Texas Governor Greg Abbott has forcibly taken over Fort Worth ISD. In October 2025, the Texas Education Agency officially booted Fort Worth’s democratically elected school board and replaced it with a state-appointed board of managers. Commissioner Mike Morath announced that the state would assume full control of the 70,000-student district, making it the second-largest takeover in Texas history after Houston ISD in 2023. According to The Texas Tribune, this marks the 11th state takeover of a Texas district since 2000 and the latest in a growing line of Republican Party interventions that target majority-Black and Latino school systems under the banner of accountability. In his letter to the district, Morath claimed that through “action and inaction,” the elected board had “failed the students of Fort Worth ISD,” citing that 20 of 144 campuses had been labeled “academically unacceptable” for multiple years. Yet the district’s overall “C” rating in Texas’ A–F accountability system, an “acceptable performance” grade under state definitions, suggests a selective reading of the evidence.

The pattern is familiar. The state seizes control, citing test scores, and promises reform through managerial efficiency. But the record tells a different story. Since the takeover of Houston ISD began, state officials have pointed to higher STAAR results as proof of success, while teachers and parents have described a system driven by fear, overtesting, and scripted sideshows. Under state-appointed superintendent Mike Miles, Houston has suffered extraordinary teacher turnover, declining enrollment, and the silencing of community voice. Now, Fort Worth, where three-quarters of students are economically disadvantaged and nearly 40 percent are bilingual or English learners, is next in line for the same experiment. Governor Abbott’s office praised the move as “a strong accountability measure.” But accountability without democracy is not accountability at all. What is unfolding in Texas is not reform. It is right wing political theater dressed in the language of student progress.

What the Policy Research Shows

From Louisiana to Tennessee to Michigan, every statewide district that Republican politicians once promised would deliver miracles has gone down in flames. The Center for Popular Democracy’s report, State Takeovers of Low-Performing Schools: A Record of Academic Failure, Financial Mismanagement & Student Harm (2016), concluded that “there is no clear evidence that takeover districts actually achieve their stated goals of radically improving performance at failing schools.” In Louisiana’s Recovery School District, the bar for a passing grade was quietly dropped from 87.4 of 200 points to 50 of 150 to create the illusion of progress. Half of all high-schoolers still failed their tests, and nearly half of the charter schools earned a D, F, or transitional rating. The supposed miracle was simply statistical manipulation.

Tennessee’s Achievement School District followed the same pattern. The state promised to move schools from the bottom five percent to the top 25 percent within five years. Instead, a Vanderbilt University study found that locally controlled Memphis “Innovation Zone” schools improved more than those under state control. Michigan’s Education Achievement Authority ended in even greater embarrassment. Within three years, student achievement fell, teacher turnover soared, and the chancellor admitted publicly that “achievement hasn’t improved.” Each of these efforts was celebrated as innovation but ended as failure. All of these state takeovers went down in history infamously, and no one mentions them anymore because they all failed. Louisiana, Tennessee, and Michigan are now case studies in political control and arrogance, not excellence. Their short-lived reforms left behind disruption, distrust, and damage.

What the Statistical Evidence Shows

In 2021, Beth E. Schueler of the University of Virginia and Joshua F. Bleiberg of Brown University published the most comprehensive national study ever conducted on state takeovers. The findings were unequivocal. Tracking student outcome data from every state takeover between 1988 and 2016, they concluded that “there is no evidence that takeover generates academic benefits, and there is some evidence that takeover negatively affects ELA achievement in the early years.” They found that districts targeted for takeover tend to serve high percentages of Black students, and that after takeover, communities lose local political power and representation.

Their recommendation was clear. State takeovers “should be used with extreme caution” and never as a first-line reform strategy. They also noted that there is still “limited evidence explaining why some takeovers might produce positive outcomes,” meaning that even the rare cases that appear successful do not hold up under closer scrutiny. In other words, the exceptions are mostly illusions. The national research consensus could not be stronger. State takeovers fail academically, socially, and politically.

Taken together, the independent peer-reviewed statistical evidence and the policy reports tell the same story. Takeovers are harmful in districts, most disruptive in communities of color, and least effective in generating sustained improvement. When state leaders seize control, they remove accountability rather than restore it. What follows is predictable: top-down management, data manipulation, and a widening gap between rhetoric and reality. Yet Texas insists on repeating the same cycle. The deeper question is why. Why, when the data are clear and the history undeniable, does Texas choose to relive a failed experiment?

The Return of the Texas Miracle

We have seen this Texas miracle before. When I analyzed a large urban district remarkably similar to Houston in my Stanford dissertation 20 years ago, the so-called “Texas Miracle” collapsed under scrutiny. What had been marketed as a story of equity turned out to be a story of Enron-style illusion. Practices such as pacing, selective enforcement, and strategic student exclusion produced what I called the illusion of progress. I suspect those same tactics have returned today under new names and new leadership.

Anyone who treats a headline score bump as proof of salvation without asking which mechanism produced it is being willfully naïve. Test score miracles are not educational transformations. They are management strategies disguised as success stories. The same patterns repeat wherever political pressure to show improvement outweighs the commitment to genuine learning.

The first pattern is teaching to the test. There is nothing wrong with aligning instruction to standards, but when alignment becomes item rehearsal, learning suffers. Teachers are pressured to drill students on specific question formats, pacing guides are rewritten to mirror test sequences, and entire semesters become practice sessions for test day. Scores rise quickly, but the knowledge is shallow. You can teach a test without teaching the subject. That is not reform; it is gaming the system.

The second pattern is denominator manipulation. Many districts do not lift their struggling students up; they simply remove them from the count. Low-performing students are retained, reclassified, or quietly counseled out. When fewer struggling students take the test, the average score goes up, but the community’s learning does not. The data may look better, yet the reality for excluded children grows worse. If test scores climb while attendance, graduation, and growth measures do not, the improvement is a mirage.

The third pattern is curricular narrowing. When administrators prioritize testing over teaching, whole subjects disappear. Social studies, art, and physical education are reduced or eliminated so that students can spend more time on reading and math practice tests. In some cases, districts even delay Algebra I or Biology so that cohorts will test in later years. As we’ve seen in Houston, books even disappear from Kindergarten. This narrowing of opportunity hides behind rising numbers. It is not progress; it is deprivation.

The Hidden History of Houston

I wish Linda McNeil, my colleague and friend from Rice University were still with us to fight for democracy in this moment. When I worked in the Houston ISD Research and Accountability Department, due to her cutting edge research that was exposing the gaming of the system that led to HISD last “miracle” she was declared persona non grata. We were told not to speak to her, not to share data with 60 Minutes, and not to let outside researchers see our internal metrics. The district was obsessed with managing perception. Data were treated like state secrets.

Working inside that department, I saw how the miracle was built. We were holding back Black and Latino students from testing so that district averages would appear higher. The district leadership knew exactly what it was doing. The fake results impressed state politicians, national journalists, and federal officials. That manipulation laid the groundwork for the so-called Texas Miracle, which later inspired No Child Left Behind. It was the last time Texas lied to the nation about an educational miracle and got away with it.

That same dynamic is back. Houston ISD is once again being held up as a test case for takeover reform. Yet the results are predictable. If you do not invest in wraparound supports, bilingual programs, special education, and teacher development, then test gains are not improvement. They are manipulation. The more things change, the more they repeat.

How Takeovers Manufacture Success

The takeover playbook follows the same script I described in my dissertation. The first act is to lower expectations. State leaders quietly adjust cut scores, redefine what counts as proficiency, and change the comparison year. Louisiana’s Recovery School District did exactly that, exempting itself from the state’s own grading system for its first year and then lowering the bar when scores disappointed. Once the numbers are redefined, progress becomes inevitable by design.

The second act is to reset the workforce. Teachers are replaced en masse, often by novices or temporary staff. In Tennessee’s Achievement School District, over 30 percent of teachers had never taught before, and nearly half left after one year. High turnover creates instability, and instability depresses learning. But new data systems make it easy to claim that “new practices” are driving change.

The third act is to privatize. Charter conversions multiply, but oversight declines. The Center for Popular Democracy warned that takeover districts had become “breeding grounds for fraud and mismanagement at the public’s expense.” Once democracy is stripped away, financial accountability collapses too. The takeover system becomes a revolving door for consultants and contractors.

When Ideology Becomes the Goal

If the data are this clear, the persistence of takeovers demands another explanation. It is not about academic improvement at all. The goal is ideological implementation. Success is redefined as compliance with an ideology rather than progress for students. State control delivers an image of order, rewards political allies, and enforces a narrative that markets and management can do what democracy and community cannot.

In this framework, the takeover does not have to work for children to work for power. It replaces elected boards with appointed ones, weakens teachers’ unions, and opens the door for privatization through contracts and charter expansion. The test scores and press releases are secondary. The true achievement lies in reshaping public education into a controlled marketplace that serves the few instead of the many. That is why every failure is followed by another takeover. The ideology, not the outcome, is the measure of success.

This is why Houston and Fort Worth matter far beyond Texas. They are laboratories for a national agenda that purposely confuses disruption with progress and obedience with accountability and student success. Communities of color become the testing grounds for policies that would never be imposed on affluent suburbs. When those experiments predictably collapse, the architects move on, claiming victory and leaving students, teachers, and parents to rebuild what was lost.

The Real Meaning of Success

Real reform is slow, deliberate, and expensive. It requires wraparound services, special education support, bilingual programs, and teacher retention initiatives. It means listening to families, building partnerships, and being transparent with data. Real improvement does not need a press release because it is visible in the lives of students.

In my dissertation, I made the empirical argument that score improvement without resource investment is, at best, partial and, at worst, deceptive. When districts claim rapid gains without new investments, the simplest explanation is manipulation. True change takes time, humility, and honesty. Manufactured miracles are fast, fragile, and false.

The great irony is that those who claim to be “data-driven” often ignore the very data that matter most and they do everything they can to make sure you don’t have access to the data. The research consensus is unambiguous. Takeovers do not improve learning. They reduce democratic participation, undermine community trust, and perpetuate inequality. Yet they continue because they serve a different purpose: to normalize right wing political control and to make the privatization of public institutions seem inevitable.

The Lesson for the Nation

Texas is gleefully repeating history. The so-called Texas miracles have always been a mirage, but they are a useful one. It allows Republican Party leaders to declare victory without investing in children. It turns democracy into a problem to be managed instead of a promise to be fulfilled. The ideology thrives because it rewards obedience, punishes dissent, and cloaks political ambition in the language of student success.

The truth is simple. The purpose of education should be learning, not leverage. Communities should not have to trade democracy for data or equity for efficiency. Every child deserves a system built on trust, transparency, and investment, not a stage play of political control.

No kings in our schools. No kings in our democracy. Texas has shown the nation for decades what happens when ideology outruns evidence in education. The challenge before us is not to succumb to control but to reclaim agency, to prove that when communities lead, children thrive, and democracy delivers the real miracle.