Recently released state school ratings reveal that five Texas school districts are at risk of a takeover by the Texas Education Agency (TEA)—the most since a 2017 state law expanded the state’s takeover powers. The new ratings cover the 2022-23 school year, released in April following legal delays, and the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years, released last month. One Fort Worth ISD school received its fifth consecutive failing rating for 2022-23. Schools in Beaumont, Connally, Wichita Falls, and Lake Worth ISDs, which have a total of 32,000 students, all received a fifth consecutive failing grade for the 2024-25 school year.
Some parents in Fort Worth have already organized to fend off a takeover: Zach Leonard, a parent of three children in the district, told the Texas Observer he does not want Fort Worth to lose its elected leadership and staff the way Houston ISD has under its 2023 takeover and the state-appointed leadership of superintendent Mike Miles. “It’s not a sustainable model for the future. It’s not true education. It’s just test prep,” Leonard said. “Fort Worth ISD has room to improve, but we can do it our way, and we don’t have to do it the way that TEA is prescribing.”
In the past decade and a half, 13 districts have been taken over and run by a state-appointed board of managers, under public school accountability laws which have empowered TEA to step in and depose an elected school board if its schools do not meet academic, governance, or financial accountability standards. In 2017, the state made it easier for TEA to intervene by allowing the agency to take over an entire school district if just one school receives failing ratings for five consecutive ratings.
An Observer analysis of school ratings at those districts before and after TEA takeovers reveals that, while some districts have recently reduced their number of failing schools under state control, others racked up more failing schools and even ended their time under state control by being gobbled up by other districts.
“You’re getting people that they’re putting in there to sabotage everything that we were trying to do.”
The state agency currently controls Houston ISD as well as four smaller school districts because of governance issues or consecutive failing ratings at one or more schools. Four of those districts have shown some progress in their state scores, 2024-25 data shows. After eight years of TEA control, Marlin ISD, near Waco, received no F or D ratings this past school year and will return to full local control in January 2026. In East Texas, Shepherd ISD’s three F-rated schools improved to D-rated schools in the five years under state takeover. And for the first time since the A-F system began in 2017, Houston ISD had no F ratings last school year. South San Antonio ISD, which TEA took over due to governance issues in February 2025, also had fewer failing schools in 2025 than 2024.
But other school districts that were subject to TEA control in the past reported more problems following takeovers, based on the agency’s own metrics for academic performance, records show. Four out of eight districts where state takeovers have ended were dissolved entirely: North Forest, La Marque, Kendleton, and Wilmer Hutchins ISDs were all shut down and absorbed into other school districts. One of those districts, North Forest, was absorbed into Houston ISD, itself now taken over.
Two other districts returned to local control with more failing schools than before: Beaumont and Edgewood ISDs, which had been taken over for governance or financial accountability issues. In the case of Edgewood, taken over for failure to hire a superintendent, the number of failing schools increased from one to 10. In the two remaining cases, the results were better: Southside ISD, taken over for financial accountability reasons, had no failing schools pre- or post-TEA, and El Paso ISD, taken over for a state test cheating scandal, emerged with fewer failing schools.
When presented with the Observer’s findings, TEA spokesperson Jake Kobersky suggested TEA is not responsible for the outcome of state takeovers. “The agency does not ‘take control’ or manage the operations of school districts,” he said. “In the event a Board of Managers is appointed, the locally appointed board members and the district administration, consistent with the operating structure of districts statewide, make all operational and curricular decisions—not TEA,” Kobersky wrote, clarifying in a separate email that “locally appointed” referred to the state “appointing board members from the local community.” Kobersky continued: “Classifying the district as being under agency leadership is an incorrect characterization and would mislead your readers.”
Kobersky emphasized that TEA removed the elected boards at Edgewood and Beaumont ISDs mainly because of financial and governance issues, not academic issues. Though school ratings slipped, he noted that the percentage of all Beaumont ISD students who met overall standards at their grade level was only 30 percent when the takeover began, and it remained the same afterward. In Edgewood, a district in west San Antonio that was the center of a historic 1989 court ruling on school finance equity, the percentage of all district students who met grade level increased from 24 to 29 percent, Kobersky said.
In the first year of the state takeover at Edgewood, TEA’s appointed board of managers named Emilio Castro as superintendent. But Castro resigned only two years later, after a district employee accused him of sexual harassment. Timothy Payne, who served as an appointed board manager from 2016 to 2019, told the Observer the board then selected TEA’s recommended replacement—Eduardo Hernández, a former Chief of Schools for Duncanville ISD, though Hernández had no prior experience as a superintendent.
By 2019, Hernández pushed for private operation of some campuses under a state law that allows school districts to hand over their schools to private charter operators or public university programs in exchange for extra funding and a break from state sanctions. The district inked private partnerships with four operators to run eight elementary, middle, or high schools. But only one of those schools, run by Ridgeline Education Corporation, received passing ratings in the 2024-25 school year. Winston Intermediate School of Excellence, which was operated by the Texas A&M San Antonio Institute for School and Community Partnerships, closed following the 2023-24 school year, after receiving a F rating.
Payne blames TEA for the district’s declining ratings. “TEA is the problem,” he said. “You’re getting people that they’re putting in there to sabotage everything that we were trying to do.”
Kobersky, the TEA spokesman, reiterated that it was the state-appointed Board of Managers, not TEA, who hired Hernández as Edgewood ISD superintendent.
Edgewood ISD parents have now collected 200 signatures for a petition that demands a performance review for Hernández and more transparency on academic performance, school discipline, teacher vacancies, and district spending. Edgewood parent Jessica Martinez told the Observer that her sons’ school—Gus Garcia Middle School, another campus run by the Texas A&M program—has had a different principal each year her kids have attended and that substitute teachers are running classes “all year round.”
Henrietta Muñoz, the CEO of the Texas A&M program, told the Observer via email that staffing shortages are a statewide concern and that the state ratings “highlight areas for continued improvement” but do “not fully reflect” the accomplishments made at the school. A spokesman for Edgewood ISD did not respond to the Observer’s request for comment.
During its TEA takeover, from 2014 to 2020, Beaumont ISD saw its number of failing schools increase from four to eight. Right before the takeover ended, the district contracted with nonprofit charter operators to run three schools. The district terminated these partnerships in 2023 after all three received F ratings, then turned them over to another charter operator—Third Future Schools, a school network founded by Miles, now the Houston superintendent—which in turn ended its partnership with the district last school year, reverting control to the Beaumont ISD. Only one of the former Third Future Schools partnership campuses in Beaumont ISD received a passing rating in 2024-25. One of those three campuses, Fehl-Price Elementary, received its fifth consecutive failing rating, putting the district at risk of yet another takeover.
Thomas Sigee, who joined the Beaumont ISD board as an elected trustee in 2019 and is now the board chair, previously told the Observer that TEA directed the board’s selection of private partners: “We chose charter schools based on what TEA told us we could use,” Sigee said. But Kobersky, the TEA spokesman, countered that districts have always been in charge of selecting operators: “The decision-making authority has always rested with the district.”
Sigee told the Observer the district has not yet received any information from TEA regarding whether Beaumont will face another takeover. He said the district would close Fehl-Price and transfer its students to another school if needed to avoid state control. Until then, he said, “We will continue to educate the students in BISD.”
Credit: Source link
