Thousands more Houston ISD students are being taught by teachers with no prior classroom experience under second-year Superintendent Mike Miles, whose overhaul of the district has produced early test score gains but an increase in teacher turnover. 

District records show the share of first-year teachers in HISD has roughly doubled from about 6 percent prior to Miles’ arrival to 12 percent early this school year. In turning to more first-year teachers, Miles’ administration hopes to buck historic trends showing educators with no prior experience often struggle with managing a classroom, preparing lessons and teaching concepts.

The increase in first-year teachers follows Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath appointing Miles and a replacement school board to run HISD in mid-2023 as a result of state sanctions against the district. Miles made many changes to classrooms and school operations that angered educators across the district, contributing to about one-third of HISD teachers resigning during the 2023-24 school year or leaving the district this past summer. 

Miles’ reliance on inexperienced educators began in his first school year, when the number of first-year teachers jumped from about 550 to 1,050, district data show. This year, about 1,300 out of HISD’s 10,625 teachers are in their first year, according to district data from September.

“In the education profession, we’re always going to have first-year teachers, and we want first-year teachers,” said Ena Meyers, deputy chief of strategic initiatives at HISD. “We want people to be interested in the teaching field and pursue this as a profession.”

Houston Federation of Teachers President Jackie Anderson, who leads the district’s largest teachers union, said many educators experienced in managing a classroom and delivering instruction left after realizing Miles’ overhaul of dozens of HISD campuses meant they had to teach more-scripted lessons. 

Under Miles’ system, many lessons are made at the district’s central office and handed down to educators at long-struggling schools, who are expected to follow a teaching system that involves checking for students’ understanding every four minutes or so. Teachers at some higher-performing schools get more classroom freedom.

“Of course we have a high number of (first-year) teachers, because our teachers, actual educators, professional certified educators, left in droves,” Anderson said.

About 9 percent of Texas teachers had no prior classroom experience in 2023-24. Data is not yet available for the current school year. 

Researchers have generally found that first-year teachers have the lowest positive impact on student learning, on average, though they often improve quickly within a few years.

In HISD, first-year teachers historically received some of the worst annual performance ratings. From 2019 to 2021, about 25 percent of first-year educators were graded “needs improvement,” compared to slightly less than 10 percent of teachers with classroom experience. District officials have not publicly released performance ratings by years of experience, though a September presentation by Miles showed uncertified teachers — who are more likely to be in their first year — scored worse than certified teachers.

Still, HISD’s increase in first-year teachers last school year did not coincide with a drop in standardized test scores. HISD produced some of the biggest gains in the region on the state’s primary standardized exams, known as STAAR, though it’s unclear what impact first-year teachers had on the results. Student discipline rates also remained largely stable in Miles’ first year.

Traditionally, first-year teachers enter the profession with high expectations and energy, though their impact on students often doesn’t match their excitement, said Thomas Guskey, a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky’s College of Education.

“They’re working really hard and putting in lots of hours, and if they’re not seeing evidence of the kind of influence that they would like to have, it just becomes a really challenging endeavor,” Guskey said. “Those first couple of years are really difficult for most beginning teachers.”

Guskey added that two factors — support from principals and a sense of trust within the school — are major influences on the success of first-year teachers.

“If a beginning teacher is having difficulty, they have to believe that there’s a culture of trust in this school, that they can share those difficulties with their teaching colleagues and get help, rather than ‘I’ve got to stay back in my classroom and do this on my own,’” Guskey said. 

In HISD, Meyers said the district is committed to making first-year teachers “instructional leaders” alongside their principals and assistant principals. 

“They’re getting support and coaching and mentoring, not just from a teacher that’s next door to them or down the hall, but they’re getting the instructional support from their campus leadership,” she said.

But Anderson said the union is hearing different accounts from its members, with some experienced teachers reporting that they’re not working as closely with new educators.

“If you’re not going to actually get into those classrooms and show them, and most of them are brand new, what do you expect?” Anderson said.

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