Since established by an Appropriations Act in 2006, the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) competitive grant program in the U.S. Department of Education has supported human capital strategies "to ensure that students attending high-poverty schools have better access to effective teachers and principals, especially in hard-to-staff subject areas" such as science and math. Responding to the national agenda to improve STEM education, in 2012, the fourth cohort of the Teacher Incentive Fund federal grant competition (TIF4) included special consideration for projects designed to improve STEM education by identifying, developing, and utilizing master teachers as leaders of broader improvements (OESE, 2012a). Houston Independent School District's (HISD) approach to STEM education -- described in this report -- is an innovative policy response to the national challenges of preparing students for 21st century global citizenship. In HISD, the TIF4 grant supported program activities that reached students, teachers, and school-wide systems. This descriptive overview of activities and interventions unique to the TIF4 project schools sets the context for a meaningful discussion of programmatic impact. Additional reports in this series will investigate specific outcomes of interest, including: how student outcomes for science and math at project schools compare to outcomes at similar schools not participating in TIF4, teachers' readiness (self-efficacy) for STEM instruction, and human capital outcomes for science and math teachers at project schools. [For the other two reports in this series, see ED603680 and ED603681.]