Great story in Houston Chronicle today on Miles reforms in Houston schools.

With no anonymous histrionics!

Up until now, The Houston Chronicle’s news coverage of the Miles reforms underway in the Houston public schools has been drawn almost exclusively from teachers and teacher union officials, who are very unhappy. But today the paper published a piece reported from parents and students, and guess what?

They seem to love what’s going on in the Houston public school system.

The Houston Chronicle

Education reporter Megan Menchaca spent the first week of school snagging kids and parents coming and going from Houston schools – good old-fashioned gumshoe reporting. She came up with a story in stark contrast to almost everything else the paper has reported since Mike Miles took over as the new state-imposed repairman-superintendent over the summer.

One interview she did was with a tenth grader at Kashmere High School. Kashmere is one the schools whose persistent multi-year failure to bring students to minimum state standards prompted the state takeover this year of the entire district:

At her school, Tianna said there were few “get-to-know-you” activities or icebreakers, and instead, the curriculum was “straight-up rigor” from day one — but to her, that’s for the best. She said she feels like her teachers are stepping up efforts this year to improve the quality of her education. “It’s a better system because (last year,) they would just give us work and they would tell us how to do the work, but we were not actually learning from it,” Tianna said. “Now, they're taking time out of their lessons to assess if we are retaining the information we just got and it's really helping.”

Menchaca was a journalism and government grad at UT-Austin where she was an editor at The Daily Texan. Before coming to the Chronicle this year to cover education, she did internships at The Dallas Morning News, The Austin American-Statesman and The Texas Tribune.

My wife and I had lunch Sunday with an old friend who was in Dallas briefly. She’s way-back Houston/West U, grew up in Houston public schools. She said everything she reads in the paper and sees on TV makes it sound as if Miles is burning down the school district and the kids will never be educated again.

This is how Menchaca summed up her piece today:

The Houston Chronicle spoke with about two dozen students and parents on the outskirts of several NES campuses throughout the first week of classes, and nearly all were unanimous in their praise of the majority of Miles’ reforms, which aim to improve outcomes at a group of campuses that largely serve Black, Hispanic and low-income students.

Melody-Ford Williams, whose daughter attends second grade at Kashmere Gardens Elementary, said she welcomed the reforms, particularly the additional structure for children and higher expectations for teachers. Williams said she thought the staffing changes, conversion of libraries to Team Centers and other reforms were “perfect." Her child hasn’t complained about any of the changes so far, she said.

Also at lunch Sunday was a man we have known forever, a retired head of school and private school teacher. If teachers were fiddle-players, this guy would be at the first chair symphony violinist end of the spectrum.

He talked a little about how math was taught at one of his schools, and it sounded very much like the teaching methods put in place by Miles, especially the emphasis on student engagement and participation versus teachers just lecturing for an hour. It’s not as if Miles is pulling this stuff out of his hip pocket, which is how the teachers unions have depicted it. It’s more like poor kids getting the advantage of teaching methods that privileged kids have benefitted from for decades.

To facilitate this new teaching system, Miles announced he was moving librarians out of a number of schools and repurposing the library spaces as study halls for advanced students. A minor part of that change was a policy of sending disruptive students to the new study halls for half an hour or so. It’s an attempt to reduce suspensions, which research has shown cause great harm to the suspended students.

The teachers unions seized on that minor detail and inflated it to say Miles was firing librarians and turning the libraries into punishment chambers. Because, you know, he hates kids and wants them to be stupid. Who could believe this stuff?

Everybody. The New York Times bit on it, as did MSNBC, twice, as did most of the media in Houston. It was too good a headline. It fit in neatly with everything else people are reading about Texas these days.

In fact nobody got fired. When I saw these “team centers” in action last week, no student was there for disciplinary reasons. Instead, top students assisted by learning coaches were silently working ahead in their lessons.

But the torture chamber story had serious media traction, conflating the team centers with right-wing book-banning campaigns. A story on MSNBC even suggested reprehensibly that Miles was closing libraries to keep black kids from learning to read.

Menchaca found concern about the libraries and a wish from some parents that favorite librarians could return to their posts, but the general tone was very different from the stridency of the unions:

“My daughter loves to read, and reading is a priority, so I feel like they should bring (libraries) back, but I'm willing to see what they’re going for and to just give it a shot,” said Crystal Boyd, mother of a sixth-grader at Fleming Middle School. “You have to try it in order to see what the result will be. I’m down for a change. Change is good.”

I’m a lifelong reporter. One of the little flags of professionalism I found in Menchaca’s piece was she got people to let her use their names and some identifying detail. Almost all of the histrionically distraught teachers quoted in the torture chamber stories have been anonymous.

The problem is that anonymity doesn’t always lend itself to truth. Some people will tell you all kinds of stuff that isn’t true if they know they’re not going to have to live up to it. Menchaca did it old school.

And here’s the other thing. The teachers are not exactly the story. They’re not the top of the story anyway– what we call the lede. The school system does not exist for the sake and sole benefit of teachers. The lede is the kids and their parents – what Menchaca went for.

That’s why Miles is there. That’s why the state took over. All these stories about teacher morale and the libraries and so on: almost none of them ever includes the line that Menchaca wrote to explain the purpose of the state intervention. It’s “to improve outcomes at a group of campuses that largely serve Black, Hispanic and low-income students.”

That line is the fulcrum on which the whole story balances. It gives the reader a reference point. The reader may think, OK, some of the teachers hate this. I don’t know if they’re right or wrong. But it sounds as if they weren’t getting the job done before, so maybe we needed a new broom.

Absent that, none of it makes any sense. A bunch of right-wing Trumpian sadists swept into town to persecute the school teachers for no good reason? But you know, if I’m fair about it, I have to admit that in these terrible times that might not be that hard to believe.

That’s why a story like this one by Menchaca is such a welcome breeze of basic sanity. Sanity, you know -- like an old friend from West U. Where you been keeping yourself ?