In 2000, the U.S. Department of Education published a report on the Houston Independent School District (HISD) during the implementation of TAAS, Texas' standardized testing program. Lindy McNeil and Angela Valenzuela, lead researchers, argued that rigorous standardized testing disciplines children into repetitive, isolated performances of knowledge. Basically, rather than learning developmentally appropriate skills, like reading, thinking, and writing, TAAS siphoned classroom resources towards preparing kids for multiple-choice test formats, short text reading, and short essays, skills that are not transferable or usable outside of the test.
Calling it a "ticket to nowhere," McNeil and Valenzuela documented the adverse effects of standardized testing on poor and minority students, including actively eroding reading and writing skills and alienating students from learning. "By treating them as if they are unteachable," the researchers argued, the system siphons resources from classrooms and encourages a resistance to schooling that pushes kids out. Rather than improving educational outcomes, HISD's testing created punitive and limiting environments for non-white students.
This era of HISD was later dubbed the "Texas (or Houston) Miracle" when superintendent Rod Paige initiated large-scale reforms that were celebrated after test scores improved while he supposedly decreased the dropout rate. By the time people realized that Paige had been encouraging at-risk students to drop out, forcing low-performing students into special education classes so their test scores wouldn't count, and ordering principals to cover up actual dropout rates, the story had already played a key role in George Bush's successful 2000 Presidential run and the later passage of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Constituting the biggest federal government intervention in education, NCLB implemented a punitive school rating system based on standardized testing outcomes under the guise of closing the educational gap.
Houston's systematic oppression of students was thus exported into national policy. NCLB was the 2002 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), originally part of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society program. Where ESEA dedicated federal dollars to schools, No Child Left Behind required states to test students from grades 3-8 and in high school and publicly report scores. Schools were required to make progressive improvement in test scores each year. If a school did not hit yearly targets, it was subject to punitive sanctions, including, but not limited to: allowing students to transfer out of the school, state intervention, and closure.
Under this system, schools did not have the resources to support students dealing with the residual effects of poverty, discrimination, and instability and subsequently lost resources and autonomy. A prime example is post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, where the state took the devastation as an opportunity to establish the first near-total charter school system. In New Orleans, school accountability stripped the historically Black city of public assets and democratic control of the school system.
Although most people have disabused themselves of the aspirations of NCLB, many are still convinced of the need for its original goals of educational equity, accountability, and standardized testing.
HB1842, passed in 2015, is an act that requires "the intervention in and sanction of a public school that has received an academically unsuccessful performance rating for at least two consecutive school years." Texas Representative Harold Dutton, one of the more consequential believers in NCLB, once likened HB1842 to calling Child Protective Services on a family.
Dutton's analogy is apt. As political scientist Domingo Morel argued, a district takeover is a tool that allows conservative states to undermine local leadership and political engagement through the paternalistic assumption that Black communities cannot educate their children. Takeovers are racialized, with over 85 percent of state interventions targeting majority Black or brown communities, and their likelihood increases with the rate of Black political representation in city council and school boards.
The Southern Students Manifesto For Academic Freedom
We, a coalition of students, staff, faculty, and alumni at The University of Texas at Austin, amplify the discontent of communities across the United States. We are tired of the senseless elimination of educational opportunities under the guise of neutrality, the increasing implementation of gag rules that demolish systems of shared governance, and most alarmingly—the…
Houston is no different. HISD's takeover is part of Texas' increasingly aggressive attempts to curtail local progressive control, which has targeted Houston due to its racial diversity and potential for political liberalism.
In 2018, Wheatley and Kashmere High Schools were not rated due to the effects of Hurricane Harvey. The following year, Wheatley High School was rated as a failure and subsequently triggered the district takeover, despite the break in failing ratings. Moreover, the school would have received a passing rate had it not been for a 2018 change in rating standards.
After a four-year-long legal battle, Texas officially took over the reins in 2023 despite Wheatley's school rating passing in 2022. Three years into the takeover, HISD's New Education System (NES) reforms have led to thousands of teachers and students leaving the district, libraries being transformed into detention centers, and 12 schools in predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods permanently closing. Curiously, state-imposed superintendent F. Mike Miles has repeatedly touted NES as equitable due to its allocation of funds and gains in educational outcomes.
And the official numbers back him up: HISD has attained higher state ratings due to sweeping reforms. In HISD's reports, the district has reported historic gains in standardized testing scores over the last three years. The schools targeted for large-scale overhaul, primarily in Black and brown neighborhoods, on average have $2k more public funds allocated per student.
Similar to the facade of the Houston miracle, though, these gains are being uncovered as data manipulation. Recent reports and community members have revealed that HISD has been effectively manipulating data to produce its statistical success. Students are both being held back from taking advanced courses so they qualify to take on-level tests, and students are being placed in remedial courses to keep them from taking tests. For example, the percent of students passing on the Algebra I end-of-course exam has improved by 23 percentage points in three years. In that same time, there were over 3,000 fewer Algebra I tests taken at least in part due to this systematic manipulation.
Under a standardized testing regime, students and teachers are individually held to standards they have neither the resources nor tools to reach. Where white and middle-class children are able to rely on cultural indicators to pass exams, minority and low-income students are subject to drills on the particular form of the test, multiple-choice questions, and specific writing skills that not only trade off with substantive learning, but actively "de-skills" students' existing higher-order problem-solving and thinking.
This is exemplified in Houston, where teachers describe sneaking in books that students have to hide if an administrator walks in. The superintendent's military-style accountability systems and experimentation with heightened discipline and monitoring at other school districts also sit within Texas' larger censorship regime. The lieutenant governor has recently announced a list of 2,200 books he wants banned from Texas public schools, and the Texas legislature has passed legislation to allow parents to remove books off of shelves, removing access to literature that may help develop children's cultural understandings.
Miles' classroom surveillance strategies are poised to be supercharged by AI. The district has recently announced "Future 2" schools that will select elementary schools to include AI-generated, personalized curricula for their highest-performing students. Aside from the early studies reporting cognitive atrophy associated with regular AI interaction, there are huge privacy and consent concerns regarding young students training a privately-owned educational program model using public dollars.
The promise of educational equity warrants surveillance and regulatory intervention that turns schools into a plantation. It tells communities that they should love schools that break their children's love of learning. In this facade, kids are forced to express their educational capacities in circumscribed and constricted ways to their own detriment. Moreover, their excellence is used as proof to further justify the dispossession of their communities. The state takeover has been a perverse educational experiment that has innovated new strategies in public deceit and student surveillance that threaten to be exported across the nation.
Mike Miles' NES has created an effective system of constraining students' educational abilities, disappearing problematic students, and creating carceral schools. Educational equity, here, means stripping Black and brown communities of the ability to educate their children and subjecting students to perform by rigid and manufactured educational standards. And in return, students graduate with skills that are neither useful nor transferable. A ticket to nowhere, indeed.