Digital subscribers can listen to this article.
Subscribe today for unlimited access to Texas Monthly. Already a subscriber? Log in.
One day last spring, Laura Craig’s elementary-aged child came home distressed. Everything at their Fort Worth ISD school was changing, they said. The desks had been moved out of the pod formation they liked. Pajama day, a prize for students meeting their reading goals, was canceled. “There were a lot of things they were looking forward to,” Craig said, “and they were not allowed to do them.” Soon she would hear about a canceled field day at another elementary school in the district. Another parent reported that practice time for sports at their school had been cut short. These were seemingly small losses, but for Craig, they were confirmation of what she’d been dreading for almost a year. Things were changing for the worse, and her kids’ schools would not be exempt.
In March, the state completed its takeover of the 67,000-student district on the western side of the Metroplex, replacing the elected board with an appointed board of managers, replacing the superintendent with a recruit from out of state, placing them under the guidance of a conservator to oversee reforms. Craig knew the district had challenges—one school had received an F letter grade from the Texas Education Agency for five straight years before closing in 2023, 77 had received some mix of D’s and F’s, and eight had not met state passing standards since 2018. But she’d been hoping that, whatever remedy the newly appointed leadership chose, her kids’ schools—all A- and B-rated campuses—would be left to carry on as usual.
Craig had not been notified by administrators of the changes at her child’s elementary school, nor of how many more were coming. Her middle schooler started reporting similar shifts. One teacher had a unique and engaging approach to teaching science—one that felt more like an interactive college seminar than a middle school lecture. Craig said students loved it and did well on tests, but after the takeover, the teacher switched abruptly to a district-approved curriculum. Her child said faculty seemed to be on edge, nervous about district administrators walking into their classrooms to observe. Craig is adamant that the teachers are doing the best they can with the situation, but she worries that, if Fort Worth experiences changes like those she’d heard about in other takeover districts, the connection between teachers and students will be stifled—some families have already left, she said, in anticipation of this. But she’s determined to stay. “We want a good learning environment for our kids,” she told me. “We will work hard to make everything the best we can.”
But what’s best—for students, their schools, and the entire Texas education system—is more complicated than it sounds. It’s easy to agree that students should learn to read, write, and work with numbers in a safe, supportive, joyful environment. “I know of no school system leader, be it a school board member or a superintendent, who doesn’t possess a desire for our students to thrive,” TEA commissioner Mike Morath wrote in a May 2025 letter announcing his agency’s intent to consider the possibility of interventions into Fort Worth ISD.
The disagreement arises when someone tries to figure out how to make that happen for every child in a district with dramatically variable income levels, adult educational attainment, and neighborhood cultures. In a state that is loath to spend more money and increasingly ready to institute top-down reforms, the reins of change have landed in one pair of hands: Morath’s. “But if that desire does not translate into student learning, the only moral response is to change practices,” his letter continued. He said he planned to evaluate the district over the coming months and then, if forced to by the district’s underperformance, intervene.
After the letter went out, the district took aggressive action to overhaul its most chronically struggling campuses. Meanwhile, Craig and other parents in the district formed an alliance to try to spare their neighborhood schools from the heavy-handed reforms they’d heard about in Houston ISD and several other Texas districts the state had taken over. Some organized a group, Families Organized and Resisting Takeover, or FORT, and launched their campaign to stop the takeover, speaking with any elected leader who would take their calls.
None of it would be enough.
Public school advocates and parent organizations fearing state intervention often point to Houston ISD, the state’s largest district, where a TEA takeover has led to the departure of 21,000 students. In 2023, Morath installed Mike Miles, a former Dallas superintendent, to lead the district and gave him broad authority to remake it using his philosophy of reform. Miles quickly rolled out his New Education System, or NES, a highly centralized instruction model built around scripted curriculum, tightly timed lessons, frequent testing, and intensive teacher evaluation. It started on a few targeted campuses, but by the 2024–25 school year, NES was in operation on 130 of the district’s 274 campuses. Teachers and parents fiercely resisted the changes, citing staff turnover, library closures, and the fact that the reforms were imposed by an unelected, state-appointed administration; Houston Public Media reported that 633 HISD teachers had resigned by early 2024, nearly twice the number the previous year, while a standing petition demanding Miles’s removal gathered more than 21,000 signatures.
Parents in Fort Worth were terrified the same thing would happen in their schools, Zach Leonard, leader of FORT, told me. They started petitions, held town halls, made yard signs, reached out to the media, and met with city and state elected leaders, asking them to use whatever influence they had to stop the takeover.
Karen Molinar, FWISD, who had been superintendent since March 2025, embarked on an ambitious overhaul of the campuses—those with chronic D and F accountability ratings—mentioned in Morath’s letter. She applied for state funding to turn the schools into “resource campuses,” a state designation that provides additional funding, and requires the schools to adopt an extended calendar and state-approved, high-quality curriculum. It also requires that all staff, including the principal, reapply for their jobs and that the school maintain a student-to-counselor ratio of three hundred to one. The model is a monumental lift for districts, but it has some very influential champions.
In fact, the model for resource campuses—Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE)—was created and launched by Miles in 2015 while he was Dallas ISD’s superintendent and Morath was on the school board. The next year, Morath became TEA commissioner. Miles moved to Colorado and founded the Third Future Schools charter network. In 2021, Miles and Morath managed to convince the Texas Legislature to allocate extra funding for resource campuses. In 2023, , Morath appointed Miles to lead Houston ISD. Molinar, in other words, had chosen the gold standard for radically investing in struggling schools. What she didn’t have was time.
Fort Worth ISD’s state takeover board holding its first public meeting, at the city’s District Service Center, in March. Tom Fox/The Dallas Morning News via Getty
In March, the state appointed a nine-member board of managers and replaced Molinar with Peter Licata, a retired superintendent with a strong school-improvement record in Florida, where school choice programs—both charter networks and voucher programs—are long established. Once the takeover was complete, the board of FORT changed the word forming the “R” in its acronym, from “resisting” to “responding.” By the end of the school year, the changes Craig’s children had reported were showing up across the district. By the start of the following year, at least two principals had resigned from their positions at A and B schools.
Over the summer, Craig, a nurse, and her husband, a professor, attended the district’s listening sessions called by the newly appointed leadership to gather feedback on the direction the district was headed. Parents were asked to name their “non-negotiables” for a school and what outcomes they wanted for their children. Few parents answered with anything specific or measurable, according to the district’s transcripts of the sessions. Instead, they talked about things like social and emotional growth, belonging, and joy. Craig noticed that district representatives rarely asked the next question: Which programs, practices, and people would produce those outcomes? She found it frustrating to try to name all the individual pieces that had made her children so happy at school, and she left wondering whether the administration could be trusted to connect those dots. Would it recognize the value of what already existed?
“We just need what was working to continue to work,” Craig said.
When pressed on the acceleration of school takeovers in the state, the TEA and Mike Morath point to the law: In 2015, the Texas Legislature created a rule requiring the state’s education commissioner to intervene if a campus has received five consecutive D or F ratings. The commissioner could either close the individual campus or replace the entire district’s school board. That same year, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 1882, which opened the doors to more money per student, and, critically, paused the clock for two years while schools implemented reforms. It sounds like a win-win—but “1882” is akin to a four-letter word in public school advocacy circles. “The moral of the 1882 story is ‘Do it the way the state wants you to do it,’ ” Carrie Griffith, executive director of Our Schools Our Democracy, a public school watchdog organization, told me.
To access the extra funding and accountability pause under SB 1882, districts have to partner with outside organizations, like charter networks, to operate the school. While universities and nonprofits are considered eligible partners, they’d have to create internal programs that meet the staffing and governance requirements for an 1882 partner, making them slower to launch and harder to get approved. “The rule making heavily incentivizes that the partnership be with a charter,” Griffith said. Austin ISD recently proposed a partnership with the Texas Council for International Studies, which helps school districts implement International Baccalaureate programs, for three of its struggling schools, a move many saw as a test of whether non-charter-based turnaround partnerships were viable. The state denied the proposal.
School administrators, like Molinar in Fort Worth, have attempted to use alternate turnaround methods, like Miles’s resource-campus model. When Shawn Bird took over as deputy superintendent in San Antonio ISD, the district had several multi-year D- and F-rated schools to remedy. If he could have turned every one of them into resource campuses, he said, he would have. “At any school that’s an F, I’m going to do ACE,” he told me in May.
But when Bird looked into the model to turn around Hirsch Elementary School, Ogden Elementary, and Tafolla Middle School—all in their third and fourth year of D’s and F’s—he found out he didn’t have enough time to implement it. If the district sought charter partnerships for the schools, they would get a two-year pause on their accountability clock and avoid triggering a state takeover. If they tried to use the resource-campus plan, which requires a planning year before it really gets off the ground, and still received a D or F during that year, the state could take over the district.
Tafolla alum Diego Bernal, vice chair of the Texas House Public Education Committee and longtime advocate for resource campuses, was puzzled as to why the resource campuses didn’t get the same pause in accountability that charter partnerships did. In May, at an interim hearing held by the committee, Bernal asked Morath if the two-year accountability pause could be added to the rules.
“That’s not an authority you’ve granted me,” Morath answered. “That would require statute.” If lawmakers want an accountability pause, they’d need to write it into the law next session. But in the gallery that day, at the interim hearing, Julia Grizzard, a legislative affairs consultant and Bernal’s former legislative director, sighed. The pause was written into the 2021 legislation, she said. She knows, because she helped write it. But somehow, while in committee, the accountability pause disappeared. Someone—no one could tell me who—had taken it out.
At the hearing in May, Morath argued that districts wouldn’t need the additional incentive of an accountability pause, that extra money and resources for kids in D and F schools should be reason enough for districts to make big changes. But the reality that one campus can trigger the takeover of an entire district often overshadows that motivation, and preemptively closing a school is often preferable to letting it trigger a takeover. So in 2023, Morath used his rule-making authority to update the Texas Administrative Code to prevent that maneuver. “A school district cannot close or order the closure of a campus in the year that the fifth or higher consecutive unacceptable accountability rating could be earned,” the code now reads.
With the clock ticking in SAISD, Bird started looking for partners for Hirsch, Tafolla, and Ogden. He needed to find a charter school to enter an 1882 agreement, and there was only one option he knew would get the approval he needed to stay ahead of triggering a district takeover: Third Future Schools.
Founded in Colorado by Miles after he left Dallas, Third Future specializes in school turnarounds—taking campuses with years of low test scores and changing staffing and curriculum to rapidly drive improvement. Since expanding to Texas in 2020, it has enjoyed an increasing monopoly on 1882 turnaround contracts. Watchdogs raised alarms about Miles’s relationship to the network spreading across Texas. He didn’t stop consulting for Third Future until 2026, well after a 2025 law prohibited superintendents from taking such contracts. But there’s no evidence that Miles himself is behind the spread, other than as a sort of functional brand ambassador. It’s the TEA that approves turnaround plans.
No one at TEA has come out publicly to say that Third Future alone should be given operational control of any public school in its third, fourth, or fifth year of D or F ratings. In practice, however, that’s how it’s happened. Since 2022, Third Future is the only outside charter turnaround partner TEA has approved, with seven contracts so far and more in the works.
The state has offered several clues—Third Future’s expansion, systems implemented in Houston and Fort Worth, and even the way resource campuses are structured—that when it comes to educating Texas kids, it’s after something very specific.
While Morath, Miles, and their fellow reformers may see a low-income school’s D or F rating as a sure sign of trouble in an entire school district, they are less trustful, historically, of the A’s and B’s earned by schools serving middle-class and high-income families. A large part of the reason Texas implemented a single-school trigger for a district takeover is because leaders thought it was the only way to get districts to care about what was happening in their lowest-income schools, according to Seth Rau, an educational consultant who was working in legislative affairs when many of the Morath-era reforms were drafted.“We can’t just ignore disparities and let a few kids—or a whole school—slip through the cracks because they don’t affect the overall score,” Rau said.. “Wealthy neighborhoods in Houston ISD and Austin ISD didn’t care about what was happening in the poorer schools because it didn’t affect their lives.” At least they didn’t rally behind those schools the way they do behind their own.
“We cannot only listen to the loudest voices,” Licata, Fort Worth’s state-installed superintendent, said in a September 8 news release. “We have to find the voices that are harder to reach—the parent who is working two jobs, the family that does not have transportation, the parent who does not know who to call or does not feel comfortable walking into the district office. Those voices matter just as much.”
The TEA has taken over eight districts since 2020 and ordered less severe interventions in others, producing a lot of qualitative data on how parents respond. Those who do not feel they have been well served by their local school board or superintendent usually welcome the intervention, but they often do not have the time in their days to hound district administration on the details of every change. Sometimes they are exhausted after doing so for decades. The TEA’s takeover of South San Antonio ISD in 2025 followed nearly twenty years of requests from families and alumni fed up with board infighting and corruption. Reactions are similarly mixed when districts take drastic improvement measures on their own. In the late 2010s, San Antonio ISD entered its first rounds of 1882 charter partnerships, and some parents championed the changes, tired of what they saw as half-hearted half measures. Others felt the district was selling out to privatization. Rarely does every single family or teacher in a struggling school agree on what strategies are best, even as they agree that something has to be done.
In districts like Houston and Fort Worth, old inequities make it hard to share a path forward. The middle-class schools don’t want drastic changes at their schools. The schools in low-income areas do, even if they disagree about which exact intervention is best. So why does the state require everyone to do the same thing?
That question is bigger than any one district because the education-reform movement is trying to work at scale—reaching the most kids possible, not just those lucky few whose parents get them a lottery seat at a Montessori charter or a voucher to attend Catholic school. The trend is toward optimization, a systems-engineering model that looks to align every single part of the day, the curriculum, and even the budget toward improved outcomes for kids. Since the state cannot measure individual children’s lifetime happiness and fulfillment and economic mobility at scale, they use test scores on the assumption that these scores reflect a student’s preparedness for future success. At the school level, they test and track relentlessly, setting up war rooms covered wall-to-wall in student-progress data.
“You can’t f— with field day.”
In the optimized system, students still receive individualized support when they struggle, but at the classroom and school levels, reformers increasingly believe they have figured out the best way to teach core subjects: the right rhythm and pacing, the right materials, and a common approach that can be used everywhere. Third Future uses this strategy. Miles’s NES schools use it. And when the state took over Fort Worth ISD and replaced Molinar and the elected board, the district’s plan for seven resource campuses exploded into plans for 19 Elevate Network schools—a model parents fear is shaping up to look very similar to NES. “There’s a play, and [TEA is] just going to run it everywhere,” Leonard said.
Morath-style reformers also try to eliminate variables in the resources public schools provide from classroom to classroom, campus to campus. In 2021, under superintendent Stephanie Elizalde—who worked with Miles in Dallas—created a policy in Austin ISD prohibiting PTAs from funding campus positions, eliminating 31 positions on eleven elementary school campuses. Miles enacted a similar policy in Houston.
The question behind parent-funded arts and enrichment programs is a math question, Rau said. “Are there enough public funds to actually do all of this for every child in a publicly funded system? I’d love for the answer to be yes, but that’s often not the case.” Simply put, Texas does not put enough money into schools.
Eliminating variables—whether for the sake of equity or time optimization—can threaten arts programs and extracurriculars, which has parents in Fort Worth concerned. To them, an optimized system doesn’t sound like it leaves much room for childlike wonder or community culture. One parent, who asked not to be named, said that canceling field day at their children’s school had caused a small uprising among parents. “You can’t f— with field day,” the parent said.
Rising test scores don’t impress Griffith, the privatization watchdog. When teachers follow scripts designed to help kids perform well on standardized tests, the kids do better on those tests. She sees this as more of an engineering triumph than an educational one. “I don’t agree with the way the state is defining quality,” she said.
This is where the debate over data and strategy wears thin, exposing the values beneath the surface. For advocates like Griffith and many teachers, “better schools” means something felt: joy, community, belonging. They agree that basic skills must be gained, but what sets a good school apart from a great one is the child’s experience. Morath, Miles, and their reform-minded acolytes also affirm the importance of joy and community at a baseline level, but “better” is quantifiable. It means better test scores and smaller gaps between the highest and lowest performers. They trust that those scores correlate to real-world skills and abilities that will launch students from disadvantaged backgrounds into bigger, better opportunities. For them, whatever improves outcomes for kids is worth whatever adults hate about them.
By the 2025 accountability release, after 130 Houston schools had implemented the NES model, the number of schools earning an A or B rating had risen from eleven before implementation to 94, while the number earning D or F ratings fell from 108 to seven—though some have questioned the integrity of the strategies the district used to make those gains. Most still do not outperform the wealthier schools, but they have improved. Sam Houston Collegiate Prep, part of Midland ISD, went from a C to an A (then dropped to a B) partnering with Third Future. Mendez Middle School, part of Austin ISD, received its first passing rating, a B, in a decade. But not every partnership has been equally successful. A funding dispute and failure to raise scores at two of three partner schools led the charter network to end its three-year contract with Beaumont ISD a year early. One of the schools it operated was a trigger school for the subsequent state takeover.
But even pointing to Third Future’s and Miles’s successes doesn’t address parents’ concerns about the heavy-handed way TEA is getting districts on board with changes in their children’s classrooms. It doesn’t appear to matter. A board of managers doesn’t answer to parents in the way an elected school board does. Once the state has decided on a new direction, families who don’t want to go along have essentially one option: leave. And some do.
Houston ISD’s preexisting enrollment decline steepened under Miles, particularly at the NES schools. Craig said several families at her children’s schools left as soon as they saw where things were headed. But she didn’t want to leave the schools her children love. She didn’t want to surrender so easily, she said. “We just don’t want to be bullied.”
Read Next