When Texas released public school ratings this summer after a two-year pause while the new accountability system was tied up in lawsuits, a number of districts learned that, due to chronically low standardized test scores at too many campuses, they might be subject to state takeover. The districts at risk for takeovers include Fort Worth and Austin Independent School Districts.

This is not new. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has used this tool for decades. But the previous state takeovers of Houston ISD in 2023, and El Paso and Beaumont before that, make the new round of potential takeovers questionable at best.

State Takeovers Rarely Produce Serious Improvements

The truth is, the TEA’s government-first, bureaucratic, Progressive educational approach is incapable of delivering any lasting change. That’s because it completely misunderstands the nature of education. School “accountability systems” largely dependent on various state-selected datapoints sideline real solutions that respect parents’ place in their children’s education. 

The latest high-profile takeover of an ISD in Houston, the state’s largest district with more than 180,000 students, arrived with great urgency and greater expectations. Yet parents and teachers quickly discovered that declarations of change are easier than durable renewal, even according to the TEA’s flawed metrics.

Earlier episodes in Beaumont and El Paso followed a similar script: elected boards replaced with state-appointed managers, principals and teachers reshuffled, rehired, and occasionally let go, and the day to day experience of students remaining stubbornly familiar.

National research points the same direction. Studies surveying dozens of takeovers find little evidence of sustained academic gains, even under the flawed metric of standardized testing, and even, at times, early disruption to reading performance and enrollment instability. A takeover moves names around on an organizational chart.

Because those moves are often justified by standardized test scores, which are the symptoms but not the substance of the problem, these kinds of “reforms” cannot reach to the roots of education. They cannot call into being the disciplined and ordered classrooms, engaged families, and shared sense of purpose that genuine education requires.

Test Scores Are Just a Symptom

If the essential weakness of takeovers lies in mistaking governance reform for educational renewal, the weakness of the test-score regime that underwrites those takeovers lies in mistaking symptoms for substance. Scores can illuminate where students are struggling, and Texas is right to take signs of academic decline seriously, but when tests are treated as the ultimate aim of education they distort the real purpose of education: the formation of virtuous men and women through the education proper to a free people.

Teachers learn to serve spreadsheets rather than students, raising numbers rather than cultivating minds. Literature is pared down from the greatest works of the Western tradition to short passages and excerpts that mirror test questions. Tutoring that should deepen real understanding is repurposed to rehearse test item formatting.

Years of heightened state “accountability” have not prevented the very declines now used to justify state intervention. An education system reduced to data management has forgotten what it is for. It begins with the shadow of data points rather than the substance of human formation.

Part of the problem in public schools is that the state has forgotten who schools are accountable to, behaving as though accountability flows upward from school to district to state bureaucrats. True school accountability extends down and out to parents. Parents are the first and last educators of their children, and schools do well when they remember that they are entrusted with a small portion of that sacred responsibility.

A takeover flips the script on accountability and implicitly substitutes state authority for parental authority, and schools risk drifting further toward compliance rather than formation. The paradox is hard to miss: the parents whose investment is most needed in education are the very people most likely to feel pushed to the margins.

Choice Is Accountability

To recover the true meaning of accountability, and chart a real path toward school reform and assessment, we must recover the real meaning of education that the Founders knew. Education is not a management problem, nor a scoreboard to be optimized, but the moral and intellectual cultivation of the young into free citizens who can think clearly, choose well, and live disciplined lives.

The rising number of classical schools bring this approach most vividly to families: classrooms ordered by high expectations, curricula that center enduring texts and ideas, and habit cultivation that prize attention, humility, and courage. None of this is visible on a state exam, and yet without it those scores are hollow. To some extent they capture what students have learned, but leave far more important things out. Any parent knows a report card does not capture the adult that a child is becoming.

If takeovers fail because they mistake symptoms for substance, the alternative is to entrust families with real authority to hold their schools accountable through meaningful school choice, and not to destroy choice schools by imposing state “accountability” programs on them that neuter the very differences that create choices for parents in the first place. It is good that President Trump has made even more moves to do this in his second term than he did in his first, but there is more to do.

Freedom, Not Bureaucracy

School choice is practical, since it forces schools to improve in substantive ways by serving families rather than appeasing central offices and state overseers. Choice is also principled, since it honors the God-ordained responsibility and right of parents to direct the education of their children.

Families know their children best, and they are the only ones positioned to seek out the schools that will best form their children in knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue, whether traditional public, charter, private, or homeschool. When parents are in charge, schools have reason to align their work with the true purpose of education rather than the narrow incentives of a testing regime.

Takeovers allow the state to feel that they are addressing failing schools, and one hopes they are successful. But recent history indicates that that is unlikely to be the case.

The state has a role in education, not to commandeer education from above, but to create the conditions in which families can exercise the authority that already belongs to them, and in which schools are able to pursue authentic education. Parents should insist on that authority, and policymakers should examine their part in securing it, and ask whether their decisions are making it harder or easier for families to choose schools that educate their children.