Lest the moment pass unremarked – and because I say a lot of snarky things in this space about Houston media and their coverage of school reform – I need to take particular note of a remarkable editorial in The Houston Chronicle last week. It amounted to a full-throated endorsement and maybe even something like cheerleading for reform superintendent Mike Miles.
Ostensibly focused on small under-utilized campuses in the Houston public school system, the editorial traipsed outside that limited topic to endorse a theme underlying the entire school reform effort in Houston. That idea is that the huge public school system in Houston, a $2.2 billion annual enterprise, is engaged in a zero-sum competition with an alternative that might be called anything else, please.
Enrollment in the Houston Independent Schol System continues to hemorrhage every year while enrollment soars in tax-supported charter, private and religious schools. Families beating a path to the world of anything else are largely minority.
The only way for public education in Houston to win that contest – or public education anywhere in the nation, for that matter – is to win it straight up, head on, fair and square, do a better job.
That ought to be wonderful news for America, if not for big public school systems, because it puts the lie to racist assumptions about why minority kids don’t achieve well. Give their parents an option, almost any option offering real promise, and there they go, right out the door.
Even more pointedly, the ballooning minority defection rate kills another even more insidious lie promulgated by the teachers unions in Houston and nationally. The unions have relentlessly pitched the cynical lie that charter schools and other options are part of a racist elitist conspiracy to kill public education in America.
Here are the final lines from the Chronicle’s editorial, beginning with a quote from Miles about the real reason enrollment is dropping in some schools in particular:
“They’re losing kids because we haven’t done right by the community,” he said.
The editorial ends with one word:
Amen.
That one word, amen, is so important, every time I read it again it brings something like a tear to my aged and desiccated eye. In that simple amen I hear recognition that children, all children, are destined by nature to learn. We adults choose only what they will learn -- whatever it is we put before them.
An early development expert told me once, from birth to third grade if a child’s eyes are open, you cannot stop that child from learning. What do you want her to know?
Sure, she can learn failure, boredom, disrespect and even the insidious concept of despair, if that’s what we give her to learn. Or she can learn to read. That’s entirely up to us. But learn she shall.
The Houston Chronicle editorial touches on another topic that I know had to ring true on the more seasoned ears on the editorial board. Miles, whose regime was imposed by force on Houston by the State of Texas last summer, recently released what he too kindly called an “efficiency report” on school finance. I would call it, “Show Me the Money.”
The Miles reforms involve a lot of enrichment, from higher teacher pay to more teachers in the classroom (all of which the unions decry for being too rigid, riddle me that one). Ever since he showed up, Houston media including the news columns of the Chronicle have suggested that he’s going to bankrupt the school system.
The report issued recently by the district – which I assume is the work of HISD’s crack money guy, Jim Terry, whom Miles worked with ten years ago in Dallas — offers a direct answer to how Miles and Terry think they can afford the reforms without running the ship aground. At the risk of over-simplifying, I would summarize their solutions as falling into three main areas:
1) Stop stealing the money.
2) Stop throwing the money out the window.
3) At least count the damn money, can you?
In reading it, I was reminded of a story Miles told me not long after he came to Dallas, where I live, to be our reform superintendent. That’s where I first observed him in action.
He said a well-meaning person in school district management came to him to explain why he was having so much trouble with a particular member of the board of trustees. That trustee, the helpful executive explained, was very close to a certain contractor seeking a deal with the district. Miles had been refusing to chop that deal up into smaller segments.
By keeping the deal all in one integral bundle, the person explained, Miles was putting it at a dollar amount high enough to legally require approval by the full school board. The deal was unlikely to be approved by the full board, so what Miles needed to do to keep the member happy was cleverly subdivide it into smaller pieces that would slide beneath the threshold requiring full board approval.
Miles said he listened patiently. Then he said, “So you are advising me to commit a crime.”
Blink blink. The person said, gulp, well, no. It’s just how things are done. It’s what we’ve always done. It’s what you have to do to get this trustee’s support. It’s the political thing.
Mile explained to the person that what he or she was recommending fell under a legal concept called structuring – a method, always too cute by half, designed to break the law by evading it. He made it plain that this person would do well not to advise him again to break the law.
When he was here in Dallas, I frequently heard from people close to school district affairs that Miles was “very politically naïve.”
I always thought to myself, “Oh, yes. You mean not a felon.”
His approach to the money is every bit as important as his approach to education itself. It reflects his insight into the profound corruption riddling the public education empire in this country.
Public education has devolved into a fat enterprise quite happy with itself in spite of dismal failure. It is endlessly smug, deeply corrupt and laughably arrogant. Even worse than all that, it dares to paint its detractors as racist while it ships generations of poor minority children off to shrunken lives because they cannot read, write or do numbers.
I read that beautiful, “Amen,” in the Chronicle editorial, and I thought, “I see you now, Houston Chronicle editorial board. I know something about you now. You do get it. This communication has been recorded for training and accuracy purposes.”
I doubt the Chronicle would admit it, but it looks like you changed some minds. Focusing on the money moves the conversation from the faculty lounge to the lawyer’s office. Raises the stakes. Sharpens the mind.
This:”Public education has devolved into a fat enterprise quite happy with itself in spite of dismal failure. It is endlessly smug, deeply corrupt and laughably arrogant. Even worse than all that, it dares to paint its detractors as racist while it ships generations of poor minority children off to shrunken lives because they cannot read, write or do numbers.”
So good.
I do think Miles is wrong about not consolidating some schools. Maybe people will flock back, but I don’t think in 10s of thousands.