews. After that process is complete, officials present a list of finalists to the commissioner for final approval.
Complicating matters is the fact that Fort Worth ISD closed Forest Oak Sixth last year and moved its students to Forest Oak Middle School. In his letter to district leaders, Morath said the fact that the campus is already closed doesn’t remove the need for intervention. But he also didn’t specify what form that intervention would take. All 2023 A-F scores are considered preliminary until they’re finalized in August, and school districts have the right to appeal. Fort Worth ISD officials have said they plan to appeal the rating, and Morath isn’t expected to make a decision until after that process is finished.
Houston ISD takeover led to STAAR gains, but also turmoil
The possible intervention in Fort Worth ISD drew immediate comparisons to the state’s 2023 takeover of Houston ISD, the state’s largest school district. That takeover was triggered by a fifth consecutive failure rating at Phillis Wheatley High School. The school’s fifth F rating came in 2019, but a court injunction blocked the takeover until 2023. By that time, Wheatley’s scores had improved, but TEA officials argued the law still required them to intervene.
At the time that Morath notified Houston ISD that a takeover was coming, the district was struggling, said Duncan Klussmann, a professor of school leadership in the University of Houston’s College of Education. The board was dysfunctional and wasn’t serving the district or its students well, he said. So although Morath had the option of only closing Wheatley, Klussmann said he thinks the commissioner saw the situation as an opportunity to improve governance for the entire district.
There’s always a balance to be struck when a state takes over a school district that’s struggling academically, Klussmann said. Once a new superintendent is in place, that person is under a great deal of pressure to act quickly. If the new administration spends too much time getting established and hashing out their plan, they run the risk of wasting a school year that students will never get back, he said. But they also need to get the community on board with the changes, which can take time.
Once the new Houston ISD superintendent, Mike Miles, was in place, he implemented a sweeping school reform plan called the New Education System. The model includes higher teacher pay, an increased focus on discipline and pre-written instruction that’s tightly controlled at the district level. Controversially, the plan also included converting campus libraries into student discipline spaces. Miles initially rolled the plan out at 28 campuses, but more have joined since then. Next year, about half the schools in the district will be under the model.
What has happened since Miles took over has been something of a mixed bag. A year into the takeover, Houston ISD’s state test scores improved, even as they declined across Texas, a fact that district leaders held up as a sign their strategy was working.
But the district has also seen widespread principal turnover, a sharp uptick in teachers leaving and big declines in enrollment, especially at schools under Miles’ school reform model. Klussmann said he knows families who have transferred their kids from Houston ISD to private schools because of the instability the district has seen since Miles took over. Last year, voters in the district roundly rejected a $4.4 billion bond proposal, which both supporters and detractors saw as a referendum on Miles’ leadership.
In a virtual town hall last week organized by the Houston Chronicle, Miles said the lesson he took from the bond issue’s failure is that a state-appointed intervention team can’t bring a bond proposal to a community. The community needs to come to district leaders with what they want to see in a bond package.
But more broadly, Miles defended his slate of reforms. The large amount of turnover among Houston ISD’s principals was driven primarily by the district making leadership changes because former principals weren’t getting results, he said. While he acknowledged that a change in principals can bring disruption, he said it was necessary to improve school performance.
Klussmann, the University of Houston professor, said it’s too early to tell how effective Miles’ reforms will be in the long term. Much of his strategy for the district is centered around getting short-term wins, like improvement on STAAR scores, he said. But other metrics like high school graduation rates, student success after graduation and college-going rates can be better indicators of how a district is actually doing, he said. Any change in strategy could take five to seven years to show up in those metrics.
Do state takeovers lead to better test scores?
In a paper released in 2023, researchers at the University of Virginia and Brown University looked at the academic impact of state takeovers of school districts across the country. What they found was that, on average, takeovers had little impact on how students performed on state tests. But that average doesn’t tell the whole story — researchers found that takeovers had a widely varying impact from one district to another, leading to big gains in some districts, big losses in others and little impact in still others. Across the country, those effects tend to even out, said Beth Schueler, a professor of education and public policy at the University of Virginia and the lead author of the paper.
Researchers don’t completely understand the factors driving the results of state takeovers. The racial and ethnic makeup of the districts seems to make a difference, Schueler said — predominantly Hispanic districts seem to see the biggest gains, while predominantly Black districts tend to see smaller gains or even losses.
Schueler said it also isn’t clear what’s driving the difference in outcomes based on demographics. But she pointed to other research suggesting that takeovers seem to have different political implications for school districts, depending on who those districts serve. In majority-Black communities, state takeovers have tended to result in less Black representation on school boards, while in majority-Hispanic communities, takeovers seem to open the door for greater Hispanic representation. That trend can affect student performance, since separate research suggests students of color tend to do better in districts where elected officials reflect the communities they represent.
Another factor that seems to make a difference is how districts were doing academically before the takeover, Schueler said. Almost all the districts researchers looked at were struggling — that’s usually what prompted state education officials to step in — but within that group, there were some that had very low test scores and some that were closer to the middle of the pack, she said.
In general, districts that were struggling the most before state intervention tended to see better results, while those that were performing somewhat better beforehand were more likely to see their test scores decline. Schueler said state officials need to take a hard look at that factor when they’re considering taking over a school district.
“If I were a state, I’d want to be really careful about taking over districts that weren’t at the very, very bottom of the performance distribution,” she said.
This story was originally published May 19, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
