Houston Chronicle shoots down the Spectrum Story about School Superintendent Mike Miles

.. and they shoot it down baaad!

Oof. In my experience here in Dallas when Mike Miles was our reform school superintendent ten years ago and now watching him in Houston, your typical scandalette hit-job news story lasts at least three days before turning into total toilet paper.

The Spectrum News story accusing him of shipping millions of dollars of Texas school money to a private address in Colorado didn’t make it 24 hours.

A story in today’s Houston Chronicle by Megan Menchaca shoots down the Spectrum story -- down to the ground. Since I know people on all sides of this scenario, it’s a bit brutal to watch.

Houston Chronicle

Before being assigned by the state to take over the failing Houston public schools, Miles was head of a private charter school company based in Colorado called Third Future Schools, TFS for short. School districts in Colorado and Texas hire TFS to come in and take over their worst schools as a way to head off state takeovers.

The Spectrum story showed on camera two checks for a total of more than a million dollars that Spectrum said Miles’ ex-company had sent from Texas to Colorado. The Spectrum story strongly suggested that the company is fleecing Texas taxpayers to make up shortfalls in Colorado.

Nope.

Menchaca reports in her piece that Spectrum got it dead wrong. The checks didn’t come from TFS.

Spectrum News reported that Third Future Schools’ Ector College Prep sent two checks for more than $1 million to Aurora, Colorado. However, neither Third Future Schools nor Ector College Prep sent the two checks, according to a Chronicle’s review of the documents.

Ector ISD, a public school district, sent both checks, which were addressed to Third Future Schools Texas’ Ector College Prep and sent to the charter network’s corporate headquarters in Colorado.

When the Spectrum story was aired, the teachers unions were dancing on Miles’ grave. Well, I guess he doesn’t really have a grave yet, but they were dancing. Menchaca reported:

“Teachers, students and their families deserve better and in response we are demanding the immediate resignation of Mike Miles and the immediate exit of the TEA from HISD,” Jackie Anderson, the president of HISD’s largest teachers’ union, said in a statement Tuesday in response to Spectrum News’ report. 

I don’t know the origin of this particular story, and I have a lot of respect for the Spectrum reporter who did it. But generally speaking, these little from-nowhere dust devils come straight from the unions, who strongly oppose school reform.

They can’t debate Miles on academics, teaching or student achievement, because Miles holds all those cards. The unions represent institutions so failed on all of those grounds in fact that the child advocacy groups now call their kind of teaching “the cradle to prison pipeline.”

Cradle to Prison

Unwilling to face Miles straight-up for an honest debate on … you know, education … the unions gin up these two-bit scandal stories instead to paint him as a corrupt evildoer.

Menchaca reports in her piece that the payments cited in the Spectrum piece were money the public school system in Ector County, Texas owed to TFS. The school system is required by law to be the entity that sends that money.

Ector ISD said in a statement that the district was the passthrough for state funding from the Texas Education Agency to TFS, and it was required to send checks to Third Future Schools’ headquarters in Colorado for TFS to operate Ector College Prep.

The Spectrum piece also strongly suggested that money sent to TFS was not being spent for properly intended purposes. Menchaca shoots that one down, too.

Chapter 45 of the Texas Education Code states that public schools, including charter schools, can use state funds that are “not designated for a specific purpose” for any other purposes “necessary in the conduct of the public schools determined by the board of trustees.”

Toni Templeton, a senior research scientist at the University of Houston Education Research Center, said this language gives school boards broad flexibility to approve spending funds on nearly anything they determine is necessary for the benefit of the students, including purchasing services from other institutions and paying management or network fees.

“It’s not uncommon for (state) funds to go out of state,” said Templeton, the former director of data services for the Texas Charter Schools Association “I can understand how in the context of this particular conversation, people can be concerned, but no, it’s not an uncommon occurrence.”

Lastly, the Spectrum piece suggested that TFS is in big money trouble.

Menchaca:

The Academy of Advanced Learning and Coperni 3’s annual audits appear to show the campuses have major financial deficits, but the audits state that is because federal pension reporting requirements have significantly distorted the financial statements. Excluding those, both Colorado schools have generally had positive fund balances and net assets since at least the 2019 fiscal year, according to Chronicle’s review of the audits. 

OK, just for grins, think for a moment about the central thesis here. The Spectrum piece basically says TFS is making money in Texas and may be using some of that money in Colorado.

So?

If TFS does what it’s supposed to do in Texas and gets paid for it, how is it anybody’s business what it does internally with those revenues? If a big national construction company builds a new school in Houston, then, sure, Houston needs to get in the car go make sure the school got built right. If it was built properly and Houston pays the agreed fee, then what? Are you telling me Houston can say to the company, “Now don’t you spend any of that money in Chicago?”

These things would be almost funny, if it weren’t for that cradle thing.