As state education leaders run FWISD, who holds them accountable? | Opinion
The Texas Education Agency recently initiated the takeover of Fort Worth ISD for failing to improve student outcomes on one campus for five consecutive years. While state law legitimizes the transfer of power to TEA under such conditions, it reveals a troubling pattern: TEA consistently diagnoses school failure as a governance problem while ignoring the resource problems that drive underperformance. This raises the question: who holds TEA accountable when its interventions fail?
One common TEA prescription prior to a state takeover is Lone Star Governance. The agency describes it as a “framework for governing teams who choose to focus intensely on only one primary objective: improving student outcomes.” The intervention requires districts to use tools to track metrics such as how board members allocate their time and districts’ quarterly progress to narrowly focus board discussions on student outcomes.
Despite its promise, the governance model has consistently failed to improve student outcomes.
FWISD has been implementing Lone Star Governance since 2016, after a TEA deputy commissioner required its adoption due to unsatisfactory turnaround plans. Nine years and about $60,000 in training and coaching later — a dollar figure obtained under the state’s open-record laws — FWISD still faces low achievement levels in some schools.
Other districts implementing LSG have a similar story. Houston ISD and Austin ISD adopted Lone Star Governance in 2016 as well. In both districts, achievement continued to decline. Ultimately, the state took over HISD in 2023, while a looming takeover threat remains in AISD. More broadly, districts across the state implementing the governance models in 2018 and 2019 saw accountability ratings decline faster than districts that did not use it.
Governance interventions alone cannot solve fundamental policy and resource problems. The challenges experienced in FWISD and other districts partly stem from inattention to other larger structural issues that the state is failing to address, such as funding and teacher workforce problems that disadvantage students in low-income neighborhood schools that are struggling to improve.
Leadership Academy at Forest Oak, the campus that triggered state takeover in FWISD, served a predominately Black and Hispanic neighborhood, including many refugee and immigrant newcomer students who often need robust support systems, well-resourced classrooms, and experienced and effective teachers. Yet, FWISD faced million-dollar budget deficits for the past several years while the Legislature has refused to significantly increase school base level funding. Recent increases to teacher salaries from the 2025 legislative session likely came too late to make a meaningful difference in FWISD given years of neglect.
Both Lone Star Governance and state takeover are reforms that are fundamentally disconnected from the reality of Leadership Academy at Forest Oak and broader problems across the state: growing numbers of uncertified teachers and classrooms starting the school year without a teacher.
The state has a constitutional duty to ensure a strong teacher workforce so that every district and school can hire qualified educators. Yet in 2024-25, Texas had more than 42,000 uncertified teachers — up from less than 13,000 in the 2019-20 school year. Perhaps more troubling, novice teachers in Texas are opting to leave their campuses at an alarming rate (24.7%), making it hard for struggling districts and schools to invest and build capacity.
In FWISD, campuses struggling to improve student outcomes are more likely to start the school year with teacher vacancies. They often have teacher turnover rates as high as 30% or 40%. No amount of school board meeting minutes spent discussing student test scores will create more certified teachers or fill empty classrooms.
The state should be leading finance and policy reforms—competitive teacher salaries, robust recruitment and residency programs, meaningful professional development—that directly address teacher retention and quality. Instead, TEA prescribes governance reforms that ignore the root causes of academic underperformance.
Just as TEA can hold districts accountable for failing to improve outcomes, the state must accept the same accountability when its own interventions fail. For too long in Texas, accountability has been a one-way street where districts are scrutinized while state policymakers pass judgment from a well-insulated perch.
Until Texas commits to shared accountability and makes meaningful investments in strong campus leadership, teacher pipelines and residencies, and the basic school allotment, state interventions will remain political theater rather than improve schools like Leadership Academy at Forest Oak.
Rachel S. White is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. David DeMatthews is a professor of education there.
