Texas will add exactly one new open-enrollment charter operator this year, after the State Board of Education signed off on Texas High School for Accelerated Learning, the single applicant the Texas Education Agency (TEA) advanced from a field of 18.
The board voted 10-4 with one abstention to approve the application, according to Our Schools Our Democracy, a group that tracks charter authorizations, clearing the operator to open for the 2026-27 school year.
Of the 18 groups that applied last December in the Generation 31 cycle, TEA forwarded only Texas High School for Accelerated Learning to the board, Texas Ed News reported. Under state law the elected board’s role is limited: it can veto a commissioner’s charter recommendation but cannot add applicants of its own.
The single-approval continues a pattern of tight state gatekeeping even as Texas expands other school-choice options, including the new Texas Education Freedom Account program now depositing funds for tens of thousands of families.
Texas High School for Accelerated Learning plans to open two dropout-recovery campuses in North Houston, in the Aldine and Spring school districts, aimed at students who have left or fallen behind in traditional high schools. Dropout-recovery models serve a population that conventional campuses often struggle to reach, and supporters cast the approval as adding an option for older, off-track students who might otherwise not finish.
For those students, a targeted recovery campus can be the difference between a diploma and none at all.
The application also drew organized opposition, and the strongest objections turn on the operator’s track record and structure. The school intends to contract out its operations to Second Mile Education, a for-profit company based in Florida and owned by private-equity firms, testimony before the board claimed.
Critics, including Our Schools Our Democracy and the Texas American Federation of Teachers, argued that arrangement raises accountability questions. Second Mile’s Florida campuses reported an average graduation rate of 42.15% across 21 campuses in 2024-25, according to Florida Department of Education data compiled by Our Schools Our Democracy — about 26 percentage points below the existing dropout-recovery campus in Aldine ISD that opponents held up as a benchmark.
Board members who voted no cited those numbers and the private-equity ownership in questioning whether the new campuses would set students up to succeed.
Supporters counter that dropout-recovery schools are measured differently than comprehensive high schools, since they enroll students who have already disengaged, and that a low graduation rate at intake reflects the population served rather than the model’s ceiling. The state’s accountability system rates dropout-recovery campuses on a separate methodology for that reason.
Texas High School for Accelerated Learning delivers will ultimately be tested against Texas’s own outcome measures once its campuses enroll students and post results.