Houston at the Spear

School takeover a sea change for the city by the bayou

In the mid-1990s my career as a true-crime author living in Dallas took a dip, and I decided I needed a job. I went back to some people I knew in the newspaper business and came up with a job that was very convenient for me – Dallas bureau chief for The Houston Chronicle.

The Chronicle was easily the best paper in Texas at the time, and my job was the best at the Chronicle -- well, for me, anyway. It was easy. All the Houston Chronicle wanted me to do was come up with stories that made Dallas look stupid. If you’re from Texas, you get that.

Luckily, there was this glorious fountain of stupid stories called the Dallas Independent School District. I barely had to get out of bed.

I forget the exact order of things, but the Dallas superintendent of schools was using district money to furnish a naughty love nest; the Black Panthers showed up with shotguns at a school board meeting; the superintendent went to prison; it turned out the Black panthers weren’t the real Black Panthers; the next superintendent was such a mess, he offered to resign and the board said, “You can’t quit, we fire you.” A cornucopia.

The Houston Independent School District, meanwhile, was a rising star, not just in Texas but nationally in the nascent school accountability movement. A posse of brilliant Houston educators went to Austin to serve then Governor George W. Bush as his brain trust on school reform. More on Bush later in this space.

The paradigm for me in the mid-1990s was pretty simple. Houston schools, smart. Dallas schools, stupid. I didn’t have to make anything up to earn my bowl of rice, not that I would have. Of course.

I left the Chronicle after a couple years, because I got bored. Too easy. I went to work for the weekly newspaper in Dallas – a kind of high-quality urban news magazine at the time – to do in-depth stories about Dallas.

No story challenged me more than the resuscitation and revival of the Dallas school system. The Dallas school story forced me to break out of my own shell of bias and belief – always the toughest thing for a reporter to do.

Now at this moment in 2023, the mid-‘90s paradigm that was in place when I worked for the Chronicle has pretty much flipped. Dallas has become a national model of improvement among major urban school districts. Houston, meanwhile, is in such abysmal straits that the state this week will seize control of the Houston school district, shove aside the elected school board, appoint a “board of managers” and effectively put the district under the sword of a state-appointed czar.

There is no small irony for me in the fact that the state commissioner of education carrying out this coup, Mike Morath, is someone I once covered as a Dallas school trustee, and the person he will send to wield the blade will be Mike Miles, the former Dallas school superintendent who shook me out of my shell. It’s more than merely ironic. It’s sort of amazing, really.

Do I understand how little anyone in Houston will want to hear from anybody from Dallas about how to run the Houston schools? My, yes. I already told you. I used to earn my living that way.

Worse, I intend to write about it here myself. For Houston. Oh, my goodness, it’s awful. Me. An old, white ex-hippie guy in Dallas. I venture, I dare, I presume to tell Houston in the months ahead what’s going on in Houston. And in all candor, I confess that a minor part of my motivation will be knowing exactly how irritating and preposterous that will be for Houston. That’s how we roll up here. If you’re from Texas, you get that.

But here is the important thing. Houston is going to start off exactly as I did – getting Miles all wrong. Houston already has Morath wrong and school accountability and even liberalism and racism wrong in this context. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, one of the state’s brightest political leaders, already has Miles out of focus. Turner and the rest of Houston were not helped at all, I’m sure, by a recent off-target superficial predictive profile of Miles by my alma mater, the Chronicle (I know they’ll get better at this as the story rolls out).

Hint to Chron: in discussing Miles’ history in Dallas, don’t forget to mention the miracle.

But Houston’s not the Lone Ranger. The entire nation right now is profoundly confused and perplexed about public education. The school reform movement is a moral and political crucible challenging all our most cherished post-‘60s assumptions about left and right, good and greed, even racial segregation and assimilation.

The thing we all tend to get most wrong -- who really cares. Who in this puzzle truly believes, who is committed, who has the ability and the tools to take urban minority poor kids off the kindergarten-to-ruin express train that has been big city public education for a century, putting them instead on a path to fulfillment and the American dream? There are some very big surprises and reveals ahead in this story.

This week with the arrival of Mike Miles, Houston faces the tip of that spear. And that can be a good thing. The spear can be a great gift to Houston, as long as Houston remembers not to sit on it.

I’ll be back. And dear Houston, bumptious buoyant bayou city that you are, I must tell you frankly that I may or may not grow on you, but you’ll be back, too. Here. See you around these parts soon again, and we’ll chat about the Miles miracle in Dallas. It’s documentary.