An unusually high share of teachers left Houston ISD over the summer, but new data from the district show educators who received low evaluations drove a large share of the exodus.

About 83 percent of HISD teachers rated “proficient” or higher on the district’s formal evaluation tool stayed with HISD, while 51 percent of those rated “developing” or “improvement needed” left this summer, according to data shared by the district Thursday.

Roughly 2,700 teachers left the district in June and July, equivalent to about a quarter of the district’s 2023-24 teaching force, district officials said. About 950 other teachers resigned during the school year.

The numbers suggest the hard-charging approach of state-appointed HISD Superintendent Mike Miles, who has repeatedly told teachers they can leave the district if they don’t agree with his methods, may be playing out as he intended: Keeping top-performing instructors in classrooms while pushing out less-effective ones. 

“Over time, what you’d like to see is your more effective teachers retained and your less effective teachers are the ones who leave,” Miles said Thursday during a school board meeting. “Over time, you’ll see a more and more effective teaching force in HISD.”

However, the district’s largest employee union and other Miles critics argue the evaluations don’t accurately measure teacher quality. They said Miles made several changes to HISD’s rating tool — a local version of the Texas Teacher Evaluation and Support System, or T-TESS — that reward formulaic teaching styles and punish teachers who use less-structured methods, such as class discussions.

“I think it’s the military mindset, like everybody has to be exactly the same all the time, but that’s not how kids learn and that’s not what good teaching is,” DeBakey High School for Health Professionals physics teacher MinhDan Tran said.

HISD administrators rated 60 percent of the district’s teachers “proficient,” “accomplished” or “distinguished” in 2023-24. About 18 percent received scores of “developing” or “improvement needed.” Another 22 percent were not appraised, largely because most teachers were allowed to opt out of an evaluation in Miles’ first year leading the district. 

The district data also showed that teachers who were not yet certified tended to perform worse on an internal rating tool than their fully licensed colleagues. Roughly 42 percent scored proficient or higher, compared to 66 percent of certified teachers.

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‘It’s a choice to work here’: HISD superintendent tells resistant staff they can leave

by Asher Lehrer-Small / Staff Writer

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HISD board member Angela Flowers, who is a longtime educator, honed in on high-performing teachers who left the district, suggesting that Miles seek information on their decision to leave.

“We love the (retention) trend, but still it looks like there could be 100 to 200 great teachers that we lost,” Flowers said. “Is there a way to get exit survey data, especially from our high performers?”

In recent years, the emphasis on teacher retention by evaluation rating has been a point of emphasis in Dallas ISD, where Miles rolled out policies tying teacher pay to performance scores during his tenure as superintendent from 2012 to 2015. In recent years, Dallas ISD has boasted in district presentations and communications that it has retained over 90 percent of its most effective teachers.

HISD administrators publicly posted similar data up until 2022, though it was not a significant part of the district’s academic strategy. Under those evaluation systems, about 90 percent of teachers were rated “effective” or “highly effective.”

Asher Lehrer-Small covers Houston ISD for the Landing. Reach him at asher@houstonlanding.org.

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