Houston Independent School District’s (HISD) superintendent, Mike Miles, announced that the district will no longer use its principal proficiency ratings to decide whether principals will retain their jobs in the coming school year. The reversal of the earlier directive came after hours-long meetings with both community members and the district’s Board of Managers.
What does “adverse employment decisions” mean?
It simply means that Miles reversed an earlier decision to use the proficiency screening process that put principals at risk of losing their jobs.
Way past midnight last week, following a four-hour meeting with board managers, Miles announced that he would reverse the decision he had defended earlier this month — that the proficiency screening process will not be used to fire principals.
The reversal came on the heels of community members’ public outcry. They also sent a legal memo to HISD’s board of managers and the Texas Education Agency, which said that the principal screening process violates state law because it did not get prior approval from the board and was not in place before the start of the 2023-24 school year. There were also concerns that several well-respected principals in their respected schools risked losing their jobs. More than 150 people registered to speak during last Thursday’s board meeting, after which Miles made the new announcement.
Several community members opined that Ramon Moss, the native Houstonian who has been the president of Carnegie Vanguard High School for more than two decades, built the magnet school that ranked 35th among the best public high schools in the country and the fifth best in Texas by the U.S. News and World Report.
“The board and I both together listen to comments from the community and we came up with a sensible way to move forward,” Miles said. “The board has a big role in responding to the community, and we work as a team of 10 to make sure that we’re responding in a way that makes sense and will settle everybody’s concern and help us continue to do our job, which is to focus on the quality of instruction and do good things for kids.”
Miles continued to defend the need for a “rigorous” evaluation system for teachers with the district providing data throughout the year for instructional achievement, quality of education, action plans, and special education.
“The Superintendent will continue to use instructional data and student achievement data in the exercise of the discretion outlined in board policy DNB (LOCAL): When relevant to the decision, written evaluations of a professional employee’s performance, as documented to date, and any other information the administration determines to be appropriate shall be considered in decisions affecting contract status,” read the statement from Miles.
The proficiency screening for principals operated on similar factors:
- Student achievement outcomes on tests such as the STAAR, DIBELS, NWEA, and AP exams,
- Principal performance, including assessments on the quality of instruction in the school by an independent review of the instruction in a school and the principal’s score on the Executive Leadership Rubric and on the School Systems Review (not applicable in the 2023-2024 school year),
- School climate and culture survey twice a year, and
- A school action plan.
What happened before Miles reversed his decision?
Before Spring Break, HISD told 117 principals representing 40% of the district’s campus leaders that they needed to improve their performance. This warning stemmed from HISD’s mid-year principal proficiency screenings.
The principals, some of whom led high and low-performing schools and were well-known in their communities, were required to take a second assessment in spring and perform better to retain their jobs next year.
Those who did not receive a “proficient I” rating or higher not only had to go through a second screening but also be assessed by district evaluators. Depending on these factors, principals would keep their jobs or be removed as leaders from the school district. The results will be announced on May 1.
Among the 274 principals, 125 principals were rated proficient or higher, which means they were having a “winning season,” in Miles’ words and the 117 others were progressing.
HISD follows an evaluation process that uses a target distribution of ratings, which essentially means that the bottom 10% of principals with an “unsatisfactory” rating will not have their contracts renewed for the 2024-25 school year. Another 22% of principals will be placed on the second last section and may have a chance to keep their jobs, depending on their feeder pattern’s executive director or their division superintendent. The two categories combined make up 32% of principals who will not be considered proficient, according to the screening.
