Dawn Miller was a true believer in Mike Miles when she started working, in March 2023, for the charter school nonprofit network Miles had founded seven years prior.
Miles started Third Future Schools (TFS) in Colorado in 2016 and later expanded to Texas, where he promised that his reform program, the “New Education System,” could turn around struggling public schools. Miller began working for Third Future Schools-Texas (TFS-Texas)—a separate nonprofit operating under the Colorado parent organization—as a teacher of a class that Miles designed called the “Art of Thinking” at Ector College Prep Middle School, a public school the charter network ran under a contract with Ector County ISD in the West Texas oil town of Odessa. Then, starting in August 2023, Miller served as an assistant principal at Sam Houston Collegiate Prep Elementary School, another TFS-Texas school in neighboring Midland ISD.
Before TFS-Texas was contracted to operate Sam Houston Collegiate Prep in 2020, the school had received failing ratings—a designation including D, F, or “Improvement Required”—for four years running from the Texas Education Agency (TEA). Under state law, if a campus fails for five consecutive years, TEA can take over the entire school district and replace its elected board with state-appointed managers. This harsh sanction can be avoided under another law, 2017’s Senate Bill 1882, which allows a district to hand over individual struggling schools to private operators in exchange for extra funding and a two-year reprieve from takeover.
