Mike Miles has been superintendent of Houston Independent School District since 2023, when he was appointed following a state takeover. With earlier stints in Dallas and the Harrison School District in Colorado Springs, and some promising early results in HISD, Miles may be the closest thing we have to a superstar superintendent today. Now, he’s ready to share the secrets of his success, which he has done in By Design: How to Transform School Systems.
Over the decades, urban education has boasted a parade of dynamic reformers promising transformational change. Since the turn of the century, observers have celebrated game-changing victories in locales including Atlanta, New York City, San Diego, Chicago, Denver, New Orleans, Newark, Houston (pre-Miles), Washington, D.C., and others. Sadly, few of these “transformative” efforts ultimately delivered much transformation. Instead, the constant churning only fueled a weary cynicism about reform.
In By Design, Miles promises a path out of this dismal pattern. He confidently makes the case for the importance of all-at-once change, pointing to the stratagem he deployed upon landing at Houston as the proof point. But, while Miles’s prescriptive changes have garnered much interest, By Design has little to say about them. It’s heavier on principle than practice, making it tough to grasp how Miles’s approach translates from the page.
For those seeking a sensible way to think about district leadership, Miles offers much to like. For starters, he’s willing to call out the habitual reluctance of education leaders to anger constituencies or disturb routines. He laments that leaders “are trained to search for strategies, programs, and best practices” and argues for a more fundamental rethinking “about how systems themselves are designed to function.” He points out that incremental change tends to yield “new expectations layered onto old designs” and that reformers are hobbled by “incentives built for stability rather than performance.” He argues that the solution isn’t a “secret sauce,” “huge investments,” or “heroics” but a “commitment to working systematically.”
by Mike Miles
Paradigm Leaders Press, 2026, $28.99; 200 pages
By Design is a manual for that systematic work, featuring clear prose, a textbook layout, and discussion questions. The advice is all sensible enough; it’s just more conceptual than concrete. Miles’s core contention is that leaders too often focus on operational changes instead of the kind of system transformation that would reset the organizational incentives shaping educational routines and culture. As he puts it, “operational changes focus on what people do: programs, schedules, tools, training, and processes” while “systemic change focuses on how the system works.”
What does systematic—or, in Miles’s terms, “whole-scale”—reform look like? In Houston, it has meant requiring 87 schools to immediately adopt comprehensive changes to “curriculum, instructional model, evaluation, compensation, instructional feedback, staffing, class schedule, oversight, operations, and accountability.” Whew! Journalists who’ve visited those schools have described the scope and specificity of the prescribed changes. Unfortunately, none of that really comes through in By Design. Miles never offers much sense of what’s changed in schools or classrooms. He alludes to templates, guidebooks, and implementation plans, but those aren’t reproduced. Would-be imitators will be hard-pressed to determine just what the so-called design entails.
Rather than wade into details, Miles wants to stick to his conceptual message: Improvement requires establishing “foundational principles” of system behavior and design principles that can produce a paradigm shift in which “beliefs, assumptions, and mental models” change. For instance, in HISD, Miles’s first principle was that “instructional quality would become the primary driver of student performance.” This meant “standardiz[ing] expectations” and adopting “uniform procedures” over the objections of previously autonomous magnet schools. It involved clarifying leadership roles, making principal supervisors reapply for their jobs, providing on-the-job coaching, and monitoring performance. This all seems sensible, though the absence of any detail makes it tough to judge how different it really is from what many other districts have attempted.
Miles does offer instructive examples of his approach in a couple instances. The year before he took over, 17 percent of Houston’s teachers were chronically absent. In response, Miles and his team “clearly outlined attendance expectations for all staff.” The district did away with the “docked-day practice,” under which teachers were simply docked a day’s pay if they exceeded their 10 allowable absences. HR started to cross-check staff attendance against principals’ records, and the legal department got off the bench and into the game. Miles doesn’t offer particulars on implementation or exactly what the lawyers started to do, but the sense of taking action leaves the reader feeling reasonably good about the approach.
Such concrete illustrations are sparse, however. That’s a problem. After all, if Miles’s charge is that leaders fail because they pursue change the wrong way, it’s important to illustrate clearly what it means to apply his design principles the right way. Unfortunately, his recipe for escaping the “Pivot Lock Point” (where organizations value “adult comfort over student achievement”) is frustratingly vague. For instance, he identifies 25 paradigm shifts that are at the heart of his work in Houston. These range from “transformation begins with systemic change” to “change must be pursued with urgency” to “compensation must be tied to what the organization values most.”
