Kashmere High School is now in its second year of following Houston Independent School District (HISD) Superintendent Mike Miles’ New Education System (NES) curriculum, which he implemented after the 2023 Texas Education Agency (TEA) takeover of the school district. Kashmere HS historically had low STAAR scores and was identified as one of the original 28 NES schools.
The NES curriculum relies on time-dependent instruction during classes and test-based evaluations. The system now has 130 schools—45 more than last year—under its umbrella. It follows a centralized schedule, pre-planned lessons, and quizzes. Teachers at NES schools also receive a higher salary than teachers at non-NES campuses.
Brandon Dickerson, now in his fourth year as the principal of Kashmere HS, says the school has been grappling with declining enrollment, chronic absenteeism, academic performance, and quality of instruction. He says the NES curriculum helped improve students’ test scores.
“The magic that happened here was instruction. We did have double-digit gains in English, Science, and Math,” Dickerson said. “And that was due to the instructional model we worked under last year. The model did help us address our instructional methodology…Where you come from, your economic status has nothing to do with our hunger to learn something.”
Enrollment
Declining enrollment has been an issue. This academic year, the school started with 638 students, down 87 from the prior year.
Out of these students, 97.6% (623) come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, 76.6% (489) are “at risk” of not meeting standards or dropping out of school per state-defined criteria, 26.2% (167) are emergent bilingual, and 17.2% (110) students receive special education (SPED). The school also has a minority-majority enrollment, with 50.8% of Black and 47.5% Hispanic/Latino students.
To address the declining enrollment, Dickerson said the school has undertaken several steps — Grads Within Reach walk, in which volunteers visit “chronically absent” students to check in on them, employing a truancy coordinator on campus, who meets with students during lunch to inquire about their absenteeism, a “Motivational Monday,” where students connect with counselors, and an incentive program called “Ram bucks,” where students are rewarded for academic performance, behavior, following rules, wearing proper uniforms and consistent class participation.
“When a student says, ‘I’m not motivated by anything,’ that’s data,” he said. “We wanna make certain that we give resources to those kids that are in need to understand the mistake you made is not the life you have to live. We gonna do our part to, at some point, get you off probation. But when you get off, you have a direction to go forward and not go backward.”
Did the NES curriculum result in higher test scores?
Originally, the TEA rated the schools until 2019. Due to COVID-19 in 2020 and a Declared State of Disaster in 2021, schools were not rated. In 2022, TEA rated Kashmere HS a “C” but in 2023, TEitA did not publish its ratings when several districts filed a lawsuit against the agency. As a result, HISD created its own accountability rating system, which reflected improvements in several schools. “A” and “B” rated schools increased by 82%, from 93 in 2023 to 170 in 2024, while “D” and “F” rated schools fell by nearly two-thirds, from 121 schools in 2023 to 41 in 2024. In the latest ratings, 53 NES campuses received an “A” or “B” rating.
Kashmere’s overall rating improved from a “C” (TEA’s ratings) to a “B” (HISD’s ratings). However, student performance (STAAR test scores, college readiness, and graduation rates) and ‘closing the gaps’ are at a “C,” while school progress (academic growth) is at a “B.”
“We will focus on instruction on grade level, pushing kids beyond, giving kids opportunities with differentiation,” Dickerson said. “That’s been one of the biggest misconceptions in education. This is my 25th year [at HISD], and I can assure you I’ve seen a change in a shift in the way our academics are addressed through this leadership.”
Dickerson attributed the improvement in scores to the LSAE (Learner, Securing, Accelerated, Enriched) model under the NES curriculum. This model entails instruction and assignments for third through twelfth-grade students. The 90-minute classes begin with Learning Objectives and are broken down into the following:
- 40-45 minutes of instruction using “Multiple Response Strategies (MRS)”: These are aimed at keeping “students actively reading, writing, discussing, and participating throughout the lesson.” During this time, principals and assistant principals visit classrooms to observe the classes while administrators provide coaching and additional support to teachers, according to HISD. While timers dictate the progress, teachers ask students to read their answers out loud or conduct table talks.
- 10 minutes of Demonstration of Learning (DOL) or mini quiz: Students are scored on these quizzes.
- 35 minutes of follow-up teaching: Those who master the DOL proceed to “team centers” to practice more advanced exercises supervised by learning coaches. The team centers were previously HISD libraries. Those who could not master the DOL remain in the classroom for a “second teach,” where teachers review concepts the students need to grasp.
“It’s just like building muscle. Once you’ve done it, you keep working out, you get better at it over time and how they’re used to it,” Dickerson said. “Once they see the results, and we’re celebrating them, it’s water under the bridge.”
Teachers also use the professional learning communities (PLCs) model to plan “backward,” analyzing DOL data from both blocks of students. The PLC then adjusts the instruction for the next group. The PLC is also a key aspect of teacher performance evaluations.
How the community perceives the NES curriculum
HISD parents and teachers have been vocally critical of the NES curriculum through protests and speeches at board meetings. They cite rigorous student and teacher evaluations, frequent changes in schools’ leadership, and the closure of libraries as the most pertinent issues the district faces today.
PARENT – Liz Silva, a parent of two students at an NES school
“Sounds good on paper” is how she describes the curriculum.
“Their [HISD] current practices harm students by prioritizing standardized testing, neglecting individual needs, and failing to foster holistic development,” Silva said. “One significant issue is the lack of individual individualized support. NES schools rely on district-wide, one-size-fits-all worksheet packets that disregard the diverse needs of our students and schools.”
During a press conference, Silva highlighted students’ inability to cope with academic pressures and the needs of Gifted and Talented students not being met. She said her child, a student at an NES elementary school, has to frequent his school’s team center only to be “met with more packets, larger packets.”
“He’s frustrated and bored,” Silva said. “NES schools place an overemphasis on testing and performance metrics. This shifts the focus away from our students in meaningful learning, creativity, critical thinking and emotional development are sidelined to produce data-driven results…I would guess most parents care more about their students’ love for learning than their STAAR or MAP scores.”
Silva has observed that students and educators at NES schools are “burnt out from the worksheets.”
TEACHER
A teacher at an NES high school, who spoke with the Defender on the condition of anonymity, said the slides that the teachers have to teach from in class have “lots of mistakes.”
The teacher added the slides and assignments do not always align with the curriculum.
“What happens is they’re not mapped directly to the content or the objective they’re supposed to be tested on,” the teacher said. “There are times when the teachers have to change the slides in order to fit the learning of the DOLs every day.”
The teacher also observed how their students experience frustration when their time runs out while finishing their assignments.
Also, teachers must complete every slide given to them within 90 minutes, the source said.
“You have to fit all of that information into, even if it’s additional information into the slides, you have to do it within a 45-minute period because you get demerits or you get marked down for your score if you don’t do that within the time period,” the teacher said. “If you don’t get through all of your slides, that’s a bad score for the teacher.”
This, along with the evaluation process, creates “anxieties” for teachers, per the teacher, as they correlate directly with the money they receive. Even if a student does not understand a concept, there is no extra time to explain it to them. If they exceed the time, they are marked down as well. “And that’s when we get frustration from the kids because sometimes they don’t understand, and they need more teacher instruction as opposed to peer instruction,” they said.
The teacher also witnessed teachers getting panic and anxiety attacks during school hours and complained of high blood pressure owing to the stress of the evaluation process.
“When you start questioning things, that’s when you start seeing teachers and principals and administrators getting fired,” the teacher told the Defender. “When you see the principals that are abruptly removed from campuses, they’ve spoken up to say, ‘Hey, this is not working. We don’t see that this is valuable. We have another way of doing it.’ And if it doesn’t align with the NES model, those people [HISD] pretty much oust it.”
Test scores
While Kashmere HS seems to have improved its performance in the STAAR end-of-course (EOC) under the NES curriculum for spring 2024, it is yet to be at par with district and state scores.
Biology
- In Biology, 42% of the students met the grade-level standard in the spring 2024 STAAR EOC.
Algebra I
- In Algebra I, 16% of the students met the grade-level standard.
English I
- In English I, 33% of the students met the grade-level standard.
English II
- In English II, 32% of the students met the grade-level standard.
U.S. History
- In U.S. History, 44% of the students met the grade-level standard.
