Houston's comeback: Structure, direct instruction are paying off
- Joanne Jacobs
- Apr 21
- 2 min read
"Traditional education, discipline, and careful monitoring and data analysis" are improving student performance in Houston's New Education System (NES) schools, writes Neetu Arnold of the Manhattan Institute in City Journal.
When Mike Miles was appointed superintendent in 2023, only one in five students could read or do math at grade level, she writes. More than 120 of the district's 274 schools had D or F ratings. The state education agency took over the district, and put Miles in charge.
Houston schools have a long way to go, but reading and math scores are improving, especially for disadvantaged students, Arnold writes.
Under NES, the district's worst-performing schools now use the highly effective and highly structured Direct Instruction (DI) method, Arnold writes. Teachers guide student learning instead of asking them to "construct" their own learning.
Critics say it's authoritarian, but Miles disagrees. "Students cannot guide their own learning when they cannot read," he told her. They shouldn't "just do what they're interested in when they're way behind in math." They need teachers to teach.
Core classes last 90 minutes. After the first 40 to 45 minutes, students take a quiz to see how much they've learned. Those who've mastered the lesson work independently for the rest of the period, while the teacher gives extra help to students who need it.
Students who disrupt the class are sent to a separate room, where they observe the class remotely under adult supervision. "Kids hate that," Miles told her. Serious offenders are sent to alternative education programs.
Fighting and rules violations are down at NES schools, the district reports.
Some parents say NES schools are too intense with too much testing, she writes. They worry their children will burn out.
Some teachers dislike the rigidity of the curriculum.
But students seem to be learning more.
Miles' next move is a proposed pay-for-performance system for teachers. That's about as controversial as it gets.
Arnold discusses Houston's turnaround with Brian Arnold.
Houston's progress in an outlier. Across the country, reading and math scores for low achievers are "in free fall," writes Sarah Mervosh in the New York Times. Achievement gaps began growing years before the pandemic closed schools, and it's getting worse.
Am I still correct in thinking that you can still use Concrete... Representational... Abstract with Direct Instruction?
Relearning things that we've known for centuries. It's amazing.
Some Doctor of Education candidate should write a dissertation about how every dissertation written by every Ed.D candidate in the past 70 years has been utter poppycock.
When my son was in Elementary school, they were learning division. He couldn't figure it out, so I tried to help him. I couldn't make head's or tails of the convoluted "new math" method they were trying to teach him, so I taught him the right way to do long division...the way I was taught almost 60 years ago.
He picked that right up.
I got into a huge argument with his teacher a couple of days later when she took points off because,…
This kind of common sense approach is too rare to be seen in our deeply politicized education system. But if you really care about the disadvantaged people you have to do it.
Often, even adults need direct instruction about things. My co-worker and I are attempting to learn a new computer program that others (in another place and time zone) use frequently. We have had minimal instruction and don't even know what we can/allowed to do. It's moderately frustrating. Not to mention the others use volume when weight is more accurate and predictable.
I learned about Direct Instruction years ago, when I was an op-ed columnist, and wrote about it. Students learn more when they're explicitly taught -- that's common sense but it was rigorously demonstrated in Project Follow Through, in the late 1960s, when DI schools outperformed all the feel-good educational models. Not only in performance, but in student attitudes. That result was memory-holed, with tragic results.
DI schools aim to have 95% of students reading by the end of first grade. Failure to use demonstrably successful methods (DI isn't the only one) is professional malpractice.