The Texas Education Agency last year launched plans to take over four school districts due to low academic performance, confiscating decision-making power from elected leaders based on state-issued F grades at six campuses.
All six “trigger” schools share notable similarities.
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Between 80% and 97% of their students live in low-income households, far above the state average of 60%.
Black and Hispanic children make up the dominant majority of the student populations, from 88% at Marilyn Miller Language Academy near Lake Worth to almost every child at Fehl-Price Elementary School in Beaumont.
And nearly half of students at each school are on the fringes of dropping out — including 64% to 92% of kids on five of the six campuses.
Texas’ 2015 school accountability law places a momentous decision in the hands of the state’s education commissioner. When at least one school receives an F for five years in a row, the commissioner must order the campus closed or initiate a state takeover of the entire district, replacing elected school board members with leaders of the education chief’s choosing.
Commissioner Mike Morath, in his decade as leader of the Texas Education Agency, has ordered two campuses closed: Snyder Junior High and Travis Elementary, both in West Texas. Snyder Junior High, located in the Snyder Independent School District, has since reopened using a new academic framework. The Midland Independent School District partnered with a charter school operator to overhaul Travis Elementary.
Over the same 10-year span, Morath ordered seven district takeovers based on academic performance, concluding that school leaders consistently demonstrated an inability to govern effectively and stood in the way of kids reaching their full potential.
But critics of the accountability system say state takeovers penalize districts based on factors beyond their control. Schools alone cannot solve inequality tied to race and poverty. Yet that inequality, critics say, helps explain why many of the takeover trigger schools in Texas share nearly identical characteristics.
“Not everybody gets a hot breakfast and Mom taking them to school or putting them on the bus and giving them a kiss on the cheek,” said Jill Bottelberghe, superintendent of the Connally Independent School District.
Morath last year announced his intention to appoint superintendents and replace the school boards of the Fort Worth, Beaumont, Connally, and Lake Worth districts due to five consecutive F grades at six campuses. The Beaumont and Connally districts each had two schools that met the takeover threshold.
Morath said the districts’ inability “to implement effective changes to improve the performance of students” justified his decision. He also cited elevated percentages of children not meeting grade-level expectations across each district, not just at the trigger campuses.
In Fort Worth’s case — the second-largest takeover in state history, barring an appeal — Morath pointed out that districts of similar size and demographics had found ways to produce stronger academic results.
Texas’ accountability system measures school performance on an A-F scale. Based largely on the state’s unpopular, soon-to-be-replaced standardized exam, ratings are intended to measure how well students learn, how students progress academically through the school year, and how schools perform compared to campuses with similar percentages of low-income students.
An F means at least 65% of children at the school tested below grade level.
“Getting an F is really, really hard to do in our system,” said Iris Tian, deputy commissioner of analytics, assessment and reporting for the Texas Education Agency. “For a campus to have gotten an F five years in a row, it is a disaster — it is truly an emergency.”
Low-income schools, including those educating mostly Black and Hispanic students, can thrive in Texas’ A-F system. In the most recent ratings, 382 out of 3,203 high-poverty campuses, or 12%, earned an A, according to a Texas Tribune analysis.
But those campuses were the exception. Schools with high poverty were the least likely to earn an A and the most likely to receive Ds and Fs. Compared to low-poverty schools, those campuses were more than 30 times as likely to receive a D or F.
Similar disparities exist when factoring in race and ethnicity. Majority-Black schools were more than four times as likely as majority-white schools to receive a D or F, while majority-Hispanic schools were more than twice as likely.
Critics of the system argue that the state punishes schools without holding itself accountable, particularly when it comes to providing resources for a public education system that serves 5.5 million children — most of whom are Hispanic and Black and come from low-income households.
Research points to several strategies for improving outcomes for Black and Hispanic children, including adequately funding schools, eliminating punitive discipline, diversifying educators and providing culturally relevant instruction.
In Texas, however, schools spent six years without an increase in the state money they typically devote to salaries and operations, before the Legislature passed a comprehensive finance bill in 2025. The state has made it easier for schools to suspend children. Districts can no longer factor race or sex into hiring decisions. And teachers are restricted in how they can talk about race and gender in the classroom.
Texas also fails to address educational inequality when it focuses attention on testing outcomes at the expense of other in-school factors that impede the academic progress of Black and Hispanic students, said Andrew Hairston, a civil rights attorney who directs the Education Justice Project at Texas Appleseed, an advocacy organization.
Students of color, for example, have faced discipline because their hairstyles violated the dress code. Some have sat through lessons that downplay their history. Others have reported incidents of explicit racism.
“What good is it to have moderately improved reading levels that come from a state takeover when the children are being called the N-word every day and cannot have a peaceful environment in which they learn and seek to grow?” Hairston said.
Hairston expressed frustration that the accountability system also does not consider the lingering effects of residential segregation, community resistance to integration, or cuts to federal and state resources. That means, he said, Texas is not adequately measuring schools’ ability to deliver holistic educational services to the students who need them most.
The best school leaders and education reform efforts take those societal factors into account, said Bob Sanborn, president and CEO of Children at Risk, a research and advocacy organization focused on poverty and inequality.
When that doesn’t happen, he said, students in need of the most help can end up worse off.
“If we want our children to be successful in Texas, we have to pay attention to those districts where parents aren’t making as much money, where there’s lower levels of educational attainment,” Sanborn said. “That often translates into immigrant communities, Black and brown communities, and I think people don’t like to talk about that in Texas.”
“Meeting the needs of all students”
The Texas Education Agency insists the A-F system helps districts improve outcomes by “accurately and fairly evaluating school performance.”
“Inequality cannot be addressed by hiding outcomes, but instead, must be addressed by improving them,” agency spokesperson Jake Kobersky said in a statement. “Our state’s legal framework ensures that school leaders remain focused on meeting the needs of all students, regardless of their background.”
In recent letters to school leaders announcing the state’s intention to intervene in their districts, Morath said unacceptable performance in a single year represents a “significant academic weakness.” When it continues for multiple years, he wrote, “the children in those campuses develop significant academic gaps.”
“We clearly have a school system that has prevented children from getting the education to which they are morally entitled,” Morath said last year at the University of Texas, where he spoke about the academic takeover in Fort Worth. “What do you do when you have a situation where our locally elected school board has, for really over a decade, been sort of incapable, for whatever reason — sins of omission, sins of commission — of giving kids a shot at success in America?”
Bottelberghe, superintendent of the Connally school district, understands why the commissioner often attributes school struggles to governance, saying district leaders in her community did not adequately respond to students’ academic shortcomings prior to her appointment in 2023.
But Bottelberghe also feels state leaders do not fully understand how factors outside of school can hinder academic performance. The state’s accountability system gives schools some grace by taking into account socioeconomic makeup and measuring academic growth beyond just kids’ mastery of content, but she doesn’t think the system goes far enough.
Bottelberghe’s Waco-area district includes students who have to wake themselves up in the morning because their parents cannot, athletes who rely on coaches for rides because buses don’t run early enough, and children who don’t always know where they’re going to lay their head at night.
“It’s very unfortunate that we have so many kids that are in that situation,” Bottelberghe said. “I think people lose sight.”
Tian of the Texas Education Agency acknowledges that academics are not the only important factor in education.
But one of the primary goals of the accountability system, she said, is to direct attention to where children need academic support. Schools can have strong internal cultures and positive relationships with their communities, but if they lack rigorous quality instruction, Tian said, “kids are not going to be where they need to be.”
“Really, all the intervention is, is like, ‘Let’s try something new because what we’ve been doing for the past few years has not been working.’ These kids are not getting what they deserve. And we have to do something different,” Tian said.
“We felt alone”
State takeovers can severely disrupt community morale, said Kevin Jackson, who provides behavioral support to children at the Disciplinary Alternative Education Program in Beaumont.
More than a decade before the state announced plans to replace its school leaders for academic reasons, the Beaumont district was taken over due to concerns about its financial practices. Jackson, a 25-year veteran of the district and president of the Beaumont Teachers Association, said the previous intervention left educators and students feeling punished for acts they weren’t responsible for.
“We felt alone,” Jackson said. “We felt like we were put on an island out there by ourselves, because you remove the people that we elected to work with us and protect us and help us create a better district. You removed all of the board and everyone from their positions, and you brought in your own people. And as a result, that didn’t look well, because the people that you brought in weren’t familiar with this area. I don’t believe you were really tuned in to what was really going on here in Beaumont.”
The education agency and supporters of the accountability system often cite the Houston Independent School District as an example of what takeovers can accomplish. Texas’ largest school district educates a population of mostly Black and Hispanic children, while roughly 80% of students come from low-income households.
Since the state takeover in 2023, the Houston school district has seen drastic improvements in test scores. Last school year, it had no F-rated campuses — down significantly from 56 underperforming campuses before the intervention.
But critics say the takeover also serves as an example of what can happen when leaders emphasize testing metrics over the broader school climate.
Teachers and students have left in droves. District leaders have struggled to earn trust, as evidenced by 58% of 450,000 voters opposing a historic $4.4 billion bond package aimed at improving school infrastructure. Some Houston residents are skeptical about whether short-term academic success on standardized exams will lead to sustained progress in the years to come.
Education research on school takeovers nationwide offers a wider glimpse at the potential impact on students:
- Takeovers across the U.S. are more likely to occur in districts where students of color and low-income children constitute a majority of the schools’ populations.
- Takeovers tend to increase per-student spending and some measures of schools’ financial health.
- Takeovers have demonstrated more positive academic effects on districts with large concentrations of Hispanic students but have affected Black students more neutrally or even negatively.
- Takeovers, on average, do not improve test scores.
The Texas Education Agency says comparing academic performance before and after takeovers shows improved governance and higher test scores in nearly all state-operated districts, defying the national trend.
Beth Schueler, an education professor and researcher at Stanford University, said it’s also important to evaluate simultaneous trends in similarly sized districts not under state control, providing a more reliable measure of a takeover’s impact.
Still, Schueler noted, conversations about how to best serve the most vulnerable children are common nationwide, with broad agreement that education must focus on what’s best for children before opinions differ on which policies can best make that happen.
The presence of so many societal constraints leaves an important question for state leaders and local educators: What are reasonable expectations for schools?
“I don’t think we want to lose sight of the fact that the demographic composition of a school system is the thing that’s going to be the most predictive of variation in performance and outcomes,” Schueler said.
“But I do think there’s room for education systems to make a difference, because we’ve seen that they can make a difference,” she added. “There’s limits to what they can do, and I think that’s important context. But it’s not as though we should give up, I think, on trying to make more effective education policy.”
Alex Nguyen contributed to this story.
Disclosure: Texas Appleseed and Texas State Teachers Association have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.