Houston Chronicle Goes Blind When It Comes to the Unions.
And yet there they are, front and center.
Maybe the school reform conversation in Houston is moving an inch or so in the right direction following recent test scores proving that radical changes under the new state-imposed regime are working. Maybe. An inch.
Chronicle Buries Test Score Story
Today in an editorial, The Houston Chronicle comes off its Edvard Munch scream — “SOME TEACHERS ARE QUITTING! SOME TEACHERS ARE QUITTING” — to concede that it can be a good thing for some teachers to quit if they are no good at teaching.
Citing higher teacher turnover numbers under Superintendent Mike Miles, the editorial raises half of a fair question: who’s quitting?
“Are we losing the effective educators whose charisma, creativity or quiet connection with young people is the highlight of every student’s school year?” the paper asks.
“Or are we losing the low-ambition desk sitters who just can’t keep up with the rigor implemented by state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles? We don’t know. We don’t even know if the district is tracking the kinds of teachers they’re losing.”
No, we don’t know. That is, the Chronicle and I don’t know. You don’t know. But I think Miles has an inkling.
Here’s a clue. In announcing a vast expansion this week of his New Education System (NES) reform program to include dozens more schools, Miles said the new NES schools will not have to be “re-constituted” as the original NES schools were at the beginning of the year. Re-constituted means everybody at the school must reapply for their jobs, and they are all vetted and interviewed as if they were first-time applicants.
This time around, Miles seems confident the district will be able to pick and choose among the faculty at each school — who stays, who goes — based on information the district already possesses. That tells me the district already has enough information from the first half of the year to provide the profile it needs for each teacher.
The Chronicle editorial has a certain tone, however — as a former editorial board member myself at another Texas daily, I would call it editorial pissiness — because the school system apparently was not forthright with them about exactly how the measuring is being done:
“But we weren’t able to get more details about what else it tracks, whether anyone there is regularly reviewing the data and what types of educators are leaving.”
Well, no! And this is what I mean by half a question. Does the editorial board truly not know why the district has to be so careful what it says about measuring teacher effectiveness? Do they not read their own newspaper?
Last August the Houston Federation of Teachers went to court and won a temporary restraining order blocking Miles from imposing a district-wide system of teacher evaluation. The evaluation scheme he wanted to use is one Miles developed over a decade as a reform superintendent of both public and private school districts. It would have been tied to teacher compensation.
Judge Fredericka Phillips said no, stop, you’re not allowed to measure teacher effectiveness that way. So if Miles now has another way to get the job done, I’m sure he’s not going to brag about it in the Chronicle.
Look, this is what the whole fight is about. It’s what is driving the entire battle over school reform in Houston. Measurement. Outcomes. Pay.
The teachers’ unions, led by the HFT, are desperate to stop Miles from imposing system-wide effectiveness metrics tied to pay. They want teachers to be left alone to teach in whatever way they choose and to be paid strictly on seniority. They don’t want anybody systematically testing the kids to see if they’re learning anything.
Basically, the unions regard a teaching job as sort of an inherited trust fund. It’s nobody else’s business what you do with it.
I do think it’s an inch ahead for the Chronicle even to admit that some teacher turnover can be a good thing. I do understand their question about who’s leaving and why:
“All of this can and should be measured — especially by a district that diligently measures the outcomes and progress of its students.”
Right. Now the other half of the question. If the district in fact is measuring effectiveness — and it seems to be — then why isn’t it laying out the details of its measurement system the same way Miles did ten years ago when he was superintendent in Dallas?
If it’s the unions, why? Why do the unions so fear the same kind of accountability the rest of us live with every day out here in the real world?
I would say it will be a cold day in hell before the media in Houston ever ask hard questions of the unions, but, you know … with this crazy weather.
You’re telling me that Miles, the guy who isn’t afraid to sell and oversell every other part of his reform effort is completely tight-lipped about the kinds of teachers who are leaving, despite HISD measuring teachers in dozens of different ways, when producing that data - even broadly and generically, not on an individual basis - would be as big as an exoneration of Miles’s reform effort as jumps in test scores? The Union suit is only about tying *pay* to performance - Miles isn’t under any gag order to not comment about teacher performance at all. He’s free to say, “We have data showing the majority of teachers who are leaving are in the bottom X% on principal ratings, student test scores, and student incremental achievement,” but he doesn’t. C’mon, Jim. You’re arguing that Miles not saying anything means he obviously has something? That’s some “Trump is playing 4D chess” stuff.
Teachers who do not care whether their students are learning what they believe they are teaching have lost their passion for the job, if they ever had it in the first place. They are disengaged from the practice. HISD should have a set of expectations and organizational values to be signed by each employee. They can be evaluated against those expectations and values in addition to learning outcomes.