Michael Hinojosa’s office, a corner suite at the top of Dallas ISD’s headquarters, already looks like that of a boss who’s left his job.

Tidy. Sterile.

“That’s how I have to have it,” Hinojosa said.

It’d be easy to excuse the superintendent, at the tail end of his 13th year running DISD, for having filled the room with piles of papers, messy bookshelves or overstuffed banker’s boxes — totems that would point to his four-decade education career.

But there’s none of that, and certainly no visible sign that within the week, he’ll announce one of the biggest moves in his professional life: leaving education for… something else.

In a way, that fits with Hinojosa’s public persona.

Amid the maelstrom of running an urban school district, Hinojosa keeps up an air of suavity, with an immaculate office, pinstripe suits and a neatly trimmed mustache.

A portrait of Hinojosa’s two tenures in DISD shares this duality.

He oversaw a now-infamous budget disaster but learned from it, leaving the district on solid financial footing with a tax increase and state-record bond passage on his resume.

He inherited experimental — and for some, controversial — efforts from reformer Mike Miles but stayed the course for most of them, iterating and expanding along the way.

He left the district once before, with critics crowing then that he was scampering off for new prospects without fulfilling his promises. Now, Dallas’ civic and education leaders — even those he clashed with — are largely praising him for his service.

“Urban education is very difficult,” said Mike Moses, a former Texas education commissioner. “But if you look at the facilities that are being built in DISD, if you look at the student performance in DISD, if you look at the finances in DISD, I don’t know of any urban district that is in better condition than DISD right now.”

Getting the superintendency ‘bug’

For a boy who grew up in a Mexican immigrant family in Oak Cliff, this perch — leading his hometown school district, the state’s second largest — was hard to fathom.

“How could a kid who used to ride the DART bus, looking up at all those tall buildings, now get to go up there with the Citizens Council, with all the big players?” he said.

A son of a preacher, the Sunset High graduate came back to Dallas in 1979 immediately after getting a teaching degree from Texas Tech with one goal in mind: “All I ever wanted was to be a coach.”

He started that career at Stockard Middle School, moving up to Adamson High School a year later after his high school basketball coach helped get him an interview. Within five years, he was Adamson’s boys head basketball coach, one of the youngest in the history of DISD, he still brags.

In his first year, Hinojosa’s team went 5-22.

“Actually, I thought I was going to be the youngest coach to get hired, and the youngest to get fired,” he said.

But after his coaching career had run its course — Adamson eventually did make the playoffs, and even beat 1987 state champs Hillcrest during the regular season — Hinojosa couldn’t get a sniff at an administrative position in Dallas.

He applied for an assistant principal role at Boude Storey Middle School, only to be unceremoniously rejected: “I didn’t even get an interview.”

He left DISD in 1987 and wouldn’t rejoin for nearly two decades.

An assistant principal role in Grand Prairie turned into a central office job, running the personnel department, and eventually getting promoted to an assistant superintendent position.

Then he “got the bug,” wanting his first superintendency.

Fabens — a small school district 30 miles southeast of El Paso — gave him a shot.

That move, 600 miles from his hometown, was pivotal for Hinojosa, in part because it put him in the orbit of several veteran Latino school leaders. A quartet of area superintendents persuaded Hinojosa to step away from Fabens to lead the regional service center in El Paso.

In that role, Hinojosa said, he “learned what to do, but also learned what not to do.”

“At the service center, where you learn how other districts operate, that was an invaluable experience to me,” Hinojosa said.

The job also helped him get to know a bevy of statewide leaders, including Moses — Texas’ commissioner of education from 1995 to 1999 and Hinojosa’s immediate predecessor in DISD.

Hinojosa reentered the superintendent’s seat in 1997, hired to run Austin-area Hays Consolidated ISD.

In the early days of his term, some criticized the $89.5 million bond — the largest in district history — for being over the top. Then there was the decision to ban the Confederate flag as a spirit symbol at Hays High School. Only this school year did Hays drop its Rebel mascot.

“Oh, I came on too strong,” Hinojosa admits. “I thought I could change the world. I wanted to fix everything, and I couldn’t stand the fact we had a Confederate flag. But I couldn’t get rid of it by myself.”

Hinojosa appointed a committee and hired an outside facilitator to help make the flag decision. The school board later voted 6-1 to eliminate the symbol. But Hinojosa was the main target for acrimony.

A lesson learned in Hays would follow him to Dallas: “There are times when you need to slow down to go faster later,” Hinojosa said.

Starting in the late 1980s, DISD had a lot of turnover — and scandals — at the top. The district had five superintendents in six years.

It wasn’t until after a three-year stop in Spring — “the first easy job I had” — that Hinojosa finally felt ready to throw his hat into the ring to lead his hometown district.

Two tours in DISD

His first stint in charge of DISD — “Hinojosa 1.0″ as he calls it — was rewarding and frustrating, he admitted.

“A lot of blocking and tackling,” he said.

Moses — who served from 2000 to 2004 — had brought a level of professionalism and stability to the district that had been lacking both before his arrival, Hinojosa said. But DISD was still wracked with division and scandals.

Hinojosa set lofty goals for the district, laying out the “Road for Broad” — a plan to have DISD win the coveted prize that honors the most improved urban school district — by 2010. While the district did make academic gains, those goals weren’t reached. And scandals kept popping up, such as a money laundering scheme in the technology department and questionable spending with district credit cards.

“There were a lot of things that had to be overcome in those early days: an IT scandal, a procurement card scandal,” he said. “We made progress, but it was just so much, getting rid of the scandals and trying to put some stability into the system.”

The low point in his first tenure — and in his career, he said last week — was October 2008, when accounting errors led to a $64 million budget gap.

DISD drastically over-hired heading into that school year. The mistakes nearly tipped the district into insolvency. The district was forced to lay off hundreds of teachers, assistant principals and central office employees.

Alliance AFT president Rena Honea said Hinojosa unfairly shouldered a disproportionate amount of the blame for that mistake, blame that should have also rested with a chief financial officer who wasn’t Hinojosa’s choice.

“If [Hinojosa] had any inkling of what was going on, it certainly wasn’t to the magnitude of how it played out,” she said.

Hinojosa drew down the district’s reserves to weather the storm. Then he brought in two well-respected school finance experts, Larry Throm and Alan King, in the CFO position over the next two years to establish better financial controls (both served Hinojosa in his second stint, as well).

But the damage was done. In 2009, a fractious board of trustees did not extend his contract after a three-hour evaluation, a clear sign that Hinojosa likely wasn’t long for the position.

He was recruited for Las Vegas’ Clark County School District’s top spot a year later, where he finished as the runner-up and received withering criticism from Dallas media for “flirting with another school system just because it blew a sweet kiss his way.”

After being recruited again, this time for a job in the Atlanta suburbs,Hinojosa left Dallas in 2011 to take over Cobb County Schools. It was a good time for a transition, he said, and it put him closer to his eldest son, who was living near Atlanta, and his two younger boys — who were both in Ivy League schools in the Northeast.

He resigned from Cobb County in 2014. With his mother and mother-in-law in poor health back in Texas, Hinojosa’s wife, Kitty, said it was time to go home.

Hinojosa’s second stretch in Dallas was almost an afterthought.

When Miles suddenly resigned from DISD in 2015, Hinojosa was back in town, working as a consultant. A logical choice to serve as an interim, he told the board that he was willing to work for “10 minutes, 10 days, 10 weeks, 10 months or 10 years, however long you want me.”

The bug was back.

“Within minutes, I wanted this job,” he said.

Miles’ tenure had ushered in tremendous reform, most notably the development of a robust pre-K program and the district’s teacher pay and evaluation system. But the hard-charging Miles also engendered a lot of ill will, among some trustees and the rank and file.

The politically savvy Hinojosa came across as the opposite, willing to listen and compromise.

Within two months of Miles’ departure — without undertaking a national search — DISD hired Hinojosa, giving him an encore as superintendent.

“There was a level of comfort,” trustee Edwin Flores said. “It was like a warm, comfy blanket. After the really hard-driving era of Mike Miles, where so much got accomplished, it was really kind of a stabilizing influence.”

Beyond that, Hinojosa’s deep knowledge of the city and the district, as well as his willingness to refine and grow the previous superintendent’s initiatives, is what has won his second stanza more accolades than his first.

Despite being initially skeptical of DISD’s teacher pay-for-performance system, Hinojosa now is one of its loudest proponents, touting it as an example for other Texas districts.

He pushed for the expansion of the district’s “choice” campuses, understanding the competitive nature of public school options brought on by the massive growth of charter schools in southern Dallas.

And he steered both a tax-ratification election and the largest school bond in state history to passage by Dallas voters.

Diane Birdwell, a high school teacher and union representative, said one of Hinojosa’s strengths was handling emergencies, such as the tornado in 2019 that ripped through three campuses and the pandemic.

But she wished he had taken stronger stances on supporting teachers, specifically by eliminating the district’s new salary system and ensuring educators’ COVID-19 retention bonuses were handed out sooner.

Still, Birdwell said Hinojosa listened to teachers. When he returned for “Hinojosa 2.0,” Birdwell said he met her at a Cafe Brazil to hear out concerns. For more than an hour, they talked and ate while Hinojosa took notes.

“You don’t see that a lot,” she said. “He’s very willing to discuss any issue and is willing to listen. That doesn’t mean, though, that he’ll always do what we want.”

One area where the district still struggles, however, is student achievement.

Sandy Kress, a former education adviser for George W. Bush and former Dallas school board president, took to social media upon news of Hinojosa’s resignation, calling declines in eighth grade on the “Nation’s Report Card” during his tenure “utterly damning.”

Only 13% of the district’s eighth graders were proficient in reading, and 15% were proficient in math, according to 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, results. Compared to Houston, Dallas eighth graders lagged in math by 10 percentage points. Hinojosa has countered in the past that raw NAEP scores don’t account for the district’s higher levels of English-language learners and low-income students.

While DISD did close gaps with the state during Hinojosa’s second tenure, reducing the number of failing schools from 43 in 2013-14 to four in 2017-18, signs show that academic losses caused by the pandemic washed away many of those gains. Accelerating learning to make up those losses must be the top priority for the district’s next leader, Hinojosa said.

Johnny Veselka, the former executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators, called Hinojosa a strong voice at the state and national level, serving as TASA president and taking key roles in the Council of Great City Schools and the Texas School Alliance. Hinojosa also has been praised for mentoring future school leaders — such as Austin Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde, who previously worked for him in DISD.

“He always had tremendous passion for students and for creating opportunities for all students to be successful,” Veselka said.

When asked what he’s most proud of during his stops in Dallas, Hinojosa mentioned two programs that best resonated with his experience growing up in the district: development of the district’s bilingual program in his first stint, and the creation of workskill and early college high schools throughout the district in his second tenure.

Students leaving high schools with associate’s degrees, paid internships and trade certificates will have a good chance of earning a living wage, which in turn will provide wealth in their communities, he said.

That lasting legacy will show just how much Hinojosa shaped Dallas for years to come, trustees say.

“We’re not in the same place as a school district, as a city, that we were 10 years ago or 20 years ago,” board president Ben Mackey said. “And he’s been able to masterfully navigate those waters in a way that brings civility to Dallas ISD.”

Staff writers Emily Donaldson and Talia Richman contributed to this report.

The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.

The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, The Meadows Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University and Todd A. Williams Family Foundation. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.