Parents and teachers snapping their fingers in support as a fellow attendee challenged the agenda proposed by Mike Miles, the Houston Independent School District superintendent, during a meeting of the district’s school board, in Houston on Aug. 3, 2023.
Since then, the new superintendent — a former Army Ranger, State Department diplomat and founder of a charter school network who has no official certification for the Houston job — has moved swiftly to adopt a new plan for educating the district’s children, focusing on rapidly improving reading and math scores in dozens of elementary and middle schools.
As the takeover began this year, many parents and teachers in Houston, a strongly Democratic city, complained about the loss of input into their schools and worried that the ultimate goal of state Republican leaders was to undermine support for public education and drive Houston parents to charter or private schools.
“It doesn’t feel right,” said Jessica Campos, 41, a parent at Pugh Elementary, a Spanish dual-language school slated for immediate changes. “I lose sleep over this. It’s a serious thing. These are our children, and we’re not having a say in our children’s education, and that is not OK.” The political tensions come at a particularly raw moment in Texas as the Republican-dominated Legislature tries to constrain Democratic-led cities on a variety of fronts, limiting local power to create city-specific ordinances, curtailing efforts at criminal justice reform and, in Austin, dispatching state troopers to patrol streets.
“It’s devastating,” said that replaced member, Elizabeth Santos. “They tried to defeat me and failed. Then Greg Abbott and Mike Morath put her in.”