Between the loonies on the left of it and the loonies on the right, school reform is a very lonely place.

Houston Superintendent Mike Miles is right not to stick his head up.

In a comment taking me to task for an earlier item, education activist Lynn Davenport makes a valid point — that the teachers unions and Democrats are not the only forces fighting to defeat school reform in Houston, as I had perhaps too glibly suggested.

Davenport says:

“Nice try, Jim. Republicans are driving this investigation just as much as teacher unions and Democrats. I’m a Republican precinct chair and my network of education activists across the state are aligned with the demand for Miles’ resignation and a complete forensic audit of TFS and Morath at TEA. Brett Shipp with Spectrum has all the public information requests, documents and evidence. This is not a partisan issue because those in cahoots with Mike and Morath cross party lines. You know that.”

I do know that. And it’s a point well worth making. The effort to fix Houston’s broken public school system takes fire from all sides — Democrats and unionists on the one side, who view public education as a jobs program and a safe sinecure for themselves, and right-wing zanies on the other who want to destroy public education because they think it’s communist and anti-white.

I won’t accuse Davenport of being a racist — I know she’s not — but she definitely is a zany. I can’t even parse what she her fellow tunes have to say when they get up and disrupt school board meetings all across America. It’s a kind of anti-vaxxer voodoo flavored with bizarre conspiracy theories and a belief that someone wants to brainwash the kids.

I personally would be OK with brainwashing the kids if it included teaching them to read first. If they can read, they can un-wash their own brains later.

Squeezed in shoulder-to-shoulder with the tunes are the money thugs like West Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and the Wilks brothers, Farris and the other one. These are the kind of guys who, if they had not been endowed with the extreme money-making gene, would be parking cars for a living. There isn’t enough intellectual fire power in the lot of them to keep a fondue pot warm.

But they are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into Texas politics with the express aim of destroying public education. One has the feeling they may be trying to get even with schools for something deeply personal.

But think of Mike Miles in all this, commissioned by the state to go in and repair the broken Houston public school system. He’s got the unions and the Democrats shooting at him from one direction, calling him a fascist tool. And from the other he’s got the Looney Tunes and the money thugs heaving Molotov cocktails because they think he’s a commie brainwasher.

Doesn’t leave a lot of margin for error, does it?

I never hear Miles talk about politics much – just about teaching kids to read and do math. Probably smart. If he keeps his head down, maybe they’ll all shoot each other.

Thanks for reminding me, Lynn.