Chronicle Buries Midyear Success Story for Houston School Reform
... can't admit they've been wrong all along on Mike Miles.
Photo credit: HISD
SECOND DAY NOTE: For a much better account of what’s really going on, see Margaret Downing, Houston Press:
“Miles Names 26 More Schools to Join the NES Family in 2024-25 and Releases School Ratings”
Houston Press
Ever since the state took over the Houston school district last summer and appointed Mike Miles superintendent, The Houston Chronicle has published a drumbeat of stories predicting disaster.
Anecdotal and based on interviews with angry teachers’ union officials, parents and kids, the stories have suggested heavy-handedly that Miles is a militaristic idiot; the schools were doing great before he showed up; his reform program won’t accomplish squat; all the teachers will quit, and the kids will suffer for it.
Well guess what? The midyear test results are in, and Miles and his reform regime win hands down. All the numbers for the Houston Independent School District reforms are good, solid, some stunning.
Not only has the Chronicle’s long-predicted HISD disaster not been happening, but the midyear trend points to an end-of-year success story.
So guess what else? Today -- on the day the Chronicle had no choice but to publish hard numbers proving its coverage had been egregiously wrong all this time – Houston’s only daily newspaper, a Hearst property, leads with this instead:
“HISD, other Houston-area schools see widespread performance drops in new Children at Risk Ratings.”
You are seriously kidding me. I mean, no. You’re kidding. I am a life-long ink-stained newspaper guy, retired, and I know the hardest thing in the news business is not about getting it right. That’s hard enough. What’s harder still is admitting when we’ve gotten it wrong.
But we have to admit it when the facts speak against us. I thought we did anyway.
The Chronicle led with the Children at Risk story and used it to bury the real story, the test results story, falsely labeling the Children at Risk story as new information. But the whole point is that it was not new information. It was old information.
Children at Risk is a private nonprofit advocacy group. Its findings of a general decline in achievement by poor kids was based on last year’s numbers – before Miles showed up. And by the way, the Children at Risk findings strongly echo what Miles himself said in early December – that changes in the state’s rating system were masking serious under-performance in the very schools that the unions were insisting were doing great.
Those schools weren’t doing great. They were doing badly. The idea that HISD was doing great was a political illusion, a fiction enabled by a few exceptional schools – the ones with the helicopter parents – that were doing well. Meanwhile HISD was allowing under-privileged schools that lacked strong parental advocacy to rot on the vine.
That’s why the state stepped in. The inequity factor forced the state to step in under a statute written by Harold Dutton, Jr., a longtime African-American Democratic State Representative from Houston.
So before we dive into the test results, let’s revisit the drumbeat – that endless succession of anecdotal stories based on blah-blah predicting the educational End Times for Houston.
The early insistence was that HISD didn’t need fixing. It does need fixing, and that’s what the Children at Risk story, if presented honestly, would actually say.
The teachers are all going to quit? It does looks if teacher turnover has increased under Miles, but it’s not at all clear that this will turn out to be bad thing.
Thanks to a lawsuit by the teachers’ unions, Miles has not yet been able to impose the teacher rating and merit pay system in Houston that he put in place in Dallas ten years ago. In Dallas under the Miles reforms, turnover among the top-rated, best paid, most effective teachers fell to zero while resignations rose substantially among the least effective teachers.
If you’re not sure if that’s a good thing, ask a parent.
So what about the midyear test scores? What do they show? First, I should say that Miles himself and HISD are conservative in presenting these numbers. They do not say what I said above about the numbers pointing toward an end of the year success story. At the top of their presentation, HISD states: “These are preliminary data. One set of data does not make a trend.”
Yeah, OK.
Not all schools in HISD fall under the full reform program, called NES for New Education System, although some aspects of the reform are now district-wide. The numbers show that students in the NES schools are consistently out-performing the rest of the district, some by astonishing numbers.
In reading, for example, NES middle schoolers in the first half of the school year have already advanced at almost twice the rate of middle school students in the non-NES schools. Almost twice. Double. The difference in middle school math is less dramatic but still substantial.
“MOY” in the chart below stands for middle of the year. The number shown is the amount of growth students have already achieved at the middle of the year as a percentage of what they should achieve in the entire year.
Source: HISD
In math, the percentage of black and Hispanic kids meeting the growth standards is substantially higher in the NES school than for black and Hispanic students in non-NES schools. But that’s not what jumped out at me.
I’ve been covering these test-score stories for about 100 years. This time, one number in the HISD results reached up and slapped me: within the NES schools at both the elementary and middle school levels, children of color are advancing slightly faster than white kids in math. Let me repeat. Children of color are advancing faster in math than white kids within the NES system.
The white kids are still in the lead on growth in math scores district-wide. But within NES, the kids of color are ahead of the white kids.
Source: HISD
Look, I’m all for white kids. We had one of our own. Loved him to bits, still do. I don’t want anything bad to happen to white kids.
But I feel like some ancient prospector who’s been standing in the river staring down at pans full of mud for decades, and now I look down at these NES test scores, and I’ll be damned if I don’t see a nugget. A gold nugget.
Don’t know what it means. Gotta take it into town to have the guy test it. But that looks like a nugget. My heart flies up.
So let’s look for some more. What about high school kids?
High school students who flunk their end of course tests in December of their junior year can re-take them one time in December of their senior year after a refresher course. The score on the re-take that allows them to count the course toward graduation is called “at or approaches.”
The particular school where a decade of under-performance triggered the state takeover was Phillis Wheatley High School. This last December at Wheatley, the test re-takers outscored students district-wide on four of the five tests, on three tests by dramatic margins.
I called Miles because I was curious about one aspect of the results in particular. What is the explanation for this sudden surge in end-of-course scores at Wheatley, and why are the numbers better generally for middle school students than for elementary students? That seems counterintuitive.
The little kids should be more open to the new system. Older students already have been hardened into the old ways. And in the back of my mind, I guess I may have been thinking of all those anecdotal stories in the Chronicle where they interviewed some adolescent standing out in front of a middle school waving a defiant placard under the watchful eye of a union leader.
Miles said he thinks the new culture of NES, with much more emphasis on discipline, concentration and measurement, may be having as much or more effect than the merely academic changes. That effect may be showing up among older students because that’s where the cultural change was most needed.
“What it tells me is there’s something else besides instruction going on,” he said. “It’s only been four and a half months with me. What is the difference?
“The real difference, I think, is the focus on the environment, making sure kids come to school, making sure they don’t have their cell phones out, making sure we’re serious about it. It’s not just about the instruction.”
Miles is very careful about what these numbers mean, cautioning me that the numbers are preliminary and that now is way too early to claim victory on anything. It could all change again with end-of-year testing. I get all that.
But I’m still standing in the river gazing down on that nugget in my pan. Black and Hispanic kids advancing faster than white kids. On anything. Anywhere. At any time.
I’m taking that one into town, friends. It’s my headline. I’m definitely not going with today’s approach in the Chronicle, “Mud found in river.”
Testing the gold... You probably remember the Kathy Augustine story, when the glittering results out of Atlanta led to this strong administrator's hiring in DeSoto TX ISD. Kids CAN make dramatic improvements. Fingers crossed that it is true. But superintendents and managers can be a bit blind to what (some) teachers may (or may not) be doing during the testing process.
When teacher's jobs and pay are linked to improved test scores, ...
https://archive.is/b7uH1
I noticed immediately that HC was leading with a negative slant and made the reader have to wade on to get to good news.