‘Scared for Fort Worth’: As FWISD takeover looms, Houston families share concern
Last month’s announcement that the Texas Education Agency is taking over the Fort Worth Independent School District prompted a wide range of responses from parents. Some were horrified, while others expressed guarded optimism. Still others said they weren’t sure what to expect.
But parents and students in Houston ISD, which has been under a similar state intervention for the past two years, told the Star-Telegram they worry that the instability and contentiousness their district has seen since then may be in store for Fort Worth.
“I’m really scared for Fort Worth,” said Aubrie Barr, a junior at Houston ISD’s Northside High School. “Because I’ve seen what they’ve done here with us.”
Houston ISD state takeover brought growth, disruption
The state takeover of Fort Worth ISD is the second-largest intervention TEA has undertaken. In 2023, the agency took over Houston ISD after several years of failure ratings at Phillis Wheatley High School, a campus in the city’s Fifth Ward neighborhood.
The takeover has shown mixed results in Houston. On one hand, the district has experienced a sharp increase in teacher and principal turnover. Enrollment declines, which had been a challenge for the district for years, accelerated after the takeover.
But on the other hand, the district has also seen dramatic academic progress since the takeover, particularly among students in low-income families. This year, the district reported no F-rated campuses and 18 D-rated campuses, down from 120 D and F campuses the year before the state intervened.
At the heart of the Houston ISD takeover is state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles’ New Education System, a school turnaround model that includes incentives to attract high-performing teachers to struggling schools, more frequent assessments in class and a rigid curriculum that includes scripted lessons teachers are expected to follow.
Controversially, the plan also included the conversion of some school libraries into Team Centers, spaces where students are sent during class. Students who are disruptive in class may be sent to a Team Center, where they can watch their class on a Zoom call. But Team Centers can also be a space where students go if they’ve mastered the material their classes are covering that day. In those cases, those students can work on something more challenging in the Team Center while their teachers work with students who need extra help.
Since the takeover, the district has also seen a sharp increase in the number of teachers leaving the district. In August, the Houston Chronicle reported that the district’s teacher turnover rate for the 2024-25 school year was 32.2%, nearly twice the state average.
In a webinar organized by the Chronicle and held the day before the commissioner announced the Fort Worth ISD takeover, Morath said a high rate of teacher turnover isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. If ineffective teachers are leaving Houston ISD and being replaced by higher-performing teachers, it could be a benefit for students, he said.
During an Oct. 23 news conference, Morath called the turnaround in Houston “the most impressive academic performance improvement at this scale in American history.” Although he acknowledged that the turnaround in Houston ISD wasn’t without its hiccups, Morath said state education officials hope to take the lessons they learned from that process and apply them to Fort Worth. That means making sure school leaders in Fort Worth ISD recruit, train and support their teachers in the best way possible, so that students get the highest-quality instruction available, he said.
When districts like Fort Worth and Houston ISDs underperform for years, it’s incumbent on state officials to step in, Morath said. Public schools are meant to act as an equalizer, he said, ensuring that every student has a chance to live up to their full potential, no matter what background they come from. But many low-performing schools haven’t fulfilled that promise, he said.
“It has been true, unfortunately, in so many public schools, and certainly true in Fort Worth, that if you happen to come from a background of means, that you will actually see some decent results,” Morath said. “But if you were a low-income family in Fort Worth ISD, the odds were that the system would fail you.”
Houston ISD takeover led family to leave the district
State education officials have pointed to indications that a similar performance gap in Houston ISD has narrowed under the state takeover. During a press conference in August in which he touted academic progress overall, Miles, the superintendent, noted that the gains were concentrated most heavily in schools that serve predominantly low-income, Black and brown families.
But students and parents in the district say those gains have come at a cost. Rebecca Arata, the mother of two former Houston ISD students, said the instability the takeover created at her kids’ school caused the family to sell their house and move out of the district.
At the time of the takeover, Arata’s daughters were enrolled at Barbara Bush Elementary School, on the western edge of the district. Arata’s family was happy with the school — it had a diverse mix of students from all ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, and teachers there did a good job of helping those students reach “dizzy heights with scarce and minimal resources,” she said. The campus consistently received A ratings, and in 2022, the year before the takeover, 85% of its third-graders scored on grade level in reading on the STAAR.
Although she was worried about how the takeover would affect the district overall, Arata initially assumed her daughters’ school wouldn’t see much of an impact. Because Barbara Bush was already a high performing campus, she assumed the district’s new leaders would focus their attention elsewhere.
But during the 2024-25 school year, Arata noticed her oldest daughter’s stress level around anything to do with school starting to go up. She got frustrated and overwhelmed more easily, she said, and her level of engagement and enthusiasm for her classes went down. At the same time, her achievement at school started to dip, Arata said.
Most of her daughter’s stress seemed to be tied to the amount of material she was expected to take in every day, Arata said. The curriculum seemed like a runaway train, she said, and there was no room for teachers to pause or teach a concept in a different way if students didn’t understand. Teachers would tell their students often that they needed to master a concept that day, because they’d have to move on to something else the next day.
In the spring of 2024, the principal of the middle school in Barbara Bush’s feeder pattern was fired. Arata began hearing stories about instability and high teacher turnover at that school. So she and her husband began talking seriously about moving out of the district within the next two years, before their oldest daughter reached middle school.
Then, the following November, voters in the district rejected a $4.4 billion bond issue. Critics of the takeover, including several Houston-area lawmakers, called the proposal’s failure a referendum on Miles and his reforms. At that point, Arata said she noticed a shift in how district leaders dealt with parents and teachers.
“In my opinion, a lot of the niceness and the lip service to community inclusion failed with the bond,” she said. “That was the end of that.”
Over the months that followed, Barbara Bush got a new leadership team. One day, Arata was having a phone conversation with the school’s new assistant principal about one of her daughters, and she noticed that the woman seemed unexpectedly hostile. Anytime Arata tried to say anything, the assistant principal cut her off, she said. At the end of the call, Arata hung up the phone and turned to her husband.
“We have to go,” she told him. “We can’t stay here.”
So last summer, the family sold their home in Houston’s Energy Corridor and moved eight miles west, into Katy ISD. Arata said she didn’t fully understand how bad things had gotten in Houston ISD until her kids started at their new school. Her oldest daughter, now a fifth-grader, came home during the first week of school marveling at how organized everyone at her new school was compared to what she saw at Barbara Bush.
Things have continued to improve since then, Arata said. Her oldest daughter is much less frustrated with school this year, she said — now, she wants to be involved with everything at school.
“I don’t think she changed overnight,” Arata said. “I think it’s the school environment.”
HISD high school students saw teacher walkouts, class disruptions
Barr, the Northside High School junior, said the runaway nature of the curriculum has also been an issue at her school. There’s a heavy emphasis on bell-to-bell instruction, she said. Teachers walk through lessons using prepackaged slide show presentations, she said, and there’s a time limit on each slide. So teachers have no way to slow down if a student needs a moment to catch up, she said.
Barr said district-level staffers are also a constant presence at Northside. Often, those staffers are in classrooms, chastising teachers in front of students about the way they’re teaching, she said. During a recent Algebra II class session, a district staffer took issue with the seating arrangement in the classroom and pulled the teacher out of the class for more than 10 minutes to talk about the issue, Barr said.
Micah Gabay, a former student at Worthing Early College High School, said campus leaders have been quick to criticize teachers in front of students at her school, as well. Recently, the school’s principal told Gabay’s teacher in front of the class that she needed to move her desk to the back of the classroom so that she wouldn’t be tempted to sit down while she was teaching. A disagreement ensued, and the teacher picked up her personal belongings off her desk, walked out of the classroom and never came back, Gabay said.
Both Barr and Gabay said they’ve noticed large numbers of teachers leaving their schools. Barr said many of the teachers who have left Northside are experienced educators who support and care about their students.
“It’s really heartbreaking,” she said.
Fort Worth ISD superintendent could stay during takeover
It’s unclear how state intervention in Fort Worth ISD will affect day-to-day life on its school campuses. Morath hasn’t yet announced who will be the district’s superintendent during the takeover. State education officials will conduct a nationwide search for job candidates over the next few months. Morath has said that search will include current Superintendent Karen Molinar.
Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, director of the education advocacy group Parent Shield, said she hopes to see Morath keep Molinar in place. Having her continue as superintendent during the takeover would help keep students and teachers in the district focused and working together during the transition, she said.
Dorsey-Hollins said she’s hopeful about what a state takeover could do for the district. Fort Worth schools have been stuck for some time, she said. She hopes the state intervention could be the shake-up the district needs to start moving in the right direction.
Staff writer Lina Ruiz contributed to this report.
