An apparent meeting, a glowing conference review, and a merit-pay question form a public-record sequence Academy District 20 cannot simply shrug away.
Most Academy District 20 parents have probably never heard of Mike Miles.
A public-record screenshot shows D20 board member Eddie Waldrep standing beside him at the Colorado Leaders for Academic Success conference held February 20 and 21, 2026.
That matters because Miles is not some education podcaster with a ring light and a white paper. He is the state-appointed superintendent of Houston Independent School District, the former superintendent of Dallas ISD and Harrison School District 2, and the founder of Third Future Schools.
More importantly, his career is closely associated with performance-based teacher compensation, intensive classroom monitoring, standardized instructional systems, test-driven accountability, and top-down school reform.
Then Waldrep returned from the CLAS conference, praised what he saw, encouraged D20 to examine what CLAS offers, and later asked when D20 might consider “something like merit-based pay.”
A photograph is not a policy memo.
It is also not an eraser.
The photograph is not the whole story. The sequence is.
A screenshot received through a CORA production and reviewed by the D20 Accountability Project shows Waldrep standing beside Miles in front of a CLAS banner.
The accompanying message refers to Air Academy students “getting some filming experience” and identifies “Mike Miles, Houston ISD Superintendent.”
Board meeting transcripts confirm that the CLAS conference in question occurred February 20 and 21, 2026.
That date matters. So does what happened next.
During D20’s March 12 board meeting, Waldrep said he had attended the CLAS conference. He called it “really well done,” praised its “focus on academic outcomes,” mentioned that Air Academy’s media team had been there filming, and said D20 could benefit from examining more of what CLAS offers.
Then, during D20’s May 4 special board meeting, Waldrep asked when the district might have the flexibility to consider “something like merit-based pay.”
He said he was not proposing immediate adoption and wanted to understand the “pros and cons.”
Fine. That is the fairness note.
It is not a sedative.
The photograph did not make the Mike Miles connection relevant. Waldrep’s own microphone did.
Who is Mike Miles?
Miles has held unusually powerful positions in public education.
He previously led Harrison School District 2 in Colorado Springs and Dallas ISD. He founded Third Future Schools in 2016. In June 2023, the Texas Education Agency selected him to run Houston ISD during a state intervention.
This was not a normal superintendent search conducted by Houston voters’ elected representatives. The Texas Education Agency’s announcement says an appointed Board of Managers temporarily replaced Houston’s elected trustees while Miles became superintendent.
D20 is not under a state takeover. No reviewed record says anyone is proposing one.
But the conditions under which Miles exercises authority still matter when evaluating his governing philosophy: concentrated administrative control, aggressive performance management, and a willingness to redesign how teachers are evaluated, directed, and paid.
That is a résumé, not an indictment.
The red flag is what parts of that résumé might be attracting attention inside D20.
The Miles model comes with a label
This is not critics stapling a scary slogan onto Miles. His school systems printed the label themselves.
An official Dallas ISD evaluation of the Teacher Excellence Initiative describes the program developed during Miles’s tenure as replacing the traditional salary schedule with effectiveness levels and differentiating teacher salaries using performance and student-achievement measures.
Houston ISD now says essentially the same thing in brighter branding.
Its current strategic plan says the district is adopting a “pay-for-performance” model rewarding educators for student achievement, instructional quality, and contributions to their schools.
The plan also says Miles’s New Education System operates in 130 schools using a “clear and consistent instructional framework,” extensive coaching, aligned curriculum, calibrated evaluators, and real-time classroom data.
Those are HISD’s words.
Merit-based pay and pay-for-performance are not necessarily identical programs. But they belong to the same policy family: teacher compensation increasingly determined by selected performance measures rather than primarily by experience, credentials, or a conventional salary schedule.
So when Waldrep asks about merit-based pay shortly after encountering one of the country’s most prominent practitioners of that approach, the public is entitled to more than a cheerful coincidence shrug.
No corkboard and red yarn required.
The official recordings are enough to ask questions.
The Miles model has already carried a curriculum controversy into Colorado
Anyone tempted to wave this away as a Houston problem should look southwest.
In May 2026, Montezuma-Cortez School District RE-1 adopted a school-improvement model borrowed from Miles’s Houston ISD. Administrators then selected Bluebonnet Learning for elementary English language arts and math because Houston had already repackaged the Texas curriculum into classroom-ready materials for its New Education System.
The district’s executive director of curriculum, Justin Schmitt, explained the logic with unusual candor: “We don’t want to piecemeal the model.” He said the district wanted to embrace the Houston model “in its entirety.”
That whole-package mentality promptly ran into Colorado reality.
Bluebonnet was designed around Texas standards, was not on Colorado’s approved list of evidence-based reading curricula, and included Bible-based content in multiple grade levels. Administrators announced that Montezuma-Cortez would use it before the school board had voted to adopt it.
Then came the cleanup operation.
Superintendent Eddie Ramirez issued an open letter to parents, staff, and the community promising that the district would not use the material for religious instruction and would review, remove, or modify content that conflicted with Colorado standards or the expectations of a public-school program.
The official August 11 special board meeting agenda makes the Houston connection impossible to miss. It paired consideration of Bluebonnet as the district’s K-5 English language arts and math curriculum with an amended Houston ISD memorandum of understanding and multiple curriculum distribution agreements.
As of this review, the public portal exposes the agenda, not adopted minutes. The record therefore proves that district leaders brought the package forward for board consideration. It does not, by itself, prove the final vote or how much of the material reached classrooms.
But the sequence is already damning enough: import another district’s reform package, announce the curriculum before a public vote, discover that the Texas materials contain religious content and are not Colorado-approved, and promise local review after the controversy breaks.
This does not prove that Waldrep or D20 plans to import Bluebonnet. It proves something more immediate: the Miles model is portable, it is already being exported inside Colorado, and curriculum can arrive as part of the package.
That is why a D20 board member’s enthusiasm for the Miles-adjacent CLAS ecosystem deserves scrutiny now, before anyone offers parents a shrink-wrapped “transformation” plan and calls questions resistance to accountability.
Miles still has documented Colorado Springs ties
Miles’s Colorado involvement did not end when he left Harrison.
He founded Third Future Schools, which continues to operate in Colorado and lists Colorado Springs’ Coperni 3 among its schools. When Miles accepted the Houston position, Third Future’s announcement said he would continue providing its leadership with support and counsel.
Miles also appears on the current Parents Challenge board page alongside Colorado Springs education figure Stephen M. Schuck. An IRS-origin 2023 Form 990 filing listed Miles as a trustee working approximately 0.2 hours per week without reportable compensation.
These are formal organizational records, not social-media proximity.
They do not prove that Third Future, Parents Challenge, Schuck, or CLAS arranged the Waldrep encounter. They do not prove a coordinated plan for D20.
They do show that Miles has documented organizational ties inside the Colorado Springs education-policy ecosystem.
That makes transparency more important, not less.
Mike Miles, Steve Schuck, and the Betsy DeVos network
Steve Schuck is not just a kindly local philanthropist whose name happens to appear beside Mike Miles on the Parents Challenge board. He has spent decades promoting a market-based campaign against the traditional public-school system.
To be precise, Schuck is not anti-education, and Parents Challenge assists some families who choose traditional public schools. His project is anti-public-system. He wants the publicly governed system replaced by a competitive marketplace in which education dollars follow families into traditional public, charter, private, or home-school settings.
That is not speculation. It is Schuck’s own position.
In a 2019 interview, Schuck called the public education system a “monopoly,” blamed teacher unions for declining performance, and said the solution was to break that monopoly by creating a marketplace that would force schools to compete for students. He also defended merit pay and performance-based compensation for teachers. Read Schuck’s interview.
In 2024, Schuck made the agenda even more explicit. He again called for breaking the monopoly, demanded that education dollars follow parents, and advocated paying high-performing teachers more while paying poorer performers less or nothing. Read Schuck’s column.
Call it “educational freedom” if you prefer the donor brochure. It is still a governing philosophy that treats public education as a market, teachers as competing production units, and public funding as portable purchasing power.
Parents Challenge is not merely a scholarship program. It is a scholarship program attached to a much larger political project.
And Betsy DeVos is not some distant ideological cousin.
Parents Challenge’s own account says DeVos keynoted its twentieth anniversary celebration and thanks her for both her leadership and her friendship. Read the Parents Challenge event recap.
A contemporaneous Gazette report quoted Schuck saying he and DeVos had worked together nationally for decades. It also reported that the DeVos family had supported Parents Challenge and that Schuck advised Dick DeVos during his campaign for governor of Michigan.
Schuck even jokingly called himself and Betsy DeVos “co-conspirators in the battle for school choice.”
That is Schuck’s wording. It documents a longstanding political alliance, not a crime. Read the Gazette report.
This does not prove that Miles has a personal relationship with DeVos. It establishes something narrower and still important: the organization whose board currently lists Miles is part of a longstanding DeVos-aligned school-choice network.
That makes Miles’s Parents Challenge role relevant context, not a decorative biography item.
Mike Miles and Brad Miller: the Third Future connection
Then there is D20’s own legal counsel, because apparently Colorado education reform has a remarkably small address book.
The D20 Accountability Project’s Brad Miller investigation provides the local context. Miller Farmer Carlson’s website identifies Miller as the firm’s founder.
A July 18, 2023 proposal from that firm, preserved in an official Doral Academy board packet, states that Miller Farmer Carlson was serving as general counsel to Third Future Schools. The proposal also identifies the practice as the successor to the Law Office of Brad A. Miller. Read the Doral Academy board packet.
Third Future Schools was the charter and school-turnaround network Miles built and led.
Less than seven weeks before the Miller Farmer Carlson proposal, Third Future announced that Miles was leaving its chief executive position for Houston but would remain involved and provide support and counsel to its leadership.
The documented chain is straightforward:
- Miles built and led Third Future Schools.
- Third Future said Miles would remain involved during the 2023 transition.
- Miller Farmer Carlson said it was serving as Third Future’s general counsel.
- Brad Miller is the firm’s founder.
- D20 retained that same firm as general counsel effective February 1, 2026. Read the D20 engagement record.
The February 20 and 21 CLAS conference occurred less than three weeks after Miller Farmer Carlson’s D20 representation began.
This does not prove Brad Miller personally advised Miles. The 2023 proposal was signed by Bryce Carlson, not Miller. It does not establish that the firm still represents Third Future today. It does not prove that Miller, Miles, and Waldrep coordinated anything.
It does prove an institutional bridge between Miles’s organization and the law firm D20 later retained.
That overlap becomes considerably more relevant when Waldrep attends a conference featuring Miles, encourages D20 to investigate what CLAS offers, and later asks the district to consider merit-based pay, one of the policy approaches closely associated with Miles.
At that point, asking who spoke with whom is not conspiracy mongering.
It is basic public oversight.
Fairness check: Houston reports academic gains
A serious warning cannot hide favorable evidence.
In June 2025, the Texas Education Agency credited Houston ISD with significant academic improvements, including what TEA called the highest first-year gains among large Texas districts. The agency extended the intervention through June 2027.
HISD likewise reports major achievement gains under the New Education System.
Ignoring those claims would be lazy.
Treating test-score improvements as a blank check for every feature of the system would be lazier.
D20 parents are entitled to ask what performance measures would control teacher pay, who would select them, how observations would be calibrated, what appeal rights teachers would have, how student needs would be accounted for, and how much classroom autonomy would survive.
“Academic outcomes” is not a magic spell that makes governance questions disappear.
The high-stakes testing shell game
In the Miles, Schuck, and DeVos education universe, the definition of success becomes suspiciously narrow.
Success means higher standardized test scores.
Failure means lower standardized test scores.
Everything else public schools provide is treated as background noise.
Schuck demonstrates this thinking plainly. In his 2024 column, he used grade-level proficiency rates to declare widespread public-school failure, demanded that money “chase success,” and called for higher pay for supposedly successful teachers and less pay, or no pay, for poorer performers.
The column never establishes that a single test score can validly carry all that weight.
It simply assumes the score is the verdict.
DeVos advanced similar accountability-through-testing logic while promoting private-school choice. In written responses during her confirmation process, DeVos defended voucher accountability provisions relying on standardized achievement tests and value-added assessments to measure program achievement. Read the congressional confirmation record.
Miles has turned that philosophy into an operating system.
HISD’s Earned Autonomy Framework could hardly be clearer. It calls achievement the “Primary Determinant” and makes a school’s authority over curriculum, staffing, instructional delivery, and evaluation systems depend heavily on Texas accountability ratings. Read the HISD Earned Autonomy Framework.
For elementary and middle schools, the Texas Student Achievement domain can be based entirely on STAAR performance. The overall accountability rating then gives 70 percent weight to the better result from Student Achievement or School Progress, with Closing the Gaps accounting for the remaining 30 percent.
These domains are not identical, but standardized testing runs through the machinery. Read the Texas 2025 accountability calculations.
Then Miles presents the resulting numbers as proof that his system works.
HISD advertises, for example, that fourth-grade reading increased 14 points since 2023.
That sounds impressive until someone asks the question the public-relations material carefully steps around:
Are those the same children?
No.
The fourth graders tested in 2023 were not still fourth graders in 2026. This is a comparison between one group of fourth graders and a different group of fourth graders several years later.
It is a repeated snapshot. It is not a longitudinal record showing how the same cohort of students progressed through the school system.
Calling that “three years of growth” does not magically transform it into cohort tracking.
It turns a statistical shortcut into a slogan. See how HISD presents its transformation results.
That distinction matters.
Enrollment changes. Students transfer. Families leave. Grade retention changes who gets tested. Test participation changes. The composition of a school changes.
A higher grade-level proficiency rate may reflect genuine learning. It may also reflect a different student population, different testing conditions, or some combination of the two.
The snapshot alone cannot tell us which explanation is true.
To be fair, Texas does include an Academic Growth measure that compares individual students’ current performance with prior performance. It would therefore be inaccurate to say that every part of the Texas accountability system compares unrelated annual snapshots. Read the TEA explanation of progress measures.
But that growth measure does not rescue the larger sales pitch.
HISD repeatedly promotes grade-by-grade proficiency changes and the number of schools receiving A or B ratings as proof of systemwide success. Those headline claims do not follow stable cohorts through their education.
They also do not measure student belonging, school stability, teacher retention, civic preparation, creativity, curiosity, special-education quality, or the many other responsibilities public schools carry.
The problem becomes more serious when those incomplete measures carry high stakes.
Under Miles, ratings help determine how much autonomy a school receives. Test-linked evaluations can affect staffing, compensation, instructional control, and careers.
A noisy and incomplete measurement system is being used not merely to inform decisions, but to control schools and the people working inside them.
The National Research Council has warned about exactly this problem. Its review of test-based accountability found that attaching major consequences to narrow performance measures can produce score inflation, teaching to the test, and improvements that do not necessarily represent broader learning. The researchers specifically warned against taking gains on the incentivized test at face value. Read the National Academies consensus report.
Testing can provide useful information.
It cannot provide the entire definition of education.
When the same people who want to privatize public education also get to define public-school failure using measurements tailored to their preferred conclusion, D20 parents should recognize the trick.
First, reduce education to a test score.
Second, declare the schools failures.
Third, introduce privatization as the rescue plan.
That is not objective accountability.
It is a sales funnel.
What the record proves and what it does not
The reviewed record supports these facts:
- A CORA-production screenshot shows Waldrep with Miles in front of a CLAS banner.
- Board meeting transcripts confirm that the CLAS conference occurred February 20 and 21, 2026.
- The screenshot mentions Air Academy students gaining filming experience.
- Waldrep publicly confirmed attending CLAS and said Air Academy’s media team was there.
- Waldrep praised CLAS and recommended that D20 examine more of its offerings.
- Less than three months later, Waldrep explicitly asked about merit-based pay.
- Miles’s Dallas and Houston systems have used performance-based teacher compensation.
- Montezuma-Cortez administrators selected Bluebonnet after adopting a school-improvement model borrowed from Miles’s Houston ISD.
- The August 11 Montezuma-Cortez agenda paired proposed Bluebonnet adoption with an amended Houston ISD memorandum of understanding and curriculum distribution agreements.
- Miles has documented ties to Third Future Schools and Parents Challenge.
- Schuck has a documented, longstanding political alliance with Betsy DeVos.
- Miller Farmer Carlson previously identified Third Future Schools as a general-counsel client.
- D20 retained Miller Farmer Carlson effective February 1, 2026.
The record does not establish:
- An ongoing personal or professional relationship between Waldrep and Miles.
- That Miles advised Waldrep or influenced his merit-pay question.
- That CLAS, Third Future, Parents Challenge, or Miller Farmer Carlson coordinated the encounter.
- That Brad Miller personally represented or advised Miles.
- That Miller Farmer Carlson still represents Third Future Schools.
- That Air Academy students filmed or interviewed Miles.
- Who authorized, supervised, or paid for student participation.
- That D20 has adopted or formally proposed adopting a Miles, Dallas, Houston, or Third Future model.
- That D20 plans to adopt Bluebonnet or any other Houston curriculum.
- What final action the Montezuma-Cortez board took on August 11 or how much of Bluebonnet reached its classrooms.
That is enough for scrutiny.
It is not enough for a conspiracy claim.
Officials pretending the evidence proves nothing would be just as careless as critics pretending it proves everything.
The cure is records.
Questions D20 should answer now
Before merit pay becomes a study-session slide deck, consulting proposal, or conveniently prepackaged “pilot,” D20 should answer:
- In what capacity did Waldrep attend the February 20 and 21, 2026 CLAS conference?
- Did D20 pay for registration, travel, lodging, meals, equipment, staff time, or student participation?
- What role did Air Academy students and staff have at the conference, and what were they authorized to film?
- Did students film or interview Mike Miles? If so, who requested it and where is the resulting material?
- What communications exist among Waldrep, Miles, CLAS, Third Future Schools, Parents Challenge, D20 administrators, Miller Farmer Carlson, and Air Academy personnel concerning the conference or subsequent policy discussions?
- Did Waldrep’s May merit-pay question arise from anything presented or discussed at CLAS?
- Is D20 currently examining performance-pay, alternative evaluation, standardized instructional, or school-turnaround models?
- Has anyone presented D20 with Bluebonnet, Houston ISD curriculum materials, the New Education System, or any other packaged Miles model?
- Did Miller Farmer Carlson disclose its past or continuing relationship with Third Future Schools before D20 retained the firm?
- Does Miller Farmer Carlson currently represent Third Future Schools, a Third Future affiliate, Parents Challenge, CLAS, or Mike Miles?
- Did D20 perform a written conflicts review concerning overlapping clients, relationships, or confidentiality obligations?
- Did anyone from Miller Farmer Carlson communicate with Waldrep or other D20 officials about Miles, Third Future, CLAS, merit pay, teacher evaluation, school turnaround, curriculum, or governance?
- Will the board release any proposed metrics, costs, evaluation rules, teacher protections, research, presentations, memoranda, or contracts before considering such a model?
Those are not hostile questions.
They are the basic admission price for public trust.
D20 parents should not wait for the sales presentation
Maybe the explanation is boring.
Wonderful. Produce the records and let boring win.
But the public should not have to reverse-engineer a possible policy pipeline from a CORA screenshot, board-meeting recordings, nonprofit records, legal-service proposals, and a law-firm engagement letter.
Waldrep’s contact with Miles does not prove a secret agreement. It does something more modest and more useful.
It identifies an early-warning signal.
A D20 board member encountered a nationally significant superintendent associated with performance-based compensation and test-driven school reform. Waldrep then praised the conference environment where that encounter occurred and encouraged D20 to examine what the organization offered.
Weeks later, he raised merit-based pay from the dais.
Meanwhile, Miles sits on the board of a local organization connected to a decades-long DeVos-aligned privatization campaign. The law firm D20 retained shortly before the conference previously identified Miles’s Third Future Schools as a general-counsel client.
And another Colorado district has already paired a Miles-inspired Houston reform model with Houston-supplied curriculum materials, producing a controversy over Bible-based lessons, Colorado standards, and whether administrators got ahead of their own board.
None of that proves a plot.
It does make “nothing to see here” an especially unserious response.
At some point, the vocabulary stops being atmospheric.
D20 parents do not need to wait for a consultant’s invoice, a pilot program, or a carefully lawyered agenda item before asking who is carrying which education model through the door.
Warnings are supposed to arrive before the policy.
This one just did.
Primary-source record
- D20 March 12, 2026 board recording
- D20 March 12 official agenda
- D20 May 4, 2026 board recording
- D20 May 4 official agenda
- TEA appointment of Miles and Houston’s Board of Managers
- Houston ISD strategic plan
- Houston ISD Earned Autonomy Framework
- Houston ISD transformation results
- Texas 2025 accountability calculations
- TEA progress measures
- Dallas ISD Teacher Excellence Initiative evaluation
- Third Future Schools Miles transition announcement
- Parents Challenge board page
- Parents Challenge IRS filing archive
- Parents Challenge DeVos event recap
- Betsy DeVos congressional confirmation record
- Doral Academy packet identifying Third Future as a Miller Farmer Carlson client
- D20 engagement of Miller Farmer Carlson
- TEA’s 2025 Houston intervention extension
- Montezuma-Cortez superintendent’s August 8, 2026 open letter
- Montezuma-Cortez August 11, 2026 special board meeting agenda and curriculum attachments
- CORA-production screenshot reviewed by the D20 Accountability Project