Houston's largest school district is claiming a major victory under state management, pointing to the first round of STAAR results that it says show measurable improvement since the controversial takeover. But the numbers have quickly become a flashpoint, with the district celebrating progress and the teachers union arguing the gains are not what they appear to be.
The STAAR results have shown some improvement since the state took over the Houston Independent School District back in 2023. Superintendent Mike Miles, who sat down to discuss the figures, said students are now above the state average on 13 of 20 exams. He framed the results as encouraging but unfinished, stressing that the work is far from over and that the priority remains getting children reading at grade level.
We're trying to get kids at grade-level reading, Miles said, arguing that the skill will matter far more to students after graduation than where they stood while still approaching it. He pledged that the district would celebrate the progress briefly before getting right back to work, noting that there are still many children who need help.
The single-year data, however, was not uniformly positive. The district's STAAR scores showed a drop in third-grade and seventh-grade math. Miles attributed the seventh-grade decline to the fact that only 58% of students took that test, explaining that the rest had been accelerated to the eighth-grade algebra exam, which he said skewed the comparison.
Jackie Anderson, president of the Houston teachers union, pushed back on the district's interpretation. She believes the results are skewed mainly because some lower-performing students were not allowed to take certain tests that they would have taken under a previous administration, tests she said do not factor into college entry in the first place.
Anderson also voiced a deeper worry that, since the state takeover, students are being taught how to take a test rather than truly retaining knowledge they will need after graduation. The debate unfolds with a deadline in sight: the STAAR exams are set to be replaced in the 2027-2028 school year with three separate tests given at the beginning, middle and end of the year, leaving just one more year of the current exam.