Don't Blame Rube Goldberg for the Houston School Principal Story
Although his work might explain how Houston media are approaching it.
Rube Goldberg, Wikipedia
Both in comments here and in media coverage in Houston generally, the “Rube Goldberg” epithet recurs wherever unhappy critics are talking about the Houston school system’s new assessment system for the performance of school principals.
I’m always surprised to see Rube Goldberg’s name invoked. Am I the only person old enough to actually remember seeing his wonderful cartoons in newspapers?
Each of Goldberg’s ornately drawn single-frame cartoons depicted an absurdly over-complicated mechanism involving crazy things like squirrels on wheels and tipped over buckets of water to accomplish something silly like shutting an oven door.
The Houston Independent School District’s new assessment system for principals is in the news now because, under it, half of the district’s principals have been judged recently to be under-performing. The accusation against the system is that it’s a sham, a claptrap and cover story to disguise what’s really going on.
I guess what’s really going on, according to this version of things, is that the reform school superintendent imposed on Houston by the state last summer, Mike Miles, is supposed to be nuts. He’s just going around like a crazy dictator picking on people for no good reason, using his phony assessment system as an excuse.
Of course you can always find somebody to say that. From unhappy principals on the short end of the stick to parents afraid of change, there will always be someone out there to give reporters anxiety-ridden quotes.
But there is also a central laziness and dishonesty in this reporting. Mile is nothing if not an open book with a long public track record and history showing exactly what he’s up to and why. That track record would be even easier for reporters to find than hand-wringing quotes. They don’t even have to leave their desks.
Ten years ago when I was still a working newspaper person covering the Miles school superintendency here in Dallas, one of his earliest and most notable innovations was the establishment of a leadership academy to recruit and train school principals, accompanied by a densely written and published assessment system. Those reforms were strategic and designed to meet more than only pedagogical ends.
School principals here often were neighborhood politicians who got their jobs by joining the right church. Some people decried that as corruption. I never saw it as corrupt, because I remembered where it came from.
In reaction to racial segregation and white domination of the system, the courts called for greater community input into school administration. For a long time, people like me thought it was a good thing for clergy and other community leaders to have say-so over who got the principal’s job at the neighborhood school. At least it wasn’t the Ku Klux Klan.
Over time, however, a sad but undeniable reality emerged. Social justice, important as it may be, is an unsatisfactory metric for choosing school principals.
And let’s not make this sound like it’s all about black people in segregated neighborhoods. Remember that white helicopter parents were so sure they were keeping their own schools properly lined up. Meanwhile they were accepting and sanctioning a system of teaching reading that we now know not only was ineffectual but did permanent harm to all those well-dressed heavily helicoptered little white kids.
Look, I’m a major democracy fan. Love that stuff, always have. But it turns out the education of young children is kind of like brain surgery. It’s not really all that susceptible to democratic input.
The Miles method of recruitment, training and assessment of school principals was developed and refined in a system of charter schools he ran after leaving Dallas. It is based heavily on evidence, data and proven outcomes.
I’m not qualified to say his system is above and beyond any challenge. But I know this for sure. It’s a system. It’s right there in black and white on the record, all over the record in fact. I don’t know how anybody who bothered to look could miss it. If there is a legitimate story for Houston media to work – and there’s always a legitimate story – it’s a story about that system.
But Houston media instead are ignoring the system, making scant effort to even figure out what it is and instead digging up anxious quotes from wandering anxious randos probably fed to them by the teachers unions.
Why change is hard.
I generally agree with this including pointing the media toward looking into the system. An insightful call.
I have concerns about how Miles manages the quantity of people who may leave or he makes leave. This model is based on what he could do at a few charter schools. HISD is big-even if getting smaller all the time. Further, I don’t know that he’s recruited to his principal’s academy with 100% accuracy. I’m thinking about the divorce rate being 50% and that’s with people who say they love each other. Ha