heroku not updating database schema

Do you see any output when you heroku rake db:migrate?

Try running heroku restart after you migrate to restart the web servers and DJ workers. That shouldn't influence your console, but I have seen web servers serving old versions of the code immediately after a deploy, which normally isn't a problem but with pending migrations can be.

You might want to try

heroku run rake db:migrate
heroku restart

Hope this helps.