In March, the district held a two-day conference seemingly aimed at countering the negative publicity that has dogged Miles and the state takeover from day one. Addressing an invited audience of superintendents and chief academic officers from other Texas school districts, policy analysts, nonprofit executives, and leaders of civic organizations, Miles described at length his vision of “wholescale systemic reform.” His efforts have involved reorganizing central office support systems and Houston ISD’s school feeder patterns; revamping budgeting, transportation, and operations systems; expanding professional development for teachers; and creating a new “Principal Academy” to build an NES-aligned leadership pipeline.
While previous generations of big-city reformers have tended to favor merit pay for high-performing teachers, Miles uses what he calls the “hospital model” of differentiated pay based on roles.
“Not all doctors get paid the same. They bring a different value,” he explained. “A brain surgeon or heart surgeon gets paid much more than a general practitioner, and they should.” Similarly, a skilled 3rd-grade reading teacher adds more value than an electives teacher coaching basketball. “Nobody wants to say that,” Miles told the handpicked conference attendees. “But I’m saying it.”
Accordingly, the starting salary for electives teachers in NES elementary schools is $64,000. A first-year 3rd-grade teacher of English language arts earns $83,000; the highest starting elementary-school salary is $86,000 for a special education teacher. High school math and English teachers can start as high as $90,000. Teachers in NES schools also receive a $10,000 stipend. “We’re trying to have a paradigm shift, very similar to Dallas,” a district that Miles previously ran, explains Monica Zdrojewski, Miles’s deputy chief of staff. The hospital model is the first shift; the second is performance pay tied to a teacher-evaluation system that potentially allows NES teachers to earn even more.
The staffing model also de-emphasizes the traditional focus on a master’s degree as a gateway to teaching. Miles notes the single biggest cost associated with NES schools is the large number of “teacher apprentices” and “learning coaches” who have been hired—one teacher apprentice for every 100 students, one learning coach for every 75. Teacher apprentices routinely cover classroom-teacher absences. “Our staffing model is designed to make sure the kids get high-quality instruction every day,” Miles says. “You can’t do that without a ready substitute who knows the [NES] model, who knows the kids, who knows the instruction, who’s been there every day following along.” In fact, when he visits schools and there’s a “TA” leading the class, Miles says, “I don’t know the difference. I have to ask the principal, ‘Is that a TA, a teacher, or,’ in some cases, ‘a learning coach?’”
For all of its disruption to systems, staffing, and compensation, the heart of the NES effort—and the source of some of the greatest friction—are the changes it’s imposed in curriculum and classroom instruction. For the 2023–24 school year, 28 chronically low-performing Houston ISD schools were obliged to follow the NES instructional model; another 57 voluntarily adopted it. In the 2024–25 academic year, another 45 are expected to join, bringing the total to 130 NES schools out of 274 schools under Houston ISD control––although even schools not adopting the model formally are transforming their instruction. On social media, nervous parent groups insist Miles intends to force every school, including high-performing high schools and magnet schools, to adopt the NES model, but district officials insist it’s not so. Zdrojewski has attended every monthly meeting Miles holds with the district’s 274 principals. “He’s been really clear in all of those conversations that NES is not the right model for everyone,” she says. “We have schools that are some of the top schools in the nation. We have no interest in trying to take any of their autonomy from them.”
But Houston, Miles says often, is a tale of two districts. “The number-one variable in raising student achievement is improving the quality of instruction,” says Sandi Massey, Houston ISD’s chief of leadership and professional development, on whom Miles leans heavily to drive the culture shift and to build the leadership and talent pipeline Houston will need if wholescale systemic change is to have its intended effect. Massey worked with Miles in Dallas, in Colorado, and at Third Future, where she was executive director and chief of schools. “I understand the Commander’s Intent,” she quips, employing a military metaphor and alluding to Miles’s C.V. It’s a concept developed by the U.S. Army in the 1980s, imported to the business world, and popularized by Chip Heath and Dan Heath in their 2007 bestseller Made to Stick, a guide to communicating ideas. “CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plan’s goal, the desired end-state of an operation,” they wrote. “The CI never specifies so much detail that it risks being rendered obsolete by unpredictable events. . . . It align[s] the behavior of soldiers at all levels without requiring play-by-play instruction from their leaders.”
“Commander’s Intent” does not apply to schools operating under NES. Lessons are centrally prepared and distributed to schools. Contrary to a common misperception, those lessons are not scripted, but they are prescriptive. Teachers can adapt and customize the district-provided PowerPoint slide decks, but they cannot change the lessons’ aims or lower the targeted standards. The pace of instruction is tightly managed. The first 45 minutes of an NES lesson is teacher-led direct instruction, followed by a 10-minute mini-assessment, or “demonstration of learning,” which everyone from Miles and Massey to classroom teachers shortens to DOL. Akin to an “exit ticket,” it’s intended to provide instant feedback to teachers about students’ grasp of a lesson’s goal. DOLs are logged by teachers daily and tracked by the district—offering a glimpse into how students are doing in nearly real time. In contrast, data from interim assessments or state tests can take weeks or months to return results that are already outdated by the time they’re received.
Based on their instant evaluation of the DOL, teachers sort students into skill-level groups for the next 35 minutes, according to a system dubbed LSAE: Students who are struggling to grasp the lesson objectives are said to be L for “learners.” The next level up is S, for students who either are “securing” (S1) or have “secured” (S2) the material. L and S students stay in the classroom for a reteach or additional help from the teacher. If a student scores at level A, or “accelerated,” it means “not only do I get it, but I could probably teach you about this concept,” Massey explains. E (enrichment) students are targeted for higher-level work. “It doesn’t happen often, but an E student could literally teach the concept to the class.” Once the teacher grades the DOL, the A and E students depart the classroom to spend the next 35 minutes in a school library or other room known as a “team center,” where they work alone or in pairs on higher-level material.
Teacher moves within NES lessons are similarly prescribed. When the system was rolled out, Miles and his team faced derision for requiring teachers to stop every four minutes to employ one of eight “multiple response strategies” (MRS) including a “table talk” discussing or debating with classmates, or a “think-pair-share” aimed at getting students talking to each other about the lesson content. Alternative techniques include asking students to write answers to questions or solve problems on individual response cards or whiteboards. MRS activities “keep the entire class engaged,” Massey says. “It also forces us to know, as adults, ‘Do my students know the objective?’ If I’m having everyone write, everyone read, everyone think and talk, I have a better idea of which students in my class know the objective.”
Massey also asserts that discipline problems are down in NES schools. “The pace is fast. It keeps kids on track and keeps them from getting in trouble,” she says.
“We didn’t buy a program. We didn’t pay for a bunch of consultants. I don’t even think we did a lot of professional development around it,” Miles adds. “And lo and behold, our discipline is way down. Go figure.”
Miles and Massey speak often of their goal to ensure “high-quality instruction for every student, every day.” But the NES lesson architecture hints at another objective that goes largely unspoken: to ensure a basic level of teacher competence and a consistent student experience within and across Houston’s poorest-performing schools. The sophisticated-sounding language of “multiple response strategies” belies the fact that performing frequent checks for understanding is something competent teachers do constantly, even reflexively. As Doug Lemov explains in his seminal manual, Teach Like a Champion, asking questions and calling on engaged students who raise their hands or asking, “Does everybody get it?” and moving on when students nod is typical teacher behavior, but it’s not necessarily effective. Student self-report, he writes, “is notoriously inaccurate,” particularly among novices who don’t know what they don’t know. Several of the demonstration-of-learning assessments or multiple response strategies baked into NES lessons are described in practice, if called by different names, in Lemov’s “taxonomy” of effective teaching techniques. The steady stream of MRS activities collectively increases the likelihood that teachers will be cognizant of student misapprehension and intervene appropriately. And while some teachers might bridle at having to implement centrally produced curricula, doing so guards against gaps and repetitions within and across grades—or even between schools, which is important since low-income urban students tend to be highly mobile.
Likewise, while it’s generally agreed that differentiated instruction helps boost student outcomes, it’s a practice more honored in the breach than the observance, particularly in low-performing schools where teachers might have poor classroom-management skills and where small-group work is an invitation to student misbehavior or non-effort. More than eight in 10 teachers responding to a national survey commissioned by the Fordham Institute, for example, said differentiated instruction was “very” or “somewhat” difficult to implement. In essence, the LSAE system operationalizes differentiated instruction, building it into the school day’s culture, structure, and schedule so it cannot be avoided or implemented half-heartedly.
When I asked Miles if the point of NES lessons isn’t simply to ensure a base level of instructional competence—no mean feat, particularly in low-performing schools—he cannot suppress a grin. “I’ve said similar things to the teachers and principals. ‘This is not really that new, guys. It’s how it’s put together that’s different.’” The effort to focus teacher time and energy and instruction and evaluation also means “taking away tasks from teachers that other people can do. They don’t make copies. We have people that make the lesson plans for them,” Miles says.
“I’m not really selling innovation. I’m selling wholescale systemic change.”
