Damn.
Two years into Houston ISD’s state takeover, state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles touted a major achievement: state ratings showed there were no more F-rated schools in the district.
Some of that jump, however, had little to do with Miles’ sweeping reforms or gains in student test scores. One key factor was HISD’s use of a new, rapidly expanding option in Texas’ accountability system: college-prep courses.
These are not typical courses that can earn students college credit, such as Advanced Placement or dual credit. These are courses, often taken online, that help students catch up on English and math so they don’t have to take remedial classes in college. In the state’s accountability system, schools that enroll students in college-prep courses can earn credit for producing college-ready graduates, which in turn boosts their A-F ratings.
Exclusive data from the Texas Education Agency obtained by the Houston Chronicle shows that without students completing those courses, every high school in Miles’ reform model would have dropped by at least one letter grade in 2025. The district would have had five D-rated and two F-rated high schools – undercutting Miles’ claim of no F-rated campuses.
At schools within Miles’ New Education System – the center of his reforms – students were much more likely to complete college-prep courses. Some students described being enrolled en masse, even when they had already earned college-ready credentials. Several said they rushed through the self-paced coursework, which can take up to a semester, in a few hours. Others said they still had to take remedial classes in college — the very outcome the courses were designed to prevent.
In fact, the TEA concluded in 2025 that virtually all college-prep courses failed to prepare students for college-level academics. Most graduates marked college-ready exclusively through college prep still had to take remedial coursework to pass their first year of college, the TEA found. Because of that finding, the state will no longer count most college-prep courses toward school ratings by 2028.
The findings cast doubt on the academic progress HISD schools have made under Miles since the Texas Education Commissioner ousted the elected school board in 2023 and installed him to lead the state’s largest school district. The apparent gains from college-prep courses — which the state later deemed ineffective — also raise questions about how the accountability system rewards schools.
“We can shove a bunch of students into college-prep courses, but that doesn’t mean that we’re actually doing a whole lot of work to make sure that they get somewhere,” said Jacob Kirksey, an associate professor of education policy at Texas Tech University. “We’ve basically created this fake pathway into college that’s not actually viable.”
The surge in college-prep course completions far outpaced HISD’s improvement on other measures of college readiness. In the first year of the takeover, HISD campuses made modest gains in preparing students for college, with roughly 800 more students meeting the benchmark in the 2023-24 school year than the previous year. But nearly 2,000 graduates that year were marked college ready thanks to those courses.
[…]
In all, college-prep credit boosted ratings by at least one letter grade at half of HISD’s high school campuses in 2025. That included every NES campus and almost every NES-aligned campus — both of which enroll higher rates of economically disadvantaged students than the district average.
Wheatley High School — which triggered HISD’s state takeover after several years of failing grades — earned a B rating in 2025. Without college prep, the Fifth Ward high school would have earned a C.
HISD represents a broader regional trend. In a sampling of high schools across 12 other Houston-area districts, state data showed that all but three schools would have earned lower ratings in 2025 without college-prep credit, including campuses in Katy, Cypress-Fairbanks and Conroe. The state has yet to release comprehensive regional data to the Chronicle.
Kirksey at Texas Tech found that students who took college-prep courses were less likely to earn a college degree than those who weren’t considered college ready, suggesting that the courses boost high school ratings without setting students up for success.
Statewide, low-income students were also more likely to take and complete college-prep courses. But the boost in college-prep enrollment has done little to close the gap in college-readiness between those students and their peers, according to an analysis from Rice University’s Houston Education Research Consortium.
The gap between Black and Hispanic students also remained virtually unchanged when compared to state averages.
Gabriela Sánchez-Soto, who conducted the research at Rice, said it signals the accountability system needs to change to truly reach those students.
“If we are not actually saying explicitly, ‘How are we going to support students who have economic disadvantage? How are we going to support students of color? How are we going to support emergent bilingual students?’ Then the system itself will not necessarily create that just by virtue of existing,” Sánchez-Soto said.
It’s a long story and that’s a gift link, so read the rest. I have some things to add, but first I want to note that vocal Mike Miles critic Ruth Kravetz of Community Voices for Public Education, along with co-author and PhD student Daniel Dawer were on this before the Chron published its reporting.
When Aubrie was a freshman in the Houston Independent School District (ISD), she was assigned to an Algebra I class. On the first day of school, her teacher recognized her talent and moved her into pre-AP Algebra I, where she thrived.
Two years later, at the beginning of the last school year, Aubrie was excited to take pre-AP Algebra II. She had always loved math and imagined a bright future in science. But three weeks into the school year, she and nearly 2,000 other juniors across Houston ISD’s 16 New Education System (NES) high schools were abruptly pulled out of Algebra II and placed into a remedial math course called Algebraic Reasoning/Texas College Bridge.
This move was not made to help students grow academically. Instead, we believe students were moved into this less rigorous course to artificially inflate campus accountability ratings, at the expense of student learning. Just sitting through the Algebraic Reasoning course and clicking through the online modules increases a school’s A-F rating, even if students never pass the state’s college readiness assessment attached to the class. It’s a loophole that state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles is exploiting at an unprecedented scale.
Records obtained from the Houston ISD along with publicly available data from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) reveal that the district’s state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles shunted about half of all juniors at NES high schools into this course. At some schools, as many as 70 percent of juniors were similarly demoted into less challenging classes.
NES high schools are all located in under-resourced, predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods, which have borne the brunt of the state’s destructive takeover policies. By comparison, less than 5 percent of all juniors at non-NES high schools in more affluent communities, including Debakey, Carnegie Vanguard, Challenge, HAIS, Heights, HSPVA, and Lamar, were placed in this remedial course.
A “bridge” course may make sense for struggling seniors. For juniors who are only halfway through high school, it can stop a student’s academic trajectory in its tracks.
After being moved into Algebraic Reasoning, Aubrie asked her counselor to move her back into Algebra II. “If pre-AP was full,” she said, “I’ll take any Algebra II class; just get me out of this remedial class. I already know fractions, decimals, and percents.”
She just wanted to take Algebra II. Most students in the United States take Algebra II or a more advanced math course by their junior year.
The counselor said her hands were tied. Miles’ policy required all NES juniors who were not certain to earn the college, career, and military-readiness (CCMR) credit used in school accountability ratings to be removed from Algebra II.
Again, read the rest. And as with the case of Miles’ seeming defiance of the TEA’s mandate on special ed, I have to ask, what will the state do if their hand-picked Superintendent is not in fact getting the job done and magically fixing all of HISD’s problems? Say what you want about the elected Board and the Superintendents they hired, they weren’t actively fudging the data. What accountability is there for Mike Morath and the TEA and the Legislature if their guy is a fraud?
Because, let’s be clear, the one thing that most of us Mike Miles critics have had to concede is that HISD appeared to be doing better on the STAAR test, which is a key component to the overall accountability ratings. (Though people like Kravets have accused him of playing fast and loose with that, too.) All of the bad things we’ve had to deal with – declining enrollment, mass departures of teachers and principals, a complete disinterest in engaging with the public, and on and on and on – was supposed to be in service of better outcomes for the students. Well, what are we supposed to make of that if all that was an illusion? Where are we supposed to go to get a refund for our shitty experience?
The bottom line is that the state, and that very much means the entrenched Republican leadership, has failed to do its job. It has underfunded schools, piled on meaningless and increasingly harmful mandates, mucked around with the curriculum for partisan reasons, and done less than nothing to help the children and their families do better in school. It was so much easier to push the blame for all that out to the local school boards and districts. And now we reap what they have sown. And we are all losers for it.
