WATCH: Inside Houston’s dramatic school turnaround built on high expectations and accountability

Video

Thursday, July 16, 2026

OPINION:

Houston Independent School District has cut its number of D- and F-rated campuses from 121 to 17 in just two years. Superintendent Mike Miles joins Kelly Sadler to explain the New Education System behind the turnaround, including raised expectations, pay for performance, and a renewed focus on grade-level instruction.

[SADLER] Mike, I’d love you to take us through what you classify as this new education system and the results you’ve seen in Houston.

[MILES] Certainly. So, look, the story of Houston is a story that is common to a lot of urban districts, and that is there were low expectations. And yes, there were 121 D- and F-rated campuses out of 274 schools. So that’s 44% of all the schools were D and F campuses, and they were particularly low-performing in the schools with high populations of African-American and Hispanic students. And the district is mostly African-American and Hispanic, 85%. And so it was just a school district that had not been succeeding academically or with regard to getting kids ready for a different world or workplace. So something bold and drastic needed to be done.

We created what’s called a New Education System. But what that is, is we took 130 schools and really focused on the quality of instruction while at the same time changing and improving the instructional quality for all of the schools in the district. And so we had a special focus, though, and that prioritized those schools, the quality of instruction, and raised expectations and accountability.

[SADLER] Can you tell me the difference, what does a D and an F school look like compared to an A and a B?

[MILES] In Texas, we have a letter grade system — A, B, C, D, and F. And the lower performing, the students who are not proficient, who do not grow or pass the bar, the proficiency bar, those are the schools that have D and F ratings. So you can say they’re academically underperforming, or they have a lot of students who are not proficient, cannot read at grade level or do math at grade level. And so that’s the D and F campuses.

And after only two years, we went from 121 D and F campuses to 17 D campuses in just two years. At the same time, we went from 93 A- and B-rated campuses, or higher performing schools, to 197 in just two years, more than doubling the number of A and B campuses. So the success has been pretty enormous for our kids, especially for the student groups that were the lowest-performing student groups — our Black students, our Hispanic students. Their increase over two or three years now has been double-digit gains in almost every tested area. And so we’re very proud of them for that.

[SADLER] So how did you achieve these results? Because I think many people listening to this program would think — because many school systems across the nation do this, right — they inflate their grades. So an A, 10 years ago, is not what an A is today. They kind of lower expectations for the students. And a lot of them, since the COVID era, are just passing kids grade to grade without ever achieving the bar that they need to go on to the next grade. So what did you do to improve grade performance and improve school performance? Shockingly, it’s just been a three-year period of time, and you’ve seen dramatic results.

[MILES] Yes. So first, let me say these grades, the accountability grades, are state data. So they’re not ones that we create. And I think you’ll find, if you look across the country, that Texas has done a lot to raise the bar, the proficiency bar. And they’re doing a lot to move accountability — so they, more than many states, most states, are making their accountability system rigorous. If you get an A or B in the state, that’s good, but it’s more than that. It’s about the proficiency of students, because you’re right, I don’t really care about the letter grade if the student can’t read at grade level.