Under threat of possible takeovers by the Texas Education Agency (TEA), nine school districts are set to hand over 15 public schools to Third Future Schools-Texas (TFS-Texas), a charter school operator previously run by state-appointed Houston ISD superintendent Mike Miles. 

In recordings of school board meetings and interviews with the Texas Observer, some leaders of these districts report that they believed the nonprofit was the only operator that TEA would approve to run the schools—even though numerous other operators should be eligible.

On March 24, it took less than two hours for San Antonio’s Edgewood ISD board members to hear a presentation from TFS-Texas, then vote to hand over one of its middle schools to the private charter school network to run. 

“What happens if we don’t go into this partnership?” board member Martha Castilla asked during the meeting. 

“Then we’re at risk for state intervention,” replied Theresa Salinas, the district’s chief of innovation.

Under a 2017 law, Senate Bill 1882, public school districts can turn struggling schools over to private operators to unlock extra funding and avoid state takeover, which typically involves deposing the elected board and superintendent and installing new leaders, who may enact controversial reforms.

Michael Valdez, an Edgewood board member who cast the lone dissenting vote, told the Texas Observer he opposed the decision because, apart from one presentation at Brentwood Middle School, there was little community engagement or public notice before the decision. “There was not a lot of time,” Valdez said. Valdez added that, as of last Wednesday, he still had not seen a draft of the contract even after its approval.

Edgewood is one of nine Texas districts identified by the Observer that recently signed new agreements with TFS-Texas, making that nonprofit charter network one of the biggest players in the “Texas Partnerships” program inaugurated by SB 1882. As of early April, the nonprofit is set to run at least 19 campuses across 13 districts by the start of next school year. TFS-Texas is part of a network under a Colorado-based parent nonprofit, Third Future Schools, which Miles founded and helmed until he was installed in 2023 as Houston ISD’s superintendent by the TEA after the agency took over the state’s largest school district. Third Future Schools runs campuses in three states.

TFS-Texas has had a mixed record since it first began running schools in the state in 2020. The nonprofit faced media scrutiny two years ago from the Observer and other outlets over out-of-state fund transfers—though the TEA cleared the nonprofit of wrongdoing in an investigation—and the Observer more recently reported on accusations the organization failed to teach required classes in Midland. In 2024, a TFS-Texas contract with Ector County ISD was not renewed, and last year the nonprofit ended its partnership with Beaumont ISD (which is being taken over by the state for the second time).  

TFS-Texas is expanding its presence at a time when the threat of state takeover looms over more public school districts. The TEA can take over a school district if just one school has a failing rating for five consecutive years. Between October and a March 31 program deadline, school leaders in Wichita Falls, Texarkana, Hempstead, Everman, Midland, Waco, Killeen, San Antonio, and Edgewood school districts all signed agreements for so-called 1882 partnerships with TFS-Texas. In return, the districts receive a two-year reprieve from state sanctions and get access to extra funding. 

Four preexisting TFS-Texas partnerships—in Jasper, Midland, Wichita Falls, and Manor ISDs—will continue into next year. 

But others have ended their relationship with the company. In Austin, Mendez School will no longer be under TFS-Texas control next year and will revert to district control, while Lamar Elementary in Midland will be turned into a disciplinary alternative education program school. The previous partnerships in Ector County and Beaumont ended with mixed academic results. In Ector County, TFS-Texas raised one high school’s state accountability rating from an F to a B, but the school then backslid after the charter left. In Beaumont, the nonprofit terminated its partnership leaving behind two of three campuses with failing ratings, one of which triggered the second state takeover.

The TEA did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article, and Third Future Schools declined to respond. 

Wichita Falls, near the Texas-Oklahoma border, was among five school districts—in addition to Beaumont, Connally, Lake Worth, and Fort Worth—to reach the threshold for potential state takeover last year after school accountability ratings were released. On June 10, 2025, the district entered into a partnership with TFS-Texas to run Hirschi Middle School starting in the 2025-26 school year. On October 13, the board voted to expand the partnership to include two more schools—Booker T. Washington and Southern Hills elementary schools. 

Wichita Falls’ gamble appears to have allowed their elected school board and superintendent to avoid being deposed by the state. On March 5, the Texas Education Agency decided not to take over Wichita Falls. Instead, it will appoint a conservator to monitor the district. TEA will pursue its takeover of the other four school districts beginning with the 2026-27 school year.

“We were the only outlier. And the reason is: We did the right thing,” Wichita Falls Superintendent Donny Lee told the Observer in an interview. “We’ve been doing this work since 2022, setting the stage, getting everything ready, almost eight months of planning to bring in Third Future, visiting Third Future campuses, then finally going out for the request for information for Third Future, then getting them on board.”

The TEA previously told the Observer that the agency has no authority over which partner the district selects. In a statement, spokesperson Jake Kobersky told the Observer, “TEA does not approve the selection of the entity by the district as part of the approval process but rather did the district meet all SB 1882 application requirements.”

Around 50 charter operators have taken over schools under the SB 1882 program. But during several recent meetings, district leaders told trustees and community members that Third Future was the TEA’s only approved or recognized partner for districts to enter into 1882 agreements with to turn around struggling campuses. (In some cases, Third Future was the only organization to apply in response to a district callout.)

During a February 17 board meeting, San Antonio ISD deputy superintendent Patti Salzmann told board members during a presentation about Third Future Schools that “They are the one turnaround in Texas that’s approved by the Texas Education Agency,” according to a video of the meeting. 

In an interview, Alejandra Lopez, president of the teachers’ union, the San Antonio Alliance, told the Observer, “The board made it clear at the board meeting that they were being pressured or threatened by TEA … that the district is under threat of takeover if they don’t make some pretty big changes, and Third Future is the only authorized turnaround partner from TEA.” 

Lopez said that, with little notice, San Antonio ISD trustees decided to close Rhodes Middle School and transfer its students to Tafolla Middle School for TFS-Texas to run starting next year. Hirsch and Ogden elementary schools are also set to be under TFS-Texas control. All three of these schools are in poorer areas on San Antonio’s West Side.

Board members had previously voted to ensure 75 percent of parents at each of these schools would be engaged in the decision-making process, but Lopez said that seemed to have been dismissed. “It just really speaks to the fact that they are willing to abandon any kind of engagement with the community, even a month after they voted to mandate it.” 

San Antonio ISD already has the most 1882 partnerships out of all Texas school districts, according to an investigation by the Observer. But under most of its existing partnerships, the district still controls employees’ wage and relations. This time, the school board ceded virtually all financial and operational control of the three schools to TFS-Texas,  according to drafts of the partnership contracts posted on the district’s website. 

“Third Future Schools will manage the day-to-day operations of the campus, including hiring staff and implementing its instructional model and curriculum. SAISD remains ultimately responsible for the school’s academic performance and state accountability rating,” Laura Short, a San Antonio ISD spokesperson told the Observer. 

On February 17, board members of the Central Texas district Killeen ISD voted to turn over Manor Middle School to TFS-Texas.

According to a video of the board meeting, board member Marvin Rainwater addressed Killeen Superintendent Terri Osborne, saying “You presented rigorous requirements for this and this is the only charter school in the state of Texas that’s recognized by TEA that does this.” 

Osborne replied: “Yes, sir. That’s correct.”

In an interview, Rainwater told the Observer, “I guess the decision-making part was, are we going to go with Third Future? Or are we going to try again and roll the dice with the agency taking over and let those guys come in and replace the board?” 

Rainwater said the board made the decision “at a crisis time [based on] what we thought was best for our students,” but he’s concerned about the program’s sustainability. “I just don’t see how this is a lasting remedy for our kids.”

In an interview, Waco ISD superintendent Tiffany Spicer told the Observer that TEA provided only two choices for an 1882 partner for the 2026-27 school year. “We heard that another one is possible, but I hadn’t heard of them from too many people. We had not received too much feedback on them and who they partnered with throughout the state.” 

The Wichita Falls superintendent, Lee, told the Observer that Third Future “has done a good job at Hirschi for us in terms of the metrics,” which informed the board’s decision. Test scores have gone up, he said. 

During an October 13 board meeting, Debbie Dipprey, who was then the district’s director of school administration, described another aspect of the partnership to board members, “There’s not a lot of room for differences,” Dipprey said. “You’re talking about an extended school day, extended school year, extended blocks for reading and math … less time in social studies, less time in electives, less time in science classes.”

The post Mike Miles’ Former Charter School Network Expands Its Footprint in Texas appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Though journalism remains an unlicensed profession, and standards do vary across news outlets, some rules are very broadly accepted. The most common reference point is the code of ethics of the Society for Professional Journalists (SPJ), which compiles guidelines that aim to keep practitioners honest, minimize unintended harm, and build trust.

For example, journalists are supposed to write under their real names. They are supposed to verify information before reporting it, and they should take particular care when dealing with juveniles. For a news outlet to report unconfirmed criminal allegations against a minor under a fake name—again, for example—would be atypical at best, if not a blatant violation of journalistic ethics. 

Last month, that is exactly what happened when The Dallas Express published an article about a son of state Representative Gene Wu, a Houston Democrat. 

For those unfamiliar, The Dallas Express is an unusual news outlet in a number of ways. Formed in 2021, the nonprofit repurposed the brand of a historic progressive Black newspaper that went defunct in the 1970s. It purports to produce spin-free, fact-based news, though it has consistently operated as a right-wing outlet. The Express’ own ethics code states that the outlet “does not use anonymous sources,” but it does not specify whether it uses fictitious bylines. Its founder, publisher, and board member, Monty Bennett, is a Republican megadonor and hotelier who lives in the Dallas area, and its current CEO, Chris Putnam, is a former Republican congressional candidate and ex-Tarrant County GOP officer. The Express sometimes discloses Bennett’s ties to local political and business issues in relevant articles and sometimes does not, including in articles about astroturf advocacy groups that Bennett helped seed.

Early on, the Express website was found to share technical infrastructure with a network of partisan pay-to-play websites that purport to produce local news. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit—a tax status that comes with a prohibition on political campaigning—the outlet has run advertisements for Republican candidates.

X post from Bennett criticizing other media (Courtesy/Monty Bennett X)

On March 16, The Dallas Express published an article reporting allegations about one of Wu’s two sons. In addition to being a state rep, Wu is the House’s Democratic caucus leader. 

Titled “Controversial Texas Rep. Gene Wu’s Son’s ‘Concerning’ Behavior At Prominent Private School Reported To DPS After Knife Incident,” the article was quickly spread by Republican politicians and right-wing influencers on social media. “Denaturalize and deport,” wrote Bo French, former chairman of the Tarrant County GOP and current primary runoff candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission (RRC), in a post on X sharing the article. Yahoo News, which has a syndication partnership with The Dallas Express, distributed the article to its readers. 

The article cites unspecified reports and unnamed “law enforcement officials” in reporting that Wu’s son, a minor who attends a private school in the Houston area, allegedly showed an approximately 10-inch plastic knife to classmates after school hours, among other supposed behavioral issues. 

The author of the article is listed as “J Galt,” the only staff member on The Dallas Express organizational chart who lacks a headshot. According to a former Express employee, who worked there when the name “J Galt” began appearing on articles and who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal due to signing a non-disclosure agreement, the byline does not correspond to a real person.

“Galt was a fake name we could use on the byline when we got assigned stories we didn’t want to write,” the staffer told the Texas Observer in late March. “It started when Chris Putnam was CEO, but there wasn’t an announcement or anything about it. It kind of just started happening.”

John Galt is a central character named in the opening line of Atlas Shrugged, the well-known novel by Ayn Rand, a favorite writer of many on the political right.

Bennett and Putnam did not respond to the Observer’s requests for comment for this article. Wu and his wife, journalist Miya Shay, also did not provide comment.

“The Dallas Express ‘news story’ about Texas state Representative and House Democratic Caucus Chairman Gene Wu’s juvenile son does not pass the ethical sniff test, from its newsworthiness to its use of anonymous sources and a fake byline,” Dan Axelrod, a journalist and professor who chairs the SPJ’s ethics committee, told the Observer.

Two other professors echoed Axelrod’s concerns.

“The idea of writing under a pseudonym is really problematic,” said the University of Texas at Austin’s John Schwartz, who described the article as “an incredible hit job” as well as “gossip and sleaze.” 

Schwartz said there are certain exceptions when author pseudonyms might be permitted, such as when journalists live in dangerous places where identifying them could pose imminent security risks, in which cases the reason should be disclosed. No disclosure or justification is present in the Express article.

“This appears to be using a pseudonym because they’re doing something underhanded,” Schwartz said. “For a reader to trust you, they have to know who you are. And to create a fake name, as opposed to a no-byline, adds another level of subterfuge to this.”

Texas A&M journalism professor Mariano Castillo also questioned the article’s reliance on anonymous sources, which is prohibited by the Express’ own code of ethics.

“The best practice when characterizing unnamed and anonymous sources is to always be as specific as possible,” said Castillo, who told the Observer the article is “problematic” and raises serious ethical questions. “In this story … a lot of stuff gets attributed simply to officials.” 

SPJ’s ethics code states that anonymity should only be used when information can be obtained in no other way, the source faces danger, and an explanation is given (as the Observer did above with the former Express employee). In practice, some outlets are more liberal in granting anonymity.

In addition to unnamed law enforcement sources, the Express article cites unspecified “reports” from the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Houston Regional Intelligence Service Center, which consolidates data from local, state, and federal agencies. Neither responded to the Observer’s requests for comment for this story. The Observer has filed related public information requests.

Various laws typically shield minors from the release of educational and criminal records outside exceptional circumstances. Moreover, The Dallas Express did not report that Wu’s son had been charged with any crime.

The Express article effectively identifies the juvenile, who can be one of only two individuals, through circumstantial information. The Express’ own code of ethics states that “Juvenile suspects can only be identified when they have been charged as adults.” 

Axelrod said: “Despite not naming the child or the school, the prominence of the student’s father and The Dallas Express’s mention of the child’s attendance at a Houston-area private school are enough to identify the student relatively easily.”

The Express article also superfluously states, in two separate instances, that both Wu and his wife—a Houston TV reporter—were born in China. Wu, a combative online personality himself, has long been the subject of racist and xenophobic attacks from the political right.

The second half of the article, under the subheading “Other Controversies Surrounding Wu,” features an X post from French, the RRC candidate, accusing the Houstonian lawmaker of being a “puppet” of the Chinese Communist Party.

Mudslinging is common in politics, of course, but “There’s been an unwritten rule forever that if you’re in the middle of a political fight, leave the kids out,” Schwartz said. 

In breaking that rule last month, the Express also seems to have broken with its own purported policies and that of the journalism profession—an industry fighting for its credibility against a rising tide of misinformation—broadly speaking.

“No ethical journalist would mistake the Dallas Express reporting on Rep. Wu’s son as anything even remotely resembling fair, newsworthy journalism,” Axelrod said. “[It] appears to be a hit piece masquerading as journalism … [an] example of a news outlet with a history of distorted and vindictive reportage training its sights on the child of a state representative it opposes.”

The post ‘Gossip and Sleaze’: Dallas Express Smears State Rep’s Son Under Fake Byline appeared first on The Texas Observer.

For years, climate scientists have projected that South Texas would grow hotter and drier—that drought cycles would lengthen, that rainfall would become less reliable, and that the water systems built for a wetter century would eventually face conditions they were never designed to absorb. In Corpus Christi, that projection has become a daily operational reality.

As of early 2026, according to recent monitoring data, Lake Corpus Christi stands at just over 9 percent of capacity, and Choke Canyon Reservoir, the city’s other primary source, is below 8 percent full. City planning scenarios suggest a formal Level 1 water emergency, requiring mandatory cuts across all users, could be declared as early as May. Some city planning models now account for no meaningful rainfall for the remainder of the year—not as a worst case, but as a planning baseline.

What is unfolding here is, at its core, a timing failure. This is not a failure of prediction; the science has been consistent for decades. It is a failure of alignment. The climate is changing faster than the infrastructure built to manage it. South Texas is drying. The reservoirs that supply the city were structured around conditions that are no longer stable. The industrial demand layered on top of that system—formed under hydrological conditions that have since shifted and reflect the water availability of a wetter decade— has no mechanism to recalibrate when the rainfall those commitments assumed stops arriving. This is a synchronization failure between climate systems and human systems. The reservoirs are where that gap becomes measurable.

Choke Canyon fell from 47 percent to 11 percent capacity between October 2021 and October 2025 alone. That four-year decline is the physical signature of a five-year drought that has kept the Corpus Christi area in persistent moderate to severe drought conditions, with year-to-date rainfall running at less than 60 percent of normal, according to regional climate data. This is what climate-driven aridification looks like at the reservoir level—slow, cumulative, and indifferent to development patterns established in wetter years.

The drought did not create the industrial water demand, it exposed its limits. Since 2015, petrochemical plants, steel mills, and liquefied natural gas export facilities came to the region with assurances that enough water would be available. Those assurances were made against a rainfall baseline that the drought has since revised, and under hydrological conditions that climate projections had already suggested would not hold. What was promised as an abundant water supply was, in effect, water that depended on hydrological conditions that did not persist, and now, under drought conditions that climate science had long flagged as likely, the gap between promise and supply has become a crisis.

Industrial facilities now account for 50 to 60 percent of the city’s total water consumption. Individual facilities can consume several billion gallons annually—reflecting the scale at which industrial demand now operates within a system that was never sized for prolonged drought at this level of consumption.

The deferred solution has a name and a cost. The proposed Inner Harbor desalination plant has been discussed for more than a decade. As cost estimates ballooned from around $750 million to $1.3 billion, the city voted to cancel it in September 2025. The worsening water emergency has since put it back on the table, with a vote on a revived proposal from a new contractor expected this month. But current timelines suggest the plant is unlikely to come online before 2028, a solution measurable in years for a crisis measurable in months.

Emergency measures are now underway. The city is drilling a wellfield and pursuing groundwater purchases. The largest remaining reservoir, Lake Texana, located about 100 miles away, is currently 55 percent full but could fall to around 30 percent by summer. Each of these measures buys time. None of them resolves the underlying mismatch between what the climate is delivering and what the infrastructure assumes.

What makes Corpus Christi significant as a case is not that the drought was unpredictable. It is that the drought was predicted, and that the planning systems in place were calibrated to conditions that are no longer stable. Research led by Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon projects that Texas could face conditions drier than those any megadrought of the last thousand years by the latter half of this century. The state water plan, researchers noted, does not explicitly account for climate change in its supply or demand projections—and the probability of exceeding the 1950s “drought of record,” still the benchmark for state planning, is increasing year by year.

State projections suggest an 18 percent decline in water supply combined with a 9 percent increase in demand by 2070. Those numbers describe a structural imbalance that has no analog in the planning frameworks under which the current industrial commitments were made.

According to regional climate records, the volatility itself is a signal: Last year ranked among the driest on record for the region, while 2021 was the wettest in 30 years. Planning systems built around averages fail when the distribution of wet and dry years shifts this dramatically. The 2021 wet year likely generated the false comfort that allowed another round of industrial commitments to proceed on optimistic water assumptions.

The lesson Corpus Christi offers is not primarily about desalination financing, or any particular vote, or which companies consume how many gallons. It is about synchronization. As Shannon Marquez, a professor at the Columbia Water Center, has noted: This is not an isolated crisis. It is consistent with how things will unfold in water-stressed regions that have not yet begun to plan.

The Texas Water Development Board’s own analysis estimates a severe drought could cause $153 billion in annual economic damages by 2070 if new water sources are not developed. Yet the state water plan was built against a hydrological baseline that climate science says is already receding. Industrial water contracts were negotiated against rainfall averages that the drought cycle is now revising in real time.

Corpus Christi is not exceptional; it is early. The same existing development patterns, the same infrastructure deferral, the same gap between industrial water commitments and actual climate-adjusted supply—these conditions are present across South and West Texas, wherever reservoirs are falling and drought projections are sharpening. What the city’s crisis demands is not a post-mortem. It demands a planning architecture built around the climate variables that were once projections and are now operational realities.

The climate does not negotiate with infrastructure timelines. In Corpus Christi, the forecast arrived before the infrastructure did. Other Texas cities are likely to encounter the same alignment problem as their reservoirs decline.

The post The Corpus Christi Water Crisis Isn’t Exceptional. It’s Early. appeared first on The Texas Observer.