Destinee Wilson knows her sixth grade son can, at times, act like a punk.
But when staff at Houston ISD’s Fleming Middle School repeatedly suspended him this school year for talking back to teachers and wearing Crocs to campus, she felt the discipline went too far. All the missed days transformed Wilson’s son from a top-of-class fifth grader into an academically struggling sixth grader, she said.
“It’s a big delay with my son’s education,” Wilson said. “We didn’t go through this with any other school. … They’re so quick to do a suspension.”
Wilson’s experience plays into a recent trend at the Greater Fifth Ward campus. Last school year, staff at Fleming Middle assigned three times more out-of-school suspensions as they did in 2022-23.
Yet two miles up the road at Key Middle School, a campus with a similar student profile, suspensions were way down. Campus staff issued one-fourth the number of suspensions in 2023-24 as the prior year.
The different disciplinary practices at the two neighboring campuses reflect the complicated impact of changes made in the first 18 months of state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles’ controversial tenure. New data released by the TEA reveal that some HISD campuses saw big upticks in suspensions, fighting and other student misbehavior, while others reported drastic dropoffs.
On the whole districtwide, suspensions and fights remained roughly flat, while more students were sent to an off-campus disciplinary program. Smaller infractions, however, declined as staff reported fewer instances of students breaking dress codes, ignoring teachers’ instructions and other less-serious violations.
The trends for the most severe forms of discipline held across a group of 85 campuses that Miles transformed last year through his “New Education System” and the other 180 that saw more minimal changes. However, overhauled schools cut the number of fights and smaller infractions, while those violations increased at the other schools.
The new TEA data represent one of the first large-scale measures of campus culture since Miles’ appointment, helping to fill in the picture on an intervention that has produced early improvements in test scores but also sparked widespread community opposition.
The numbers suggest Miles’ claims during his tenure of dramatically reduced student behavior problems, including an October 2023 statement that discipline issues were “way low,” aren’t entirely accurate. They also, however, contradict Miles’ critics who argue schools have become overly punitive under his leadership.
The wide variance in outcomes among overhauled schools is also notable because Miles emphasized uniform behavior standards across those campuses.
In a Tuesday interview, Miles acknowledged that HISD had not yet made significant progress toward reducing out-of-school suspensions, but argued his changes have made school environments, by and large, more orderly and conducive to learning.
“I think if you go into any NES campus and you talk to any NES principal, they're going to tell you that discipline is better, even if their (out-of-school suspension number) is the same,” Miles said. “Our goal is to decrease the (out-of-school suspensions) also. But they're going to tell you that discipline is better, the instruction is better, the focus is better.”
‘Fights happened in the hallway’
HISD’s student discipline rates have historically exceeded state averages, though they’ve generally been in line with other large, urban Texas districts.
Dozens of HISD schools, particularly those serving high shares of students living in poverty, have long struggled with disciplinary challenges. In 2022-23, the school year before Miles came to HISD, over two dozen schools averaged one or more fights per week, according to state data.
D’Shrondra Metoyer, an assistant principal at Forest Brook Middle School, described a chaotic environment when she first came to her northeast Houston campus in 2021.
“The bell would ring, everybody runs out of class, fights happened in the hallway,” Metoyer said in a September interview.
Discipline and campus safety issues have likely played into thousands of families’ decisions to leave HISD schools. HISD’s enrollment has dropped by tens of thousands of students over the past decade, with many families opting for charter schools with lower rates of behavior issues. The losses have been especially steep at many of the historically underperforming schools Miles targeted for overhaul.
Wilson, the Fleming Middle parent, said campus leaders’ discipline practices were motivating her to look for other schools for her son.
“I’m moving us in the middle of everything, it doesn’t matter about a school year. … I’ve just got to move him, get him away,” Wilson said.
Miles vowed to address student misbehavior when Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath installed him as HISD superintendent, the result of state sanctions against the district. Miles quickly rolled out an overhaul model at the 85 schools that required students to follow strict behavior rules. Students could not talk in the hallways and had to take traffic cones to the bathroom as hall passes, while teachers could send disruptive students to follow along with the lesson virtually from the library, among other new policies.
Some of the new rules prompted extensive community pushback from families and teachers who said the approach gave schools a prison-like feel.
But Miles argued the policies were the best way to ensure students who wanted to learn had an orderly classroom environment.
Mixed results in Year 1
Miles’ methods resulted in some campuses showing more success than others in curbing student discipline issues, the new TEA data suggest.
Six overhauled schools reported the number of fights last year fell by at least half, but at 10 overhauled campuses, the count at least doubled. Similarly, out-of-school suspensions fell by at least half at five overhauled schools, while they at least doubled at seven.
Nearly all schools with available data sent more students in 2023-24 to HISD’s disciplinary alternative program, an action typically reserved for more severe student behavior. (The state only publishes data on campuses with at least 10 removals to the program, a threshold reached by about 20 HISD campuses.)
However, the rise followed a state law taking effect in September 2023 that required school staff to send students to alternative schools if they’re caught using or possessing vaping devices. HISD voted mid-school year to exempt itself from the state law, though the district’s spike in referrals to alternative schools still outpaced the state rate.
Miles disputed any notion that the disparate discipline outcomes indicated a breakdown in HISD’s communication or expectation-setting with campus principals. His overhaul model is not “monolithic,” he argued.
Miles said he didn’t know why some schools saw discipline go up while others saw it go down, but that the differences represent normal variation across a large school district.
“Schools have always been a product of the leadership and the implementation of any of the practices,” Miles said. “You could ask this very same question about, ‘Why did a school jump up 20 accountability points, and why another (overhauled) school was flat,’ even though they were using the same model.”
Even at campuses where discipline and misbehavior numbers went way down, some families remain preoccupied with campus safety. Key Middle mother Liliana Jasso said she frequently sees teens misbehave on campus once school lets out.
“In the corner, a lot of students hang out, and the truth is that this isn’t a good school,” Jasso said in Spanish.
Miles said in early 2024 that HISD created a team to more closely examine how schools were doling out their most severe punishments, like assigning out-of-school suspensions and sending students to disciplinary schools. The group now works with district leaders and campus principals to make sure responses to student misbehavior are more consistent across campuses.
“Over time, there might be some evening out (of the numbers),” HISD Communications Chief Alexandra Elizondo said.
Asher Lehrer-Small covers Houston ISD for the Landing. Find him @by_ash_ls on Instagram and @small_asher on X, or reach him directly at asher@houstonlanding.org.
Correction, Dec. 16: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated a reason for the suspension of Destinee Wilson's son.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print.
