Houston Independent School District is holding steady at a B for a second consecutive year, three years after its takeover by the state of Texas. The district's second B in two years follows a string of C ratings in previous years, according to Texas Education Agency statewide accountability ratings released Thursday.
Wheatley High School — which partially set in motion the state's 2023 takeover of its largest district after the school received seven consecutive Fs — also received an A rating for the first time.
The A rating for the high school follows several years of steady improvement under the state's control, with the school earning a D in 2023 and a B by 2024.
Trey Serna, spokesman for HISD, characterized the gains as “significant” on Thursday.
The district has 205 A and B-rated schools in 2025-26 overall, up from 197 in 2024-25.
The number of schools rated D or F also fell from 120 at the start of the takeover to 13 in the last year, said Serna. However, the state also reported five failing schools for the district, up from zero F-rated schools last year.
The state also graded Houston ISD’s progress on closing 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 when compared to the year prior.
Houston ISD’s takeover by Texas remains one of the boldest — and initially politically controversial — takeovers in the nation. Its turnaround has consistently triggered 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 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 off 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.
