In Houston, a Wholesale Transformation Delivers Better Education for Students

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In the last few years, school districts across the country have seen significant declines in reading and math, leading to lower test scores. Parents of Black and Latino students, in particular, feel schools are failing their kids, and many young people have stopped attending class altogether. While students struggle, large school districts keep fiddling around the edges with incremental changes that won’t make a difference fast enough.

Things are different in the Houston Independent School District. One year into the state intervention in the district, our results show meaningful growth for students and schools because we’ve embraced wholesale systemic transformation.  

This progress is the result of some innovative practices, but also strategies that education leaders throughout the country already know. The biggest challenge has never been knowing which policies work, but rather summoning the will to do what is right for children, even when the politics are treacherous.

Twenty years ago, leaders willing to transform school systems and the lives of their students boldly dotted the national map. But as the politics got tougher, too many educators and elected officials learned the unfortunate lesson that doing what is right for kids doesn’t always lead to reelection or a contract extension. Today, most leaders don’t dare utter the words “transformation” or “accountability,” and school systems take a piecemeal approach or abandon any effort to improve instructional quality because it is easier on adults. Never mind that honest-to-God transformation of our school systems is exactly what students need. 

In Houston, we’ve embraced transformational change with our New Education System model.  What sets it apart from many previous reforms is its wholesale systemic approach. Unlike piecemeal reforms that often falter due to a lack of coherence and sustained focus, NES aims to build a new system from the ground up, ensuring that all components work in unison toward the same goals.

In particular, it changes how students are taught and how we approach training and professional development for educators. The model combines instruction with real-time feedback through mini-assessments, ensuring that students who are behind get the extra help they need. At the same time, those who are ahead are continually challenged with multi-disciplinary projects that focus on writing over multiple-choice questions. This allows students to demonstrate critical and creative thinking. 

Effective teaching is at the core. The district has invested heavily in training principals to be instructional leaders. They conduct spot observations to better understand how to support teachers and then coach them to help improve their instruction. A new, rigorous evaluation system for principals gauges how well they achieve these goals. 

We have also established leadership academies to train and develop aspiring teachers and principals. This is essential as we work to tackle a shortage of educators. The district hopes to have at least 70 graduates from the Principal Leadership Academy by May 2025.

In addition, NES provides instruction that helps equip young people with the knowledge and skills they will need in a rapidly evolving job market and world. Amid advancements in artificial intelligence and shifts in the economy, we are expanding our offerings of electives with a particular focus on AI. One semester-long course for 11th and 12th graders provides an introduction to generative AI and how to use it safely and ethically. In addition, the district has launched a FutureReady Cohort that trains 200 school staffers on how to use the technology and begin integrating it into lesson plans. For instance, a teacher might explain a couple of methods to solve a math problem to a high school class, then use generative AI to present additional approaches to prompt a discussion.

We also want to impart and foster critical thinking skills, as these are and will continue to be essential for millions of jobs. The district has introduced a curriculum known as the Art of Thinking at all NES schools. It includes lessons on how to combine facts with logic, understand bias and correlation, and devise questions that could be asked in specific scenarios. 

After just one year of implementing NES at an initial set of 85 schools, the district has seen significant achievement gains. In grades 4 and 6, students at these schools improved their reading scores by 8 and 10 percentage points, respectively, while high schoolers jumped 10 points in algebra and 7 in English.

Coalition for Advancing Student Excellence Houston called these gains unprecedented.

Because our professional development and focus on better instruction extends to all schools, our districtwide transformation efforts have had effects even outside the NES model. Across the district, preliminary state accountability data shows that the number of A- and B-rated schools increased by 82%, from 93 in 2023 to 170 in 2024. Meanwhile, the number of NES schools achieving an A or B rating skyrocketed 480%, from 11 in 2023 to 53 in 2024, and the number earning a D or F declined from 121 to only 41 during that time period.

None of this has been easy. Even when everyone in a community knows things must improve, systemic change can trigger fierce pushback. But no matter how hard it is, students deserve a quality public education. It is up to superintendents, school board members and elected leaders who have a say over education to deliver it. District leaders can’t afford to abandon large-scale reform to the past. In Houston, we are seeing incredible results. We hope other districts will find inspiration to pick up the tools of transformation and join us.

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