The planned takeovers underscore a fundamental disagreement in education policy: whether chronically low test scores signal leadership failure or whether they primarily reflect broader factors like poverty and residential segregation beyond schools’ control.
The Texas Education Agency announced plans to take over four school districts and replace their elected school boards with state-appointed leaders, citing five consecutive years of failing grades at six campuses. The districts — Fort Worth, Beaumont, Connally, and Lake Worth — serve predominantly low-income Black and Hispanic students in circumstances that critics say reflect systemic inequity schools cannot solve alone.
Commissioner Mike 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.
The schools at the center of the takeover
All six trigger schools share notable similarities. 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 88% to almost 100% of the student populations at each school, from Marilyn Miller Language Academy near Lake Worth to Fehl-Price Elementary School in Beaumont.
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.
An F grade on Texas’ A-F accountability scale means at least 65% of children 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.”
Accountability disparities by poverty and race
Low-income schools, including those educating mostly Black and Hispanic students, can and do thrive in Texas’ A-F system. In the most recent ratings, 382 out of 3,203 high-poverty campuses, or 12%, earned an A. Yet these successes are exceptions. High-poverty schools are more than 30 times as likely as low-poverty schools 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.
The debate over state intervention
Over the past decade, Morath has ordered two campuses closed and seven district takeovers based on academic performance. 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,” said Jill Bottelberghe, superintendent of the Connally Independent School District.
Andrew Hairston, a civil rights attorney who directs the Education Justice Project at Texas Appleseed, said the state accountability system does not adequately measure schools’ ability to deliver holistic educational services to the students who need them most. He pointed to concurrent policy decisions that work against the system’s stated goals.
Schools spent six years without an increase in state money 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. Teachers are restricted in how they can talk about race and gender in the classroom.
“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.
State takeovers in practice: Evidence and implications
The Texas Education Agency and supporters of the accountability system often cite 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, Houston has seen significant improvements in test scores. Last school year, it had no F-rated campuses — down significantly from 56 underperforming campuses before the intervention.
Yet critics say the takeover also shows what can happen when leaders emphasize testing metrics over 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.
Education research on school takeovers across the U.S. offers a more complicated picture. Takeovers are more likely to occur in districts where students of color and low-income children constitute a majority of the schools’ populations. They have demonstrated more positive academic effects on districts with large concentrations of Hispanic students but have affected Black students more neutrally or even negatively. And 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 is important to evaluate simultaneous trends in similarly sized districts not under state control to provide a more reliable measure of a takeover’s impact.
Still, broad agreement exists that education must focus on what is 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 when the demographic composition of a school system is the thing most predictive of variation in performance?
“I do think there’s room for education systems to make a difference, because we’ve seen that they can make a difference,” Schueler said. “There’s limits to what they can do, and I think that’s important context.”