Most days at Manor Middle School are quiet and focused. Students walk to the right of hallways in a single file line, the walls are mostly bare and core classes are 90-minute blocks of pure instruction.
But that wasn’t always the case at the school located in Manor, TX, just outside of Austin.
“Last year it was pretty loud. I think it was more like a day care,” said Ximena Rodriguez, an eighth grader at Manor. “I feel like we didn’t really learn that much.”
Last year, the 2024-25 school year, Manor received an F-rating from the state’s accountability system, meant to measure how much students are learning. The school also got failing ratings for two years prior.
But state test results could look different soon for the Manor Independent School District campus. Last year, Manor ISD partnered with Third Future Schools, a school network known for quickly turning failing campuses around by zeroing in on math and literacy scores.
The partnership effectively gave TFS control of Manor Middle School through a three-year contract, where Manor ISD still owns the building but TFS has nearly all control in terms of who is hired, what is taught and how it’s taught.
By the 2026-27 school year, TFS will also assume control of four San Antonio schools: Brentwood Middle School in Edgewood ISD; as well as Tafolla Middle School, Ogden Elementary School and Hirsch Elementary School in San Antonio ISD.
School boards at both districts agreed to the partnerships in March, receiving backlash from parents and community members pushing to keep local control. But district officials said it was the only way to keep the schools open.
Those four schools faced consecutive years of failing ratings from the state, and district administrators expect another bad grade this year.
After a campus receives three failing ratings in a row in Texas, the state is allowed to intervene in a school district by either closing the school, setting up a conservatorship or using another measure of control.
After five years of failing ratings, state law requires a takeover where the Texas Education Agency can replace elected school boards and superintendents with a board of managers and a state-appointed superintendent.
Edgewood ISD and SAISD want to avoid this fate, or at least, buy the districts more time to turn around the schools’ scores.
Passed in 2017, Senate Bill 1882 incentivizes districts to partner with outside groups in order to get thousands of additional state dollars for schools.
Entering into one of these lucrative deals also buys the district a few more years to turn a falling campus around and avoid state intervention.
While dollar amounts vary by campus and outside operator, Third Future Schools receives about $1,200 per student on top of the funding the district normally gets from the state.
“Many of these schools have had multiple years of academically unacceptable performance, and what saved several of them was during COVID there was a year that many schools got a C-rating, which reset the clock,” said Shawn Bird, deputy superintendent at SAISD, on the day board members approved the partnership. “It has been a problem for many years, and we have to reverse that trajectory for our students.”
TFS will officially take control of three schools in SAISD and one in Edgewood ISD this summer.
Who is Third Future Schools?
Based in Colorado, Third Future Schools operates several schools across Texas, Louisiana and Colorado.
In Texas, the network partners with Austin ISD, Manor ISD, Midland ISD, Jasper ISD and Wichita Falls ISD, and recently ended a partnership with Beaumont ISD because the TFS didn’t receive payment from the district.
TFS was founded by Mike Miles, currently the state-appointed superintendent of Houston ISD, who implemented a very similar model at several schools in that district after it was taken over by the state in 2023.
Often criticized for its strict methods, TFS leaders say their model was built to accelerate learning, especially in the high-needs areas they typically serve.
At Manor Middle School, in which TFS has been operating since the start of the 2025-26 school year, nearly 80% of students are considered economically disadvantaged, 65.3% are Hispanic and 22.1% are Black.
The San Antonio campuses the network is set to take over this year have similar demographics.
“We don’t run military schools, we’re just a very structured learning environment,” said Zach Craddock, superintendent of Third Future Schools, during a May 7 tour of Manor Middle School.
“We build our schools to serve the most at-risk students,” he said.
An average day at Manor Middle School
Classes at Manor Middle School start promptly at 8:10 a.m., but the building opens every day at 6:30 a.m. to allow students to get there earlier.
What follows is four 90-minute class blocks for core subjects such as reading, math, science and social studies.
The first 45 minutes are purely instructional, as teachers guide students through pre-selected work packets.
Every three to four minutes, a timer beeps, and the teacher pauses for temperature checks. These checks involve cold-calling on students, asking students to rate how well they understand the content on a scale of one to five or doing the “whiparound,” when students stand up for a few seconds to improve blood circulation.
“You’ll never see students idle,” said Latoya Miley, deputy superintendent at TFS and a previous administrator at Houston ISD.
After the first 45 minutes, students are quizzed on the material. TFS calls it a “demonstration of learning.”
Students who do well leave the room to keep working on packets at “team centers,” large rooms lined with individual desks manned by learning coaches.
Students who don’t do well are held back in the room for more individualized instruction.
“It’s differentiation at the highest level,” Miley said as she guided the tour from one classroom to another.
Manor’s library serves as one of the school’s team centers. There is no librarian inside, and students don’t have scheduled library visits but can access any of the material, officials said.
After class ends, there’s no bell to send students off to their next class. Students are only dismissed by teachers, and they walk to their next class in a single file line as staff survey the hallways reminding students to walk along the right wall.
The lack of noise and color on the walls is intentional, Miley said. “The goal is to see more white space… less distraction.”
Outside their core classes, students get one elective and one “dyad,” a class similar to an elective where students get instruction and hands-on experience. At Manor, dyads include photography, cooking, mixed martial arts and cosmetology.
Electives and dyads are selected by the principal and based on student demand and availability of local contractors.
Art teachers, for example, are locally contracted, instead of hired full time.
The network also kept the school’s UIL-competing sports teams like football, soccer and volleyball, which operate after the school day ends at 3:40 p.m.
Students don’t get any homework since they work a lot during the school day, and most don’t bring a backpack to school. Everything is provided for them. All TFS students get free breakfast and lunch.
Operating in elementary schools too, TFS uses the same model for grades 2-5, and a traditional educational program with a heavy focus on literacy for kindergarten and first grade.
Serving vulnerable populations
Part of the Third Future Schools model includes a proactive approach when dealing with discipline issues.
For Jeremiah Willis, principal at Manor Middle School, it’s about “catching smoke before it becomes fire.”
There’s usually a heavy adult presence in the hallways during passing periods and even during class periods. Students place bright traffic cones outside the bathroom when using it, to signal how many students are in the bathroom at once.
If disruptive, students are removed from classrooms and continue receiving instruction with an administrator or virtually access live lessons from a different room.
“Those systems and routines cut down on a lot,” Willis said. “I can probably count on one hand, and I’m not making that up, how many fights we’ve had this year.”
It’s what’s needed for difficult turnaround work, officials say.
“Ultimately, if parents felt our model does not work for their child, parents would make that decision for their student and follow the district choice application process,” said a TFS spokesperson when asked what happens when the model doesn’t work for a student.
Under the 1882 partnership, TFS campuses become open-enrollment charter schools, and school districts usually encourage families to apply for transfers, but school choice policies vary by district and they don’t guarantee transfers.
As for special education students, Manor has a “life skills” wing for about 13 students with severe learning disabilities and a handful of inclusion classrooms, which blend general and special education students.
Nearly half of Manor’s students do not speak English as their first language, but TFS only offers instruction in English. There are no ESL or dual language classrooms, but there are translation services and students are pulled out of classrooms for English-learning services, Craddock said.
“The four domains of language acquisition are reading, writing, listening, speaking, and kids are doing that all day long,” he said.
Measuring effectiveness
SB 1882 partners are measured on the state’s accountability system and their financial stability, an issue which has raised flags for some community members after learning Third Future Schools would come to San Antonio.
In 2024, media reports accused the network of diverting Texas funds to its schools in Colorado. TFS officials said it wasn’t true, and the TEA investigated the claim, finding there was “no merit to the allegations… that state funds were being inappropriately diverted from public school students in Texas.”
As for the network’s academic effectiveness, Craddock credits TFS hiring practices.
TFS only hires certified teachers and does not use substitute teachers. Teachers are also paid based on “effectiveness,” rather than years of experience, a model often used by traditional public schools.
The average pay for a TFS teacher is $75,000, and their teachers are incentivized to keep working with the network as it partners with new districts through bonuses. For comparison, teachers at SAISD start out at $60,000, and it takes 30 years of experience to reach a base salary of $74,178. However, SAISD and other districts have slowly been implementing different pay models based on effectiveness in recent years.
Ector College Prep Academy, a middle school in Odessa’s Ector County ISD, went from an “F” to a “B” rating within the first year that TFS took over. For the next two years, the school maintained a B, and the board chose not to renew the three-year contract after the 2023-24 school year.
At Mendez Middle School in Austin ISD, the network took the campus from an “F” to a “B” within a year, dropping to a “C” the second year of the contract but then bumping back up to a “B” the third year. Like in Ector County, the partnership ended on good terms after the 2024-25 school year.
There’s similar stories at schools still under contract, including in Midland ISD and Jasper ISD.
While TFS uses a national test to measure growth in math and literacy, it’s hard to tell how sustainable the academic growth is once TFS leaves a campus it successfully turned around using the Texas accountability system.
A year after leaving Ector College Prep, for example, the school received a D rating for the 2024-25 school year, and ratings for the 2025-26 school year won’t be published until later this year.
Wyatt Stutsman, an eighth grader at Manor Middle School, said the new system of learning something every three minutes can be a “bit much.”
“But I do think it’s really helpful,” he said.
If he could change something, Stutsman would want more resources in the learning centers and more opportunities for students to earn high school credits in advanced classes, something Manor students didn’t have access to this year because there weren’t enough students performing above grade level.
Next year, however, Manor will offer Algebra I and a couple of other high-school level courses, officials said.
Rodriguez, also an eighth grader at Manor, said being under Third Future Schools can feel overwhelming at first, but she’s adjusted to it and likes the consistency and structure on campus.
“You really get used to it,” she said. “And you grow into, like, having that much work every day.”
