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The Texas Education Agency is taking over the Fort Worth Independent School District — a district with more than 70,000 students — because a campus with just over 300 sixth graders repeatedly failed to meet state academic standards.
While Leadership Academy at Forest Oak Sixth Grade ultimately set off the state’s ability to intervene, the threat of a state takeover has been looming over the district for nearly two decades — with the first dating back to 2008. The district has a history of struggling to bring students’ grades up across the city, especially at campuses in low-income neighborhoods with large Black and brown populations.
TEA Commissioner Mike Morath announced last week his decision to remove all decision-making power from elected Fort Worth ISD school board members. Soon, the state will replace them with a board of managers and a superintendent handpicked by Morath. The new set of appointed leaders will wield substantial power. They will preside over one of North Texas’ biggest school districts — around 135 campuses — and their responsibilities will range from deciding how to spend the district’s $1 billion budget to hiring the directors who will lead day-to-day operations such as bus transportation and campus maintenance.
The district has been on the upswing academically in the last two years. But TEA, under state law, can take over a school district when a school receives a failing grade on the state agency’s A-F accountability rating system for five consecutive years, and Leadership Academy at Forest Oak Sixth Grade received its fifth F in 2023. The ratings, which were recently unveiled, had been held back because several school districts had sued to block their release.
But long before the sixth-grade campus reached the threshold for a takeover, conversations of state intervention in Fort Worth had swirled around the community.
In 2008, Meadowbrook Middle School, a campus composed of around 60% Hispanic students and 35% Black students, had missed federal academic standards for years, which nearly led to a state takeover under the now-defunct No Child Left Behind Act.
In the years that followed, the district averted two other threats of an intervention. John T. White and Maude Logan elementaries endured a streak of failing grades and nearly met the takeover threshold before seeing improved scores.
Leadership Academy at Forest Oak Sixth Grade, which the district shuttered after the 2023-24 school year, was located in Glencrest, a largely Black and Hispanic neighborhood with a median household income far below the national average. The campus, which drew in refugee and immigrant newcomers, struggled with academic performance for years.
“There has to be ownership for that,” Fort Worth ISD Superintendent Karen Molinar said in a recent interview with The Texas Tribune. “It’s not about a physical building or a statute. The kids were on a campus that was continuously underperforming, and we allowed it for multiple years.”
The campus was one of the Fort Worth district’s lowest-performing, though the struggle to lift students up to state standards has affected the entire district. In 2023, 44% of Fort Worth ISD students could read on grade level. That year, all grade levels with the exception of sixth grade saw reading scores dip.
But the district has begun to see improvements: Test scores went up in all of Fort Worth ISD last year. This year, the number of F-rated campuses plummeted from 31 to 11. And the roughly 135 schools overall have earned a C rating the last two years. The education agency considers that an “acceptable performance,” meaning the district serves many students well but needs to provide additional support to others.
Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, founder of parent activist group Parent Shield Fort Worth, said some of the credit for the improvements belongs to Molinar, the superintendent, who started her role in an interim capacity late last year and was officially appointed in February.
“This is her first year being able to make some changes to the district, and I do feel like she’s doing a pretty good job,” Dorsey-Hollins said.
After Molinar came on board, Ken Kuhl, a parent on the Fort Worth Council of PTAs, said the district has increasingly focused on improving student outcomes.
The district has sought to introduce more alignment across the district, from creating an infrastructure for educators to gameplan lessons together and attain feedback on their teaching methods, to rolling out what the education agency considers high-quality instructional materials aligned with state standards, to overhauling seven under-resourced campuses with a goal of attracting more effective instructors.
But none of those efforts stopped a takeover.
With a district as large as Fort Worth’s, disparities between schools’ performance run deep. Kuhl wonders if the district previously celebrated success at high-performing campuses “at the expense of” their academically struggling peers. The Fort Worth community, Kuhl said, would have liked to see the district address its shortcomings sooner.
Molinar said the state takeover was preventable, and the superintendent pointed blame at the district for the current situation.
“I can be upset and say it’s not fair and be upset with the commissioner,” she said. “But I’m more upset that we have not been more aggressive for my students.”
Many advocates and families believe the Texas Legislature’s decisions on public education funding have played an outsized role in districts’ academic struggles. Hundreds of districts are operating at a budget deficit, meaning they are increasing class sizes, cutting instructional staff and shutting down programs that help drive positive student outcomes. The Fort Worth district had a $44 million budget deficit earlier this year.
The Legislature for six years did not add to schools’ base level funding, a critical pot of money that provides districts with flexibility to pay rising operational expenses and boost the salaries of teachers, which rank 31st in the nation. During this year’s lawmaking session, the state approved nearly $8.5 billion in new funding, though many district leaders have noted that the increase falls billions short of catching them up with inflation and that it lacks the spending flexibility they need to tackle all of their campuses’ needs.
Meanwhile, Texas’ education agency has been flexing its power to take over schools in recent years, notably in the Houston, La Joya and South San Antonio districts. Fort Worth’s intervention marks the 11th since 2000 and will be the second largest, following the 2023 takeover in Houston. Four other districts — Lake Worth, Beaumont, Connally and Wichita — are at risk of being next.
Academic takeovers are largely driven by results on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, which lawmakers, educators and families have long criticized. They say the test consumes meaningful instructional time, places too much pressure on students and does not adequately measure how much children are learning. The Legislature passed a law earlier this year that will phase out the exam by the 2027-28 academic year and replace it with three shorter tests.
If a campus does not meet state academic standards for five consecutive years, the state can order the closure of the school or appoint a board of managers to run the district. Fort Worth ISD opted to close Leadership Academy at Forest Oak Sixth Grade, but Morath said in a letter to the school board that the campus had already reached the threshold for intervention and that the closure “did not address the district’s underlying systemic deficiencies that caused the chronic underperformance.”
The state agency’s ability to take over any district because of one struggling campus has been a point of controversy in Texas that has only grown more intense since the state intervened in Houston.
Morath and state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles say that takeover was warranted, and they tout improved test scores in the two years since it started. No Houston ISD campuses received an F on the state’s accountability ratings in the 2024-25 school year, a drastic improvement from the 56 underperforming campuses the district had in 2022-23.
But the intervention has also run into strong criticism. Teacher departures have skyrocketed. Thousands of students have unenrolled. And improved test scores have sparked concern that the district has accomplished that feat, in part, because of a hyperfocus on testing and moving students into less rigorous math and science classes.
The direction of Fort Worth’s intervention will also depend heavily on the superintendent Morath chooses to lead it. It’s unclear exactly when he will make the decision, though the commissioner has noted that he will consider Molinar for the job.
Dorsey-Hollins said she’s hopeful for the intervention. The parent of two students in the district called on Morath to appoint people who are “open to hearing from the community and actually showing that growth is being made, letting that be the North Star for the takeover and for this change.”
“I feel like this is a possibility of a fresh start for our district,” she said. “Knowing that we’re going to have an appointed board that is hyper-focused on student achievement, this could change the trajectory for our city and for our kids.”
Sneha Dey contributed to this story.