A recent ruling by the Texas Supreme Court has enabled a potential state takeover of the Houston Independent School District (HISD), and could spell the same for the Dallas Independent School District’s (DISD) own Board of Trustees.
The court lifted a lower court’s injunction against the Texas Education Agency (TEA) last Friday that was preventing it from appointing managers to replace the elected HISD Board of Trustees.
Serious allegations of misconduct and a long-standing record of poor student outcomes put HISD’s school board in the crosshairs of Texas public school regulators, who concluded that the district’s leadership was not fit to oversee the biggest school district in the state.
TEA first moved to take over the district in 2019, but HISD sued and won an injunction that was subsequently reaffirmed by a Texas appeals court.
However, the Texas Supreme Court overruled the appeals court’s decision, claiming that the injunction was inappropriate in light of a newly enacted law that provides an easier path for the state to take over dysfunctional or poor-performing districts.
“When a school district fails to meet statewide expectations designed to ensure the effective education of Texas schoolchildren, the Education Code authorizes the Texas Education Agency Commissioner to assist in improving the district’s performance,” read the court’s opinion.
The matter will now be remanded to the original trial court, which will reevaluate HISD’s request for an injunction in light of the new law.
TEA’s move to take over HISD comes under the leadership of Commissioner Mike Morath, who has been aiming to hold elected school board members more accountable for academic outcomes.
“It’s the leadership at the district level that sets the stage for whether [public schools] can succeed or not,” said Morath back in 2016, speaking before the Texas Senate Education Committee.
It is unclear whether TEA will move quickly to replace HISD’s Board of Trustees, having told The Texas Tribune that it is currently reviewing the court’s opinion.
Still, the implications of the ruling go beyond HISD and could affect similarly troubled school districts like DISD.
While HISD has made some modest improvements in academic outcomes in recent years, DISD has trended in the opposite direction, particularly with regard to on-time graduation rates, as previously reported in The Dallas Express.
The district’s latest accountability report found that almost 20% of its Class of 2022 failed to graduate in four years. Furthermore, only 41% of DISD students scored at grade level on last year’s STAAR exams.
In contrast, HISD managed to bump its on-time graduation rate up to 85.7%, with 43% of its students scoring at grade level on their STAAR exams.
Additionally, both districts only saw 25% of their students earn credit for a college prep course or score at or above the college-ready standard on exams like the SAT and ACT, well under the 41% statewide average.
TEA also deemed 29 DISD schools as “Not Rated,” meaning they received a scaled score of under 70 out of 100 for the 2021-2022 academic year. The TEA scores take into account factors like student achievement metrics and whether the campus has improved its performance over the previous year.
For its part, HISD had 17 “Not Rated” schools last academic year.
Morath has been critical of the DISD Board of Trustees for years, voicing support for reforms that would make the school board more responsive and accountable to the people it is supposed to serve and educate, even back when he was a DISD trustee before being appointed TEA commissioner.
“There is no real accountability to children for board members. Trustees are accountable to us, the voters. But such a tiny number of us vote that [it] is easy for adult special interests to triumph over the need to improve outcomes for children,” Morath said.