13 Investigates why twice as many teachers have left HISD this school year

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- After years of spending time at home with her three children, Paula Hoffman was excited to get back into the classroom this year as a history teacher at Meyerland Performing and Visual Arts Middle School.

But, just months into the school year Hoffman, who has master's degrees in education and history, said she was ready to leave the Houston Independent School District.

"I would get yelled at every day, just cursed at (by students). It was just really upsetting and heartbreaking to see the kinds of behavioral issues that were not outliers anymore," she said. "I love the content. I love history. I want to teach history. .... I didn't get to teach history. It was a lot of babysitting."

Although she said it was a difficult decision to leave halfway through the school year, Hoffman said she did leave the district last month. Ultimately, she said she would have liked to see more support from district administrators but said because they were busy evaluating teachers they weren't able to provide it.

13 Investigates wanted to know just how many teachers have left so far this school year and how that compares across the region.

Our investigation found HISD had the highest rate of teachers leaving the region, with about 600 teachers who left so far this year. That's twice as many as the roughly 300 HISD teachers who left during the same timeframe last year.

We went straight to Superintendent Mike Miles and his head of human resources to find out why.

"As radical as this sounds, and I don't think any other chief HR officer would state this: If you don't want to be here or it's not working for you, then that's okay," said Jessica Neyman, HISD's Chief Human Resources Officer. "We really want this to be a fit and even though we're in desperate times to recruit teachers, it is much more important to us to have a quality teacher in front of our students who are the most high needs."

Neyman said two-thirds of teachers who left were from schools under state-appointed Miles' New Education System model.

But, she also said she's not surprised because the new model promotes a "high performance culture" that raises expectations.

"I think the NES model is not for every teacher and due to that, there are teachers who are going to decide to continue teaching like they've always taught and go to a district that's willing to accept their level of performance -- don't mean that harshly," Neyman said. "For some teachers, if they are not performing at the level, the expectation that we've set, we don't let students go for an entire school year while we're resolving that teacher matter. We are very serious about shoring up any deficiency and if that means no longer being part of Houston ISD or being in a different role at Houston ISD that matches the skillset, then of course we'd look at voluntary reassignments to other roles."

Miles said one way the district is working to attract quality teachers is by paying them higher wages.

For the 2024-25 school year, the starting salary for a non-NES teacher is $64,000, according to HISD. The starting salary next year for an NES elementary school is $75,435. It's $80,059 for an NES middle school teacher and $82,816 for an NES high school teacher.

"The NES schools are the schools where the kids are furthest behind. They're struggling academically and there's also other needs besides academic needs in the NES schools, the D and F (rated) schools, so we need teachers who are the highest caliber as far as raising proficiency, whose quality of instruction is higher," Miles said. "We need to attract those teachers who are willing to work in a tough environment. The expectations are higher, the accountability accountability's higher. Not everybody wants to work in a school where the accountability's higher, so we're paying better wages, significantly better."

At the start of the school year, 13 Investigates reported there were nearly 800 uncertified teachers at HISD.

When 13 Investigates asked Neyman if she's concerned the district will have to hire more uncertified teachers as more teachers leave the district, she said she isn't worried because the compensation is a great recruiting tool.

"Houston ISD definitely operated as if it was several hundreds of small school districts and that became unwieldy," Neyman said. "It was pretty easy when you did an initial assessment to see where you can reign in a lot of that spending and then you're able to reinvest that and create a sustainable long-term path forward for paying teachers these incredibly high salaries for the rest of their careers."

She also said the district has an in-house certification program to help uncertified individuals get certified.

Still, Hoffman told us she feels morale is low among teachers and she is concerned the district will lose quality certified teachers.

"At my school, the topic du jour is 'what are you going to do if we become an NES school?' And so everybody has an escape hatch and everybody's thinking about, 'what is my limit? When am I going to leave,'" she said. "I don't know a single teacher who thinks this is great. I want to be a part of NES."

Neyman said it is always concerning anytime a quality teacher decides to leave the profession, but she said that's not the case at HISD.

"We have looked at, of the teachers leaving, are they high performers or are they low performers and so when we're able to crosswalk that with our separation data," she said. "What we have seen is those who are scoring the lowest on their spot observations are the same as those who are separating from employment either voluntarily or involuntarily, so both they are choosing to leave or we are assisting them with understanding that this isn't the right fit for them at this time."

13 Investigates found some districts, like Conroe, Ford Bend and Katy ISDs, have actually lost fewer teachers so far this school year compared to last year, according to employment data from those districts.

Still, Neyman said the roughly 600 teachers who left HISD so far this year make up just 2% of its overall teacher workforce.

With up to 125 of the district's 274 becoming a part of the NES and NES-aligned system next school year, the district said it is committed to ensuring it pairs the highest performing teachers with the lowest performing students.

In order to do that, Neyman said at the end of the school year, teachers will go through a proficiency screening.

She said teachers who are not proficient will not be allowed to stay at an NES school, but they will be given an option to transfer to a non-NES school.

"If you deeply understand the model, we do need to pair our highest performers with our students most in need. It begs the question, 'well, are you then intentionally putting poor performers (teachers) with students at non-NES (schools)? Our answer to that is students at non-NES schools don't need that same type of instruction," she said. (NES has) teachers who are experts and well-trained and highly compensated for doing specific instruction that shores up years of institutional miseducation of students. There is a different need at your non-NES campuses that are your highest performing campuses, so a teacher does have a choice. They have a choice to be with us, and they have a choice which campus to be at."

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