Thousands more Under second-year Superintendent Mike Miles, whose reform of the district has resulted in early test score gains but increased teacher turnover, students in Houston ISD are being taught by teachers who have never taught in a classroom.
According to district data, the percentage of first-year teachers in HISD has nearly doubled, rising from around 6% before Miles’ arrival to 12% at the beginning of the school year. By hiring more first-year teachers, Miles administration intends to defy historical trends that indicate inexperienced teachers frequently struggle with classroom management, lesson planning, and teaching ideas.
Following state sanctions against the district, Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath appointed Miles and a substitute school board to lead HISD in mid-2023, which led to the surge in first-year teachers. About one-third of HISD teachers resigned during the 2023–24 school year or left the district this past summer as a result of Miles’ numerous changes to classrooms and school operations, which infuriated educators throughout the district.
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According to district records, Miles’ reliance on inexperienced teachers started during his first year of school, when the number of first-year teachers increased from roughly 550 to 1,050. District data from September indicates that around 1,300 of HISD’s 10,625 instructors are in their first year this year.
“We will always have first-year teachers in the education field, and we want first-year teachers,” stated Ena Meyers, HISD’s deputy chief of strategic initiatives. We hope that people will be drawn to teaching and choose to become teachers.
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Many educators with experience in classroom management and instruction delivery departed after learning that Miles’ redesign of dozens of HISD campuses required them to teach more scripted lessons, according to Jackie Anderson, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, the district’s largest teachers union.
Under the Miles method, teachers at long-struggling schools are expected to follow a teaching system that entails checking for pupils’ understanding almost every four minutes. Many of the lessons are created at the district’s central office. Some better-performing institutions give their teachers more autonomy in the classroom.
Since our teachers—who are real educators with professional certifications—left in large numbers, it is no surprise that we have a large number of (first-year) teachers, Anderson said.
In 2023–2024, almost 9% of Texas instructors had never taught in a classroom. Data for the current academic year is not yet available.
Although they frequently see rapid improvement within a few years, researchers have generally concluded that first-year teachers have the lowest beneficial impact on student learning.
First-year teachers have consistently gotten some of the lowest yearly performance scores in HISD. About 25% of first-year teachers received a needs improvement grade between 2019 and 2021, whereas somewhat fewer than 10% of teachers with prior classroom experience received the same rating. Although Miles’ September presentation revealed that uncertified teachers, who are more likely to be in their first year, performed worse than certified instructors, district officials have not made performance evaluations by years of experience publicly available.
Nevertheless, there was no decline in standardized test scores during the previous school year, despite HISD hiring more first-year instructors. Although it’s unclear what effect first-year instructors had on the scores, HISD earned some of the largest advances in the region on the state’s key standardized examinations, known as STAAR. During Miles’ first year, student discipline rates also stayed relatively constant.
According to Thomas Guskey, a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky’s College of Education, first-year teachers typically enter the field with high hopes and enthusiasm, but their influence on pupils frequently falls short of their enthusiasm.
“They’re putting in a lot of hours and working really hard, and it just becomes a really difficult endeavor if they’re not seeing evidence of the kind of influence that they would like to have,” Guskey said. For the majority of new instructors, those first few years are really challenging.
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Guskey went on to say that two things have a big impact on first-year teachers’ success: principle assistance and a feeling of trust in the school.
According to Guskey, if a new teacher is struggling, they must think that this school has a culture of trust where they can confide in their peers and receive support, rather than feeling that they must remain in their classroom and handle things alone.
Alongside its principals and associate principals, Meyers stated that HISD is dedicated to establishing first-year teachers into instructional leaders.
According to her, they are receiving instructional help from their campus administration in addition to coaching, mentorship, and support from the teacher next door or down the hall.
However, according to Anderson, the organization is receiving conflicting reports from its members, with some seasoned educators claiming that they aren’t collaborating as much with rookie instructors.
What do you anticipate when the majority of those classes are brand-new and you won’t even enter them to demonstrate them? Anderson stated.
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Houston ISD relying more on teachers with no classroom experience
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