The Education of Mike Miles

The fourth grade classroom at Rucker Elementary in Houston looks like one in any Texas city. The young teacher, dressed casually in slacks and a long-sleeved shirt, stands next to a whiteboard and gazes out at the nine- and ten-year-old students huddled around clusters of desks. A girl wearing a colorful headband dons a sweatshirt to protect herself from the chill of the air conditioner groaning in the background, while the boy next to her taps his foot to the beat of a tune in his head.

On the front wall, next to the whiteboard, sits a conspicuous red timer, slightly smaller than a tissue box. Bold black numbers appear on its face. The clock is ticking down on a four-minute lesson segment—1:59, 1:58, 1:57—and the teacher and her students are working to complete a language arts assignment.

It’s May 1, the day after students sat for state-mandated standardized tests and only a month before summer break. Some kids glance nervously at the timer. But because they’re used to administrators observing their classes, no one seems to pay attention to the trim man with closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair observing them along with two others.

Superintendent Mike Miles was appointed by the Texas Education Agency to cure the long-ailing Houston Independent School District. He is arguably the most influential and certainly the most controversial educator in the nation’s second-largest state. He’s 67, and he roams the maze of desks with the agility of an athlete, peering over the shoulders of 25 or so of the more than 180,000 students in the state’s largest school district. They are enrolled at 1 of the 85 schools that adopted his custom cocktail of education reforms last year; 45 more will join this academic year.

The buzzer goes off. The teacher presses the reset button and claps her hands. After the timed segment, she picks one of a handful of Miles-approved strategies to engage her students. The teacher opts for T&T (Turn and Talk); others include Whip Around (the entire class stands and the instructor asks every student a question) and Oral Choral (students call out responses to questions in unison). The children stand up, turn toward their neighbors, and discuss a short passage from the lesson.

The teacher circles the desks and listens to her students. At the end of the class, she will keep some of the children in the classroom for additional instruction, while sending others to the “team center”—what students would have called the library just a year ago—to complete a more challenging assignment to reinforce their mastery of the material covered. But for now, the teacher clicks a remote, and a new passage displays on the whiteboard. The students settle into their chairs, and their eyes turn to the screen. The timer again begins its countdown: 3:59, 3:58, 3:57. . .

Miles and his entourage, which includes the principal and a district supervisor, file out of the classroom and regroup in the quiet hallway. He asks principal Eileen Puente what she thought of the class. The superintendent’s voice is soft, his manner relaxed. But Puente, a woman with a warm smile who’s led the school for five years, stands at attention. She knows it’s now her turn to be evaluated. She answers that student engagement seemed high, but that she is worried the teacher’s pace was too slow because the lesson reviewed material that had already been covered. Miles agrees, checking the silver dial on his black Movado watch. Then he is off to observe another classroom.

Miles is a man in a hurry. He will be judged in large part on whether, and how quickly, he can improve student performance at schools such as Rucker, as measured by the state’s standardized tests. In August 2023, two months after he took the helm at HISD, only 19 percent of fourth graders in the district were reading at grade level. Miles believes his methods will quickly get students back on track. He knows that many—including veteran teachers and national experts in pedagogy—don’t agree with his highly scripted model but he says they just need to be patient with him. “We’ve been working on the mechanics of teaching this year,” Miles tells me. “Next year we will get into the art.”

The classroom-level changes are only one of the innovations imposed by Miles since he was named superintendent by Texas education commissioner Mike Morath, an appointee of Republican governor Greg Abbott. In a takeover that’s been in the works since before the pandemic, Miles has built on the reforms he and Morath, then a Dallas ISD trustee, brought to that district a decade ago, when Miles served as superintendent, and distilled them into a prescriptive framework he calls the New Education System, or NES. By placing Miles at the helm in Houston, Morath is using the state’s largest school district to conduct a giant educational experiment.

Miles’s teacher reforms weren’t popular with many instructors and community members in Dallas, and the reaction has been even more pronounced in Houston. For decades he has proved he’s unfazed by criticism. But for all his urgent rhetoric about student achievement, the question now is whether Miles can learn from the litany of legitimate complaints—and avoid unnecessarily provoking them.

Before Miles’s arrival in Houston, student performance in HISD had trended downward for years. Between 2019 and 2022, HISD experienced the largest achievement decline of all urban Texas districts, as measured by the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, and racial-equity gaps were significant and growing. Only 11 percent of Black students were reading at grade level by fourth grade, versus 60 percent of white students. This gap grew by twelve points between 2002 and 2022. Latino students’ performance also suffered.

Nowhere is this disparity more apparent than in Houston’s low-performing schools. Take Phillis Wheatley High School, in Fifth Ward, for example—the school whose seventh consecutive failing grade from the Texas Education Agency, in 2019, triggered the state takeover. The 1986 senior-class president, Janice Thomas, who graduated third in her class, told me she received a scholarship to college, only to discover that she was unprepared. “I took a remedial class, I think, in English.” She felt lost in her math class of three hundred students. Thomas now works as a legal secretary and paralegal, and runs the nonprofit Discovering U, founded in 2016 “to share God’s graces and help others.” But nearly forty years after she graduated, Phillis Wheatley still struggles to prepare its graduating seniors for college. Only 2 of 114 students who took the SAT or ACT in 2022 scored above the threshold for “college readiness.”

Even so, when Miles arrived in Houston on June 1, 2023, primed to focus on low-performing schools, many locals were already stoked to run him out of town. Some feared a repeat of his record in Dallas, and before that, Colorado, where many well-regarded principals and teachers left their jobs during his tenure. In Colorado Springs, student test scores rose significantly on Miles’s watch, but HISD has roughly fifteen times more students than that suburban district. In Dallas, statewide achievement scores remained flat or increased only slightly. Educators and parents there usually describe him in one of two ways: He’s dedicated, hardworking, and all he cares about is kids. Or he’s a “my way or the highway” guy who doesn’t respect teachers and doesn’t listen.

Many Houstonians oppose Miles because of how he got his job. Superintendents are typically appointed by school board members, who are chosen in sparsely attended elections. But in 2015 the Texas Legislature mandated state intervention when a school fails to meet performance goals for five straight years. Four years later, Phillis Wheatley triggered the state to take control (which it did following a protracted legal battle). Morath, who had witnessed firsthand Miles’s confrontations in Dallas, installed him as superintendent of Texas’s largest school district without any significant consultation with principals, teachers, or parents. Then Morath replaced Miles’s would-be bosses—the nine democratically elected trustees—with a state-appointed board of managers.

So far Miles’s methods are yielding the results they are designed to produce: In year one, test scores on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, improved almost uniformly across the district, surpassing pre-COVID levels. The number of HISD schools rated D or F went from 121 to 41, according to preliminary test results, while those rated A or B nearly doubled. But there are doubts about whether district-wide progress can be sustained in the face of Miles’s failure to build support for his program among educators and the public; in his first year nearly half of HISD campuses experienced a leadership change, and more than 40 percent of teachers left the district.

Miles’s harshest critics fear another scenario. Governor Abbott, Morath’s boss, has become increasingly vocal in his disapproval of public schools in general and heavy-handed in his attempts to shift public dollars to private schools through vouchers. What if Abbott and Morath, intent on undermining public schools, deliberately placed the divisive Miles at the helm of HISD and are content to sit back and watch the conflict ensue?

Miles wears his hair military short and has sincere but wary eyes. He lives in a spartan apartment close to his workplace but far from his wife, who resides in Colorado Springs. He follows a rigid routine, waking at 4:30 a.m. and mounting his treadmill by 5. After a workout, he leaves for his office in the labyrinthine HISD headquarters, regarded by many as a perfect architectural representation of the district’s tortuous, bureaucratic mindset, and fries two eggs for breakfast there.

Miles keeps many books about chivalry and knights on a shelf in his home office: The Once and Future King, by T. H. White; Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur; and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by an unknown author. To relax, he watches movies—his two favorites are Gladiator and The Sound of Music—and plays chess online. But he doesn’t have much time for hobbies. Superintendents of large districts regularly put in seventy hours a week, and even more when stamping out brushfires.

Born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1956, Miles grew up the fourth child and first boy of eight kids. His mother, Chiyo, was Japanese, and his father, Floyd, a U.S. Army veteran who served in Korea and Vietnam, was Black. Chiyo stayed at home while Floyd sometimes went out late drinking and gambling. “We were poor,” Miles told me. He had a good relationship with his parents. His mother was the “gentlest woman,” and while his father was military, he never went over the top with discipline.

Miles had a speech impediment when he was young and credits his first grade teachers with helping him overcome it. At eighteen he was accepted into the United States Military Academy and left home. “On my way to West Point, my dad said, ‘You can quit, but you can’t come home.’ ” His mother’s advice, softer, was “Ganbatte,” a Japanese term that translates to “Do your best.” Miles understood that to mean that he must prepare himself for success.

After graduation he had a near-death experience that made him reevaluate his life. On the night of September 21, 1981, Miles, a 25-year-old Army ranger who had just been promoted to captain, was practicing with his team in the Nevada desert for a potential hostage-rescue mission in enemy territory. They were loaded onto a C-130 plane with four propellers. A soldier on the ground was supposed to guide them onto a field to land. But the plane’s descent was too fast, and it slammed into the desert floor. Nine soldiers died, including the battalion commander. Miles and others were buried in the dirt billowing up and covering them. Two fellow rangers saw Miles’s hand sticking out, dug him out, and helped him crawl away before the plane went up in flames. He broke his jaw in three places, as well as his left hand, and tore connective tissue and muscles in his left shoulder.

“I didn’t decide to go into education at that time,” Miles told me recently, “but I did decide then to use my life to serve.” He thought, “You got a second chance, dude. You should use it.”

He left the Army in 1983 and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a degree in Slavic languages. He next obtained a master’s in international affairs and Soviet studies at Columbia University, graduating in 1989. He started work at the State Department, in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, lived in Moscow for two months to brush up on his Russian and to work in the U.S. embassy, and witnessed the opening of the first McDonald’s in the country. In the early nineties, he spent two years in Warsaw, Poland, as a foreign service officer, helping people with visa issues, among other duties. A final State Department assignment took him back to Moscow, where he served as special assistant to the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 1993 to 1995.

When he was 39, his parents retired in Fountain, Colorado, near where Miles had attended ninth grade, and he decided to settle there with his wife, Karen, and their children. Now a civilian, he asked himself what it meant to be of service, and the clearest answer he could come up with was to help disadvantaged kids who reminded him of himself. He decided to become a teacher.

In 1995, Miles got a job at Fountain’s public high school. Four years later he became a middle school principal, and in 2003 he took over as the district’s assistant superintendent for curriculum. Then for six years, beginning in 2006, he served as superintendent for a neighboring district in Colorado Springs. Along the way, Miles coauthored a book on education and mounted a credible run for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat in 2004.

The early years of this century represented an era of bold school reform. Trailblazers such as Michael Bennet, in Denver; Tony Bennett, in Indiana; and Michelle Rhee, in Washington, D.C., worked to change hidebound public school districts. Thriving charter systems such as Houston-founded KIPP and YES Prep nudged schools toward innovation, and a fix for ailing public education seemed almost within reach. Miles joined the burgeoning movement.

Like many reform-minded educators, Miles is driven by a stark reality: America’s schools do not serve all children equally well. The data confirms what millions of former public school students can tell you: kids from poor neighborhoods, Black students, and those with disabilities are less likely to read at grade level. They are also more likely to be suspended or expelled than affluent or white peers. That frustrates Miles. “I was an underdog growing up,” he told me. “I had to work two times harder than the next person.”

In 2011 he attended the Broad Superintendents Academy (since folded into the Yale School of Management) for training on how to best push reforms. Broad taught its attendees not to expect to win popularity contests. Miles came to believe that public schools are too mired in bureaucracy and too focused on the interests of adults—often meaning the demands of teachers’ unions—to make the changes necessary to ensure that all kids are getting a high-quality education. Any pushback he encountered may have served only to demonstrate the need for change.

But as the decade passed—and many realized that poverty and other social-justice challenges, not just faulty schools, were the primary obstacles to students’ success—the promise of school reform began to fade. Miles persisted. In the early 2010s, he caught the attention of a Dallas software developer named Mike Morath, who’d just earned a seat on the Dallas school board.

Dallas ISD might as well have installed a revolving door in the superintendent’s office during the two decades before the district hired Miles, according to Todd Williams, a staunch Miles supporter and the CEO of the education nonprofit Commit. Michael Hinojosa was the sixth full-time superintendent to leave the district in twenty years when he announced his retirement in 2011. Governance was so dysfunctional, Williams recalled, that the district canceled the 2011 school board elections because no seat could attract more than one candidate. The district was also running an annual deficit in the ballpark of $100 million.

One of those unopposed 2011 board candidates was Morath, an evangelical Christian who built software to help run childcare programs for low-income families. Born in a coal-mining town in West Virginia, his family moved to Garland, a suburb northeast of Dallas, where he was educated in one of the most integrated ways possible in the United States, at a magnet school that brought wealthier kids into the district’s lowest-performing areas. As a student, Morath designed a computer program to help football coaches analyze game data. In college, he joined a predominantly Black fraternity. Morath came to the Dallas board ready to make changes: he wanted more accountability for instructors, longer school days and years, and, most controversially, to turn Dallas into a home rule district, which would exempt it from many of the laws governing public education in Texas. He’d launched what D Magazine described as a “mission from God” to do better by the poorest kids in Dallas.

“I just said, ‘That’s it,’ ” Morath told the magazine in 2014, in a rare interview. “I’ve got to do what I can to improve outcomes for kids. Not just so they can read and write and do math but so they’re prepared for lives with purpose. So they can have the same kind of success in America I’ve had.”

Morath wanted a superintendent who was ideologically aligned with him and could lead the charge. Immediately upon taking the job, Miles pushed a series of controversial reforms, including placing the best teachers in the highest-need schools and requiring all educators to adhere closely to an instructional method imposed from the top. Miles also introduced a merit-pay structure: rather than getting raises based on experience, teacher pay was tied to student test scores and quality of instruction, and those who were effective at teaching the highest-need students were eligible for an added bonus.

What’s more, Miles converted empty rooms into data centers that resembled war rooms. The walls were covered with lists of students’ average weekly grades calculated to the hundredth of a point. Students took regular quizzes to track their progress. If a student’s scores declined, even by a little, administrators considered interventions to get them, and their teachers, back on track. Many teachers in the district believed this focus was misguided: standardized testing, they argued, fails to capture many of the most powerful parts of teaching and learning, and it favors wealthier students who can afford test prep.

Just fourteen months into his tenure, Miles almost lost his job. The superintendent was investigated after a dispute over the way the district awarded contracts. A former U.S. attorney hired by the district cleared Miles of wrongdoing, but found that he had violated policy during the investigation by contacting witnesses he was not supposed to talk to. He managed to survive in a 5 to 3 decision by the board.

The conflicts with trustees hardened the resolve of Morath, Miles, and their supporters. There’s a belief common among folks of a certain temperament, especially those with corporate and military backgrounds, that what ails our schools, colleges, government, and society in general is a lack of discipline and accountability. “If you don’t like our methods, you can quit. Or be fired. Or expelled.” While most successful managers learn to ask questions, listen carefully to answers, explain decisions, and then adjust when some of the decisions inevitably turn out to be wrong, Miles relied on a different approach. He and Morath doubled down.

Miles recruited Miguel Solis, a winsome veteran of the 2008 Obama presidential campaign who had joined Teach for America in Dallas, to be his policy adviser. Solis bought into Miles’s vision and eventually joined the district school board before going to work with Williams at Commit. He’s been one of the biggest advocates of keeping the reforms in place. “You’ve got to have the political courage to stick with it,” Solis said.

In 2015 the board president rejected contract amendments Miles had requested, which would have changed his bonus structure, and he quit; Miles says he resigned to be closer to his family. In any case, he left, returning to Colorado. The board recruited Hinojosa back to the district, coaxing him out of retirement. The jolly and gregarious Hinojosa was a big change from Miles. He saw the data on improvements in student achievement and agreed that it was too convincing to reverse course, but Hinojosa knew the value in getting teachers and parents to buy in. “We call it progress at the speed of trust,” Williams said. “At the end of the day, you’ve got to bring people along.”

After Miles left Dallas, many of his acolytes dispersed across the state. Stephanie Elizalde, who served as director of mathematics, went on to become superintendent of Austin ISD before returning to Dallas ISD as its current superintendent. Mohammed Choudhury, a radical proponent of socioeconomic integration from the Miles administration, would go on to lead major reforms in San Antonio ISD, serve as state superintendent of Maryland public schools, and return to Texas as a deputy superintendent in Fort Worth ISD.

Morath was tapped by Governor Abbott to lead the Texas Education Agency. The teacher-evaluation and incentive structure that Miles and Morath controversially championed in Dallas has become the basis for the statewide Teacher Incentive Allotment. As Williams put it: “All the same things that were so controversial in the beginning are now just what we do.”

Back in Colorado, Miles founded Third Future Schools, a public school charter network. Charters have long served as incubators for reform strategies ranging from strict discipline to recruitment and training of highly motivated teachers, and Miles turned his network into a laboratory. His strategies are a blend of academic theories and philosophies.

“Accountability-based reform distills education down to what we can measure,” said Seth Rau, a longtime policy adviser to school districts and charter networks across the country. On the upside, standardized tests are one way to judge the effectiveness of a teaching method. On the downside, overreliance on testing has had a way of reverse engineering the entire educational system. The school day can be more and more optimized to produce higher test scores, because test scores are how you measure education. “Whether these are the right outcomes to look for—that’s where the experts all differ,” Rau said.

At his Third Future Schools, Miles experimented with heightened discipline and monitoring. When a student wanted to go to the restroom, she needed to carry an orange traffic cone and put it outside the facilities so her teacher could easily locate her. Other features more directly influenced student learning. He and his team developed a centralized curriculum for students who were behind, as well as courses that focused on skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and information literacy. They created a class where community members taught gardening and yoga to students.

Education experts such as Rau have questioned the efficacy of some of the reforms. Nonetheless, when Miles became HISD superintendent, he fully deployed the NES educational template. In NES schools the district supplies lessons for every class, from the third grade through the tenth, along with supporting PowerPoint slides. Teachers must teach from these slides, and use timers as a reminder to engage the students with one of the strategies I witnessed at Rucker. Students take quizzes about 45 minutes into each class. Those who need help stay to fill in basic worksheets; those who do well go to the team center to complete harder ones. One veteran teacher who has worked under Miles’s system and requested anonymity disparaged the approach as “STAAR test prep all day long.”

In many NES schools, teachers can’t assign novels such as The Catcher in the Rye, which for decades has led students to wonder where ducks spend their winter months. Passages from novels can be included in the NES scripted lectures, but, Miles explains, “Full books can come after school [or] before school. They can come once kids are out of school.”

At Miles’s Third Future Schools, teachers understood from the outset what they’d signed up for. But it was an entirely different endeavor to impose systemic change on a sprawling district with some 11,000 teachers, hundreds of principals and assistant principals, and some of the best and the worst schools in the state and the nation.

Teacher after teacher I spoke with disdained the NES model. Ben Buso, a former economics teacher at East Early College High School, explained NES with deadpan humor: “I think they got a think tank together of some really smart people and they figured out a way to systematically drain all of the joy and meaning out of the job and make it completely miserable.”

Several teachers told me they had been seeing a therapist to ease their distress. As strongly as Miles believes in the transformative power of his New Education System, many teachers view it as a disrespectful dismantling of the profession of teaching. They fear that the NES system, de-emphasizing the human connection with students, is a path toward education on the cheap, where low-income kids will ultimately be provided a basic education by low-skilled or uncertified teachers.

Robbi Goldstein has an expressive face, and her brown eyes light up when she talks about her thirty-year teaching career, which has included stints at three HISD schools, as well as at academies in Africa and the Middle East. Four years ago she began teaching at Sharpstown High School, in southwest Houston, where many of the mostly economically disadvantaged students hail from around the world. English was a second language for about a third of the children, and in the school’s classrooms and halls, she routinely heard a potpourri of French, Kinyarwanda, Spanish, and Swahili. The high school seemed the perfect spot for her. Goldstein believed she’d retire there.

That changed in 2023 when Miles replaced her principal. The first thing Goldstein noticed was that the new head’s daily announcement on the public address system sounded like a scolding. Then, early in the school year, she was told not to put motivational messages on her classroom walls. “No posters about treating one another kindly, ‘you can do this,’ type of sayings.” The emphasis was instead on academic posters, grammar drills, and such. Goldstein found herself mired in the same sort of stifling bureaucracy that Miles vows to eliminate.

Administrators began observing her classroom multiple days a week, and she feared being reprimanded if she stood more than five feet from the doors as students entered and left. Observers subtracted points from her evaluation scores when Goldstein failed to set a timer and interrupt (or “engage,” to use NES language) her class, even when she felt the students were better off continuing to work for a few more minutes.

Goldstein had nurtured an appreciation of reading and literature in her students by teaching four novels or plays a year. But in her final year at Sharpstown, she felt that her expertise—she has a master’s degree in literature—wasn’t valued and that Miles saw her role as that of a glorified robot. She dared to slip in only one play, The Crucible. Her students loved it. She defended the practice of teaching novels: “You can’t beat a kid over the head with a frying pan and make him read, and I feel like that’s kind of the strategy that Miles is taking. What you can do is inspire children to want to read.”

One afternoon early in the school term, she witnessed an administrator chiding some students for laughing in the common area. That’s when she decided to leave the district, feeling “as though they’ve removed the soul from the educational system.”

At the end of the 2024 spring semester, in a final act of defiance, Goldstein played “Hakuna Matata,” the song from The Lion King, to illustrate a lesson she called the hero’s journey. She knew that her administrators would frown on her sharing the joyful music, but a poor evaluation no longer mattered. “I’ve spent my life training and sacrificing to be a teacher,” Goldstein said. “We who’ve spent our lives perfecting our craft are suffering the most.”

When asked what she expected would be the outcome of the NES experiment, Goldstein answered without hesitation. “It’s going to fail, and they’re going to blame the teachers.”

It’s not just teachers at low-performing schools who feel trapped by Miles. Jamie Ford, an athletic 48-year-old who taught at Carnegie Vanguard High School for twelve years before Miles arrived, becomes animated when she talks about her students. Ford ran an engaging classroom that was famous for her pet leopard gecko, named Foster; Frank, a bearded dragon; and three tortoises. Carnegie Vanguard has won numerous awards since opening in 2002, and its new campus, near downtown, presents a sleek and modern glass facade. This year, U.S. News ranked it as the nation’s thirty-first best public high school, out of 17,655. About 34 percent of the student population qualifies for free lunch. Unlike teachers at lower-performing schools, Ford wasn’t subjected to the NES curriculum, but her district administrators pushed to adopt Miles’s reforms. Ford couldn’t stand the introduction of “plastic magnetic timers, like something for a kindergarten class.” She disliked having to stop her advanced placement courses every so often to do one of eight strategies. She used to play a lot of documentaries for her class, but after Miles arrived, she was allowed to show only ten-minute clips. “From the day I started school to the day I walked out, I never had the time to deeply connect with my students or to connect them with each other,” she said of her last year at the school.

Miles has since admitted that he erred in not clearly preserving the autonomy of principals at high-performing schools and has spelled out in writing the right of some principals to use any curriculum that does not violate board policy or TEA regulations. But he has responded with less conciliation to NES teachers who are unhappy with the centralized curriculum: “The curriculum is a piece of paper, and it doesn’t teach. Even an exciting piece of paper doesn’t teach. So I don’t understand how a curriculum can be boring.”

Those aren’t exactly reassuring words for teachers grasping to cope with the radical changes brought by NES. Over the 2023–2024 school year, 4,680 of HISD’s roughly 11,000 teachers left the district. In June alone, 4,114 employees, including 2,442 teachers, departed—three-fourths voluntarily. That’s more educators leaving in a single month than typically leave in a year.

Miles seems unconcerned. The testing data that fuels his reforms is stacking up in his favor: after one year, the TEA reports, Houston ISD’s STAAR scores went up nearly across the board, with major improvements in fourth and sixth grade reading aptitude, eighth grade math, and high school biology. Houston outpaced other urban districts statewide. And the biggest improvements of all? The NES schools, according to HISD. The district reports that 8 percent more fourth graders and 10 percent more sixth graders are reading at or above grade level. Fourteen percent more eighth graders are proficient in math, and 18 percent more high schoolers are proficient in biology.

The NES model is achieving what it set out to, in one sense. But Miles’s tin ear for dissent may leave him with a frontline workforce less likely to inspire students, as beloved teachers flee the profession or transfer to other school districts. The experience compelled Ford to leave education for good.

Miles has allies. Many business leaders admire Morath’s data-based approach to evaluating school performance, and they embrace Miles’s reforms. “I can’t believe how lucky Houston is to have Mike Miles,” said Doug Foshee, a former energy executive. Foshee, an earnest man with a ready laugh, founded the nonprofit Houstonians for Great Public Schools about a decade ago to track HISD board performance.

Many applaud the superintendent’s commitment to reducing disparities in student achievement by directing more resources to underperforming schools, which are concentrated in neighborhoods with the lowest family incomes. The 130 NES schools will receive $684 million under the adopted budget for the 2024–2025 school year, and the other 144 will receive about $657 million, according to the district budget presentation. Scott McClelland, a retired H-E-B executive and civic leader who is dedicated to education reform, noted in a Houston Chronicle op-ed, “There are more children trapped in failing schools [in Houston] than there are seats at NRG Stadium.”

The support of the business community is important. Businesses represent a large portion of any urban district’s tax base, and industry leaders will be crucial in passing the HISD $4.4 billion bond proposal on the ballot in November. Real estate developers and employers want good schools that they can use in recruiting employees to move to Houston, and they want those schools to educate future employees. But it’s noteworthy that Miles enjoys his strongest support among a cohort where few live in low-income neighborhoods—the areas where he has not formed strong ties.

When Miles has come in conflict with parents’ and teachers’ deeply felt views, he can appear dismissive. Take the issue of school libraries, many of which Miles infamously closed. Aikiesha Shelby, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and parent of a child at an NES school, was dismayed when she heard Miles speak at a community meeting in August the year he arrived. Librarians are among the most beloved school figures, and many adults credit them for helping introduce them to books that fit their interests, thereby sparking a lifelong love of reading. “You are going to increase literacy by closing libraries?” she thought.

Miles later responded: “We have to stop saying, ‘My kids feel better’ or ‘My kids are happy readers.’ I don’t know what that means.” Elsewhere, he doubled down: “Kids who cannot read do not love libraries,” Miles told the Houston Chronicle. He put his foot in his mouth: “I’d rather have a high-quality teacher getting paid a lot, than have a librarian doing what, checking out books?”

His missteps in firing principals were similarly pronounced. If Miles has little patience for teachers struggling to boost student performance, he displays even less for school leaders who cannot meet his goals. In June principals in roughly a quarter of schools left, were reassigned, or were removed. Among those removed were HISD’s 2023 elementary and middle school principals of the year.

Miles defends his decisions, noting that warm and fuzzy educators who are embraced by parents might not be doing all they can to advance student learning. But the disconnect between parents’ experiences and Miles’s view reflects the difference between a man who looks only at limited data versus that of Houstonians sensitive to relationships that have sustained their communities across multiple generations.

Recently Miles has begun to pay more attention to communication and has even launched a newsletter to update community members. But there’s much work remaining to repair the breach of trust. Scott Sonenshein, a professor at Rice University’s business school, pointed out one reason for so much discord in the district. “There should have been a better explanation about why Miles’s vision was beneficial, not only for the underperforming schools but for the whole district.”

Shortly before the summer break, I accompanied Miles to Francis Scott Key Middle School, which is surrounded by several acres of lush grass in a neighborhood known as Kashmere Gardens, in northeast Houston. One week earlier a tornadolike derecho had hit Houston and left many without power, but the classes appeared fully staffed with teachers, and no student seemed to be coasting. “Kids deserve a teacher every day, even at the end of the year,” Miles noted, taking pride in his crackdown on teacher absenteeism.

As he left a math class, Miles stopped at a table holding four brightly colored plastic containers. He removed math worksheets from one and explained how educators had carefully calibrated each of the four different sheets to add a layer of difficulty to the material. His voice conveyed his characteristic enthusiasm for teaching, the same type of enthusiasm Goldstein had spoken with when she described how much she loved teaching her students The Great Gatsby.

Miles often notes that setting high expectations without support breeds fear. He’s right. His flawed communication strategy as he introduced wholesale reform into a complex district induced plenty of fear. One pervasive concern is that NES, a program designed for students who are behind academically, will eventually become the norm for all HISD schools. Miles will never convince many seasoned teachers and parents of his methods. But he could certainly do more to allay the concerns of some. Even if his top-down mandates continue to raise test scores, he must live up to his commitment to allow schools that are succeeding to graduate to a culture with more creative freedom, functioning libraries, and, yes, even the use of novels to cultivate the joy of reading.

Morath has outlined three conditions that must be met before the state takeover ends: no multiyear failing campuses, compliance with state and federal special education laws, and improvement in board governance. Big questions remain. Will he declare victory based on a year or two of better test scores? Or will he and Miles recognize that without buy-in from frontline teachers and parents, their success is likely to be short-lived? If NES belongs always to Miles and never to Houston, then it’s just another timer ticking down.

Andrea White writes novels for middle school students and is a former member of the Houston Chronicle editorial board. Bekah McNeel contributed additional reporting for this story.

This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “The Education of Mike Miles.” Subscribe today.

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