The Texas Education Agency found acting Houston school district Superintendent Mike Miles not guilty of any wrongdoing after he was accused of taking millions of dollars in state funds to give to his Colorado charter school system without permission.
On Tuesday, the education agency said that Miles, who they chose to lead the state’s largest school district last year, and his charter school network, Third Future Schools, had not “violated any applicable Texas laws,” according to the 29-page report of the investigation.
Part of the investigation found that checks sent from a partner school district in Texas to Third Future Schools’ address in Colorado ended up there because that site handles accounting for the network’s separate branch in Texas. But in the end, the checks were placed in the bank account of the Texas branch.
“Based on the evidence obtained and analyzed during the investigation, there is no merit to the allegations contained in the media reports that state funds were being inappropriately diverted from public school students in Texas,” it says.
Miles called the earlier news stories “a baseless distraction and an attempt to undermine and discredit the good work happening” in the schools in an email sent to everyone in the Houston school district on Tuesday. Miles said, “Now we can do what we always do and move forward for our students.”
Spectrum News reported earlier this year that the Texas branch of Third Future Schools, which runs campuses in Texas with money from several school districts in the state, might be using public funds from its school in Odessa to make up for losses at a sister school in Colorado.
After a while, the Texas Observer said it had found “additional irregularities” in how the school network reported its costs.
Miles denied doing anything wrong and said that the previous story was wrong about “common place financial arrangements between charter schools and the charter management organizations that support them.” He also said that he would be open to an investigation into what the network was doing.
Investigators from the state agreed with Miles and said they had no proof that Texas school systems put money into Third Future Schools’ bank account in Colorado. The report says that Third Future Schools-Texas pays the Colorado location back for the administrative services it offers to the whole charter network.
The report also says that Third Future Schools-Texas is not required by state or local law to share any agreements it has with the Colorado office about buying services. However, it also says that there was no attempt to hide the relationship from Texas school districts.
The study says that the claims “cannot be substantiated or have been proven to be false.” Since the Texas Education Agency put Miles and an unnamed school board in charge of the Houston school district last year, he has been a controversial figure.
The state said that the takeover was necessary because the previous board had been dishonest and Wheatley High School in Houston’s Fifth Ward had an unsatisfactory academic success rating. Most of the students at Wheatley are Black or Hispanic and come from low-income families.
Under Miles’s leadership, the district has had a huge turnover of workers and a drop in the number of students attending. People have said that Miles runs schools like military bases, where teachers don’t have much freedom to teach in the ways they see fit and kids are tired and not interested in learning.
On the other hand, Miles has said that student improvement on the state’s standardized tests is proof that his plan works. This is something that Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath has also publicly acknowledged and praised.
In November, people in Houston will decide if they want to accept $4.4 billion in school district improvements to facilities and academics. This is the biggest proposal of its kind in the history of the state, and some see it as a test of how much support Miles has from the people.
