Great school news in Dallas, thanks to Mike Miles

Houston needs to think about it.

Paolo Uccello, “St. George and The Dragon”

How happy would Houston be today if its daily newspaper could give it a lead editorial like the one in today’s Dallas Morning News?

“We’ve been crowing for some time about the good things happening in the Dallas Independent School District and the way it is changing the narrative around urban school districts,” the Morning News told its readers this morning.

“Well, let us crow some more, because the news that hit late last month regarding attendance data in the district is astounding.”

Dallas Morning News

In a statewide trend of downward spiraling attendance for major urban school districts, Dallas is seeing an uptick. What the editorial doesn’t say specifically but everybody knows anecdotally is that some of the new specialized schools that have come online in Dallas in the last few years are even seeing hot competition for admissions slots, some of that from those dreaded suburban families trying to crowd in on a good thing.

Imagine that. They want back in.

The Dallas Morning News is right. While dissatisfied families are ditching out of other Texas urban districts, ambitious families are trying to nose their way into the Dallas public schools. It is a remarkable and hard-fought victory for Dallas, to be studied closely and emulated elsewhere.

But my heart bleeds a little – sorry, it’s always bleeding, isn’t it, what a mess – when I see how the Dallas Morning News editorial page accounts for this success. At the top of its list of contributing factors is teacher retention, or, as we might call it, teacher happiness:

“Since it fully implemented its Teacher Excellence Initiative that financially rewards good teachers, DISD has outperformed the state and the region in retaining teachers.”

Teacher happiness, the paper suggests, flows directly from great leadership: “(The Dallas school system) has benefited from good, consistent leadership, from (former superintendent) Michael Hinojosa to (current superintendent) Stephanie Elizalde.”

So why my coronary hemorrhage? Because the person who turned it around in Dallas, who put all of that in place, who hammered out those reforms against brutal opposition, is still the one name the newspaper dare not pronounce for risk of rousing monsters.

Mike Miles.

In Miles’ brief and tumultuous tenure as Dallas’ school superintendent a decade ago, he managed to put in place the bedrock reforms on which all of today’s wonderful success in Dallas was founded. And this is in no way to diminish the contributions of his successors.

From 2015 to 2022, Hinojosa did a brilliant job preserving the basic legacy of the Miles reforms while talking the teachers’ unions and the school board down from the ledge of hysteria where they had put themselves at the end of the Miles era. I don’t know a ton about Elizalde, but everything I hear is good, and I know that’s not easy.

But let’s go back to that excellence initiative thing about the teachers. That was the ballgame. “Teacher excellence initiative” is a bland name for the arch nemesis and foe of all teachers’ unions nationwide – merit pay.

Adopting it meant ripping out the entire rusted-in hardware and plumbing of seniority pay and universal tenure for teachers. Those things are the machinery of basic job protection and pay that the unions proffer to their members as the main pay-back for the dues they pay.

Teacher excellence initiative is performance pay. Test the kids. If you’ve got them where they should be on reading and math, you get a raise. If not, adios. We don’t want you here.

This is the stuff the unions in Houston are screaming about as destroying teacher morale. But look at Dallas, where it’s been in place for more than a decade. Teachers like teaching in Dallas better than in any major urban district in the state.

We can guess why. Teachers love to teach. They love to see kids learn. No, they’re not in it to get rich, but they also are not in it to endure years of failure watching children sink into ruined lives just so their teachers can hold onto a check.

Good teachers, the ones we want to keep in the schoolhouse, are just like the kids in the schoolhouse. Success makes them all happy. The place where they see that success is the test.

And, sure, teachers are like the rest of us, too. It makes them feel good to see their success rewarded with a bump in pay, as opposed to the utterly soul-numbing effect of seeing the useless teacher in the next room getting the pay raise because he’s been there longer.

That’s all Mike Miles. He was the founder in Dallas. So why can the paper still not say his name a decade after he left town? Because actually getting those reforms done, really making it happen was so bloody a struggle and time of contention in Dallas that Dallas still fears saying his name out loud might reignite the flames.

That’s the fear. Say his name, give Miles the credit he is due, and the dragons will come back out of the mountain.

I get that. I’m not faulting The Dallas Morning News. Hey, it makes my heart fly up to hear any praise for the schools in my city (I hope that isn’t going to cause more bleeding). I know exactly why they don’t want to trace the good news back to its true beginning.

But the true beginning was Miles. And here is something Houston needs to think about when it thinks about him: It takes a Mike Miles. It takes a dragonslayer. Then everybody can be happy and peaceful. Later.