Each week, “Pop Quiz” features an interview with a member of Greater Houston’s education community. To suggest someone we should interview with an interesting story to tell, email us at education@houstonlanding.org.
Meet the interviewee
Plácido Gómez, one of Houston ISD’s newest elected board members, could soon step into a more powerful role leading Texas’ largest district after spending a year in the position without decision-making authority.
HISD’s elected board members have received limited attention since they lost voting power in June 2023 when Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath installed a new superintendent, Mike Miles, and nine-member school board in HISD.
But according to state law and the plans laid out by the Texas Education Agency, three of HISD’s elected trustees could return to voting positions as soon as June 2025, kicking off a two-year transition process that would return HISD’s board to fully elected leadership in June 2027. (Morath could choose to delay the start of the transition until 2026 or 2027, if he determines HISD hasn’t made enough progress. He must announce his decision before June.)
In November 2023, Gómez ran unopposed for his seat representing District VIII, which snakes through HISD along the Buffalo Bayou and extends toward the shipping channel.
Gómez, who grew up in New Mexico, spent four years teaching math in San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley and now works for an organization that supports Democratic political campaigns across Texas. He became a new father in December and, in a few years, plans to send his children to HISD schools.
With the board’s potential return to power nearly on the horizon, the Houston Landing caught up with Gómez to discuss their thoughts about HISD’s direction under state leadership. The Landing published a conversation with another HISD trustee elected in 2023, Savant Moore, in late December.
The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
The earliest year that Morath could potentially start the transition back to an elected board in HISD is 2025. So it feels like a good juncture to look back at the past year and a half. Looking at the intervention so far, what do you consider to be some of the greatest wins and failures?
Some of the greatest wins, I think science of reading is amongst those. It’s been a battle over the past few decades of science of reading against balanced literacy. There is an excellent podcast I encourage everyone to listen to called ‘Sold a Story’ that really opened my eyes to the importance of science of reading curriculum. So that’s an extremely urgent matter that I think the new administration has done right in making sure that our kids, especially in early education, are learning to read well and using a curriculum that is backed by the best research out there.
There’s also elements of (the overhaul program) that I like. There are certain elements where the most struggling students get to maximize their time with the most qualified adults in the school, which are the classroom teachers. So that’s great. And in some of my own classroom observations, I’ve noticed very beneficial student-to-teacher ratios. I have noticed, you know, students who are falling behind getting really good instruction. So the urgency being placed on helping the students who are struggling the most, I think is good.
As far as the bad things, I’m extremely concerned about teacher and principal turnover. And a principal or administrator being let go midway through the year is even more troubling, given how much it could shake things up. Whatever the bar is to let go of a principal or transfer a principal in the summertime, that bar has to be higher during the year, and it’s unclear to me why a lot of principals are being fired. There are some cases, like last year with the Eastwood Academy case, where it seems pretty cut and dry, and I understand perfectly why the principal or administrator was let go. … There are other examples that seem a lot more fishy. Whatever gains that the new administration should be able to make, it’s not going to be sustainable if teacher turnover continues as it is, if principal turnover continues as it is.
That leads into another thing. Community trust has clearly been broken, where a lot of the superintendent’s rhetoric has treated people in the community as if we are part of the issue, as if we’re the problem. To use an understatement, it’s not the best way to get people on your side. If you want to do good things to help students, you’ve got to get people on your side. And the administration clearly has not made that a priority.
There are also elements of the (overhaul) model that I think are too one-size-fits-all. For example, I agree that everyone should take a philosophy class at some time in their education career. But does everybody really need to take Mike Miles’ philosophy course? I think it’s called the “Art of Thinking.” Probably not. And as a point of comparison, if I were in charge, every child should do some sort of performance-based activity, like sports, theater, music or something along those lines. But I’d never be tempted to force every child to take my preferred activity. … I wouldn’t force everyone to take an improv comedy course just because I think that’s the best performance thing to do. So that is troubling.
(Miles’ leadership style has) also led to a negative atmosphere in a lot of the campuses, and that’s not reflected in data as much, but that is definitely a thing I hear. I’ve never been to a community meeting where the subject of campus morale hasn’t been brought up in a negative light.
On that topic of community input and community response, you represent District VIII, which covers a long strip of the district including some of the eastern schools toward the shipping channel. What are a couple conversations or comments that you’ve heard from families that have left an impression on you or impacted your thinking?
We’re having this discussion Dec. 6, almost exactly a month after the bond election. So that’s front of mind for me. What was jarring to me is that every single person I’ve talked to about the bond agreed that students deserve better facilities and everyone seems to be on the same page that clean drinking water is important, that HVAC systems that work are important, that mold reduction is vital, that school safety, in the case of, God forbid, a school shooter, is extremely important. But even though everyone who I talked to agreed, the majority of folks decided that they didn’t trust the superintendent enough to implement those things.
They may have voted for the bond had it not been for having an appointed board and having a superintendent that didn’t prioritize community input. These community meetings that the superintendent and his team held about the bond happened way too late (in the process) than a typical bond process should. Whereas people felt that, you know, solutions to problems were being given to them without an opportunity to give real input on what the changes should be or what should be in the bond. And so it should be to no one’s surprise that, if the community is treated in that way, that they’re not going to reciprocate trust back to the administration, which led to the result.
I voted for (the bond to pass), to be clear, but I also completely understand why the majority of people within HISD voted against it.
Fast-forwarding, if you, in an imaginary world, became a voting member of the board tomorrow, how would you describe your approach to working with the appointed board members?
We’ve got to get out in the community more. I can actually make this even easier, like right now, at this moment, as somebody who’s not on the appointed board. Myself and other elected board members need to get out in the community with the appointed board to repair trust between HISD and the community. So that means going out, meeting people where they are, not making people go all the way to (central office), which is about 45 minutes to an hour drive from some parts of my district in traffic, which is where the school board meetings are, in order to be heard. So that is the first thing I would do before addressing anything policy-related, is going out to folks and giving an honest attempt to to listen.
I thought it … showed an impressive amount of self-awareness, it was actually your story, where they rated themselves 1 out of 10 in community engagement. Self-awareness is a good place to start going forward, but self-awareness doesn’t actually mean anything unless we have some action that follows from that. So that would be the first thing I do is get out in the community with the appointed board to ask questions and hear what people have to say.
From a policy approach, what are some of the key components of the intervention that you would seek to maintain versus change?
I would seek to maintain the science of reading. That’s arguably the most important change that’s been made. I would seek to maintain the rise in teacher pay and find a way to incentivize the best teachers to teach in schools that are struggling the most.
The second part of the question was about things I would do away with. … It seems to be a mindset amongst the administration that when the community disagrees, the community must be putting adult interest over students, which is just not the case. And so changing that mindset first, before going into any policy things.
And then going into the policy things, I mentioned the philosophy course. … The one-size-fits-all-ness of the program I don’t like. I’m all for student discipline, but there are places where it goes too far, like students taking massive traffic cones in order to go to the bathroom. That is something I definitely would want to do away with. The midyear firing of principals. I would want a clear policy that outlines what would cause a principal to be fired midyear.
Then finally, something absolutely has been done about teacher turnover. I know from my experience as a teacher, my first year teaching I was not very good, which is something I have in common with just about every first-year teacher who’s ever lived. So with an extremely high rate of teacher turnover, the people who replace these folks, … every teacher has to be a first-year teacher at some point by definition. But having disproportional amounts of first-year folks cannot be good for student outcomes.
One last question here, and I’m gonna put you on the spot a little bit. There are a number of members of the community that have said the district should fire Miles, and of course, only the board can do that. So if you were a voting member, where would you stand on that issue?
I don’t mean to compare him to a pirate, but have you seen the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean”? There’s a scene where Elizabeth Swann is on the pirate ship, and she’s not quite aware that everybody’s a skeleton ghost on the crew, and she’s having dinner with Hector Barbossa, and at one point she strikes a knife through Barbossa’s heart in an attempt to kill him, and Barbossa takes the knife out of his heart, and just gives a perfect line to say, “I’m curious, after killing me, what is it you had planned on doing next?” And then Elizabeth goes out and sees the horror show of the pirate ship.
So I would give the same answer about firing a principal or as firing a teacher. There has to be a plan. What’s going to happen after that? It’s going to depend on what the plan is. So let’s say, for example, the board fired Mike Miles, what happens after that is actually unclear to me when it comes to policy. Because does the board get to pick a new superintendent, or is it the commissioner who gets to pick a new superintendent. When you make a decision as drastic as firing somebody, you have to have a good understanding of what the alternative is, and I don’t have a clear understanding right now of what the next step would be.
Anything we haven’t touched on yet that you want to add?
I will say one more thing before I go off the grid for a couple of months (on paternity leave). I would observe that both sides — sides as defined by the administration and its allies, and the other side, the administration’s opponents — both sides speaking about the other as if they’re the enemy. When, in fact, from my perspective, the real enemy is the fact that students, particularly students from low-income communities, have been underserved for decades. They’ve had to go up against several generations of racism and oppression.
I come from a place where more than half of my friends I started with (in school) dropped out of high school, and there’s no silver bullet to solving this problem. It takes everyone working together in good faith to solve this problem on behalf of students. We currently do not have that in Houston. … People have figured out that the best thing to do for a political career is to clearly define an enemy and go after their enemy. That’s the best way you could fundraise, the best way you could rise in political popularity. But the best thing we could do to serve students like the ones that I grew up with is not that. The best way to serve our students is sometimes to swallow our pride and to at least try to work together on behalf of our most-struggling students.
In case there are people who are reading this, you might be rolling their eyes and thinking, “It’s too pie in the sky. That’s too hopeful.” It’s not just a matter of doing the right thing. It’s a matter of, what is the most effective thing they could do to solve the real problem: the fact that we have so many students who are underserved, who are struggling, who deserve better than what they’re getting.
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.
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