Houston ISD Maintains B Rating for Second Consecutive Year in 2025-26
Houston Independent School District (HISD) has retained its B rating for the 2025-26 school year, marking the second consecutive year at this level since the Texas state takeover in 2023. Wheatley High School, a focal point of the takeover, achieved its first A rating. The district saw an increase in A/B-rated schools but also reported five failing schools, up from zero the previous year. State-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles remains cautiously optimistic, while the Texas Education Agency has extended the takeover until at least June 1, 2027.
Houston Independent School District (HISD) has maintained a B rating for the second consecutive year in the 2025-26 accountability cycle, three years after the state of Texas assumed control. The district's back-to-back B ratings follow a string of C ratings in prior years, according to the Texas Education Agency (TEA) statewide accountability ratings released Thursday.
Wheatley High School, which played a pivotal role in triggering the state's 2023 takeover of its largest district after receiving seven consecutive F ratings, has now earned an A rating for the first time. The school's improvement has been steady under state control, having received a D in 2023 and a B by 2024.
Trey Serna, spokesman for HISD, characterized the gains as "significant" on Thursday.
The district now has 205 schools rated A or B in 2025-26, up from 197 in 2024-25. However, the number of schools rated D or F has dropped from 120 at the start of the takeover to 13 in the last year, according to Serna. Notably, the state also reported five failing schools for the district, up from zero F-rated schools last year.
The state graded Houston ISD's progress on closing achievement gaps for its highest and lowest-performing students at a B, with a slight dip from 85 to 84 on the district's score for that benchmark in 2025-26 compared to the prior year.
Houston ISD's takeover by Texas remains one of the boldest—and initially politically controversial—takeovers in the nation. Its turnaround has consistently sparked discussion over school improvement strategies, community buy-in, and the benefits and pitfalls of local control versus state direction.
A key feature of Houston's takeover is its New Education System (NES) schools, which are targeted by the district for wholesale, systemic reform rather than incremental changes, as sometimes seen in other state takeovers across the U.S. NES schools include:
- An innovative staffing model.
- Consistent high-quality instruction.
- Higher salaries and differentiated compensation based on subject and teacher evaluations.
- A specific instructional program with extra resources and support, including critical thinking and problem-solving courses.
- Specialty classes taught by community members in addition to elective courses, such as fitness, music and fine arts, 21st century media and technology, and hands-on science.
- Free field trips for middle school students.
Within about a year of the district's takeover, testing scores from students attending NES schools were almost double the score of the average district student. The district started with a little over 80 NES schools and increased the number to 130 by 2024-25. Wheatley is one of those schools.
"For me, the NES system added the structure and the resources that we need," said Wheatley Assistant Principal James Johnson in a video released by the district this week. Buy-in from the community, including both students and families, was key, he said. "Because I truly feel that you can't truly have a transformation without it being a community uptake."
State-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles has been cautiously optimistic about Houston's improvement for years, acknowledging for the first time in 2025 that the district was trending upward after multiple benchmarks pointed in that direction. In 2024, he foreshadowed that if the positive trend continued, HISD could exit state intervention sooner and transition into an elected board in a few years.
However, in 2025, TEA announced it was extending the district's takeover until at least June 1, 2027, despite the track record of improvement. "With the changes made in the last two years, Houston ISD is well on its way to being a district where all of its schools provide students with the educational opportunities that will allow them to access the American Dream," Mike Morath, Texas education commissioner, said of the decision to extend the takeover. "Ultimately, two years has not been enough time to fix district systems that were broken for decades."
Following initially contentious attitudes toward Houston ISD's takeover, some 90% of families reported viewing the school district favorably in a winter 2025-26 survey that received a 26% response rate.
As Houston looks toward a potential exit date, however, other Texas districts remain on the brink of entering a takeover or are already doing so—a possibility other school systems face nationwide amid ongoing COVID-19 recovery and budget challenges. Austin Independent School District, for example, is at risk of takeover after two of its schools recently received their fifth consecutive F ratings. And Fort Worth ISD will begin its first full school year under state control in 2026-27.