Controversial New Education System
NES Sparks Concern in Houston Public Schools
In the article featured in the Winter 2023-2024 edition of Rethinking Schools, titled “The Takeover of Houston Public Schools,” Larry Miller reported on the Texas state legislature taking control of Houston’s Independent School District (ISD) through its Texas Education Agency. State officials chose to dissolve the elected school board, appointing Mike Miles, a person with no relevant experience or degrees in education, as the new superintendent. Miles’s actions as superintendent call for the reassignment of school libraries into detention centers, termination of teachers, and elimination of special education services. Miles’s vision has been to introduce the New Education System (NES), a program he created, to the district.
NES looks to reshape K-12 education, utilizing a contemporary staffing model that allows teachers to focus on their core subjects with wages varying. Teachers and parents have voiced concerns about this program, believing it to be damaging to special education and misaligned with the requirements of Individualized Education Programs (IEP) that are designed to provide learning accommodations for students with disabilities. Protests have broken out in response to NES, resulting in library closures. Based on previous schools where Miles implemented NES, there’s no real evidence that these reforms are beneficial for students or the education systems that are supposed to serve them.
The implementation of NES has begun in 28 schools so far, with 57 additional schools expected to align with the program by the end of this school year. With this implementation, 130 teachers resigned districtwide during the first month. The district targeted by the program has around 90 percent students of color, including 67 percent Latino and 22 percent black. A well-respected teacher of 43 years in the district, Nelva Williamson, expressed concerns for students as “children are already bored and frustrated. We know the best way to educate children, and that has nothing to do with what [Miles] is doing.”
Williamson is also concerned for students whose special education is disrupted. It is noted that special education students are not being instructed on the basis of their IEPs. According to Williamson, “If a 504 student or a special ed student is having difficulty learning, they might be pulled out of the classroom and sent to the detention room to view the classroom virtually with the assistance of a TA, not a certified teacher.”
The nation’s most prestigious news outlets have covered what is happening in Houston’s public schools, but they have provided only minimal coverage of Superintendent Miles’s NES program. Local newspapers in the Houston area have done the only in-depth coverage of this issue. In contrast, corporate media coverage, including the Washington Post, glosses over the NES as “military style” curriculum, due to Miles’s military background.
Although this coverage exposes some of the wrongdoing, schools are not the military and the coverage is not enough. The specific details of the New Education System curriculum are essential to the story. As Larry Miller’s report for Rethinking Schools highlights, NES was not implemented to improve students’ learning experiences, but to improve their standardized test scores and the overall image of Houston’s public schools.
Miller backs these claims with statistics that document injustices in the New Education System. The ability to amplify the voices of the teachers and parents who are fighting for their kids can only extend so far based on local news coverage. Corporate media coverage could help this cause by shining a light on the teachers, students, and parents who oppose the New Education System and seek constructive changes in Houston’s public schools.
Source: Larry Miller, “The Takeover of Houston Public Schools,” Rethinking Schools, Winter 2023-2024.
Student Researchers: Lucas Chamberlin, Ryan Hunt, and Chloe Venuk (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Faculty Evaluator: Allison Butler (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Printed with permission from Project Censored
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