Houston Chronicle Story about Mike Miles is Dodgier than the Dodgy Dodges it Claims to Delineate .

Dead story walking.

So here’s how it goes in Houston these days. The teachers union gins up an utterly fake wildly irresponsible story accusing the new superintendent of schools of engaging in criminal activity.

Why would they do that? OK, I’ll come back to the why in a minute. But they just do.

The Houston Education Association (union) puts out a story saying they have discovered evidence of payments made by the school district to Superintendent Mike Miles as a school district vendor. They use the term “double-dipping.”

Yeah, they should have used the term, “double-dipstick,” because that’s what Miles would have to be if he was stupid enough to set himself up as a listed school district vendor on the side.

Houston has had a lot of serious trouble with this kind of thing in the recent past. Before the state declared the Houston school district an official unholy mess last summer, seized control and imposed Miles on the district to do the cleanup, the Houston school district was packing top executives off to the pokey like Christmas hams for this very sort of thing.

So anyway, the union has its hands on an entry in a school district check registry showing Miles getting paid sixty-four grand as a vendor. They push this story somehow to The Houston Chronicle.

Chronicle reporter Sam González Kelly starts off the right way with it. At least he does what I would do. He goes to school district communications chief Leila Walsh and gives her what I think of as the WTF query: please explain.

Based on what I saw in the story González Kelly wound up doing, Walsh takes the query seriously and churns out a very detailed and complete explanation of the payments made to Miles. She shows González Kelly payments to cover Miles’ agreed upon salary for the period of time between the day he went to work in Houston and the later date when he signed a contract and became a fulltime employee.

She also shows him a separate payment for moving expenses. She even shows him some screwed-up payments that were entered but then canceled while they were figuring things out.

In the world of newspapering where I grew up and lived most of my life, that’s called, “She killed my story.”

We hate that. If it happens too often, we may even be castigated for it by unkind editors, as in, “Schutze, how come you always come back here with roadkill?”

But killed is killed. It’s like a truck ran over your dog.

The story from the union was that Miles was a crook, a “double-dipper” like those slimeballs the district used to pack off to the pokey like rent checks. And he’s not. He didn’t do anything dishonest or sneaky. “Vendor” in the check registry is a bookkeeping entry so he can get paid before he’s a fulltime employee.

The story’s dead. D.O.A. In the language of contemporary cable news, the story “has passed.”

But González Kelly does it anyway. He writes a story, and the Chronicle publishes it:

“A curious payment that appeared on Houston ISD’s financial ledgers was made to appointed Superintendent Mike Miles to cover his moving expenses and a temporary contract at the beginning of his tenure, HISD officials said.”

Curious? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Like Curious George and the Lost Puppy?

It goes on: “About $64,072 was awarded to Miles over the course of three payments on June 28 and June 30, according to HISD’s online check registry, raising concerns about a conflict of interest in violation of board policy.”

OK, now we got it. Conflict of interest. That sounds criminal, like the pokey.

“District policy,” the story states, “in defining a conflict of interest, states that no employee, including a superintendent, can be involved in business that is paid for using district funds.”

Right. “Involved in business” sounds like something to do with being a vendor -- selling a product or a service to the district. So, as a reader of this story, I must assume González Kelly is about to explain all this and tell me what the business was, what Miles was peddling.

No. Not a word. Nothing. Instead, he faithfully repeats the explanation he got from the district spokesperson demonstrating that there was no business, no double-dipping, no conflict of interest. At all.

So … uh … why am I reading this story?

I can answer that one. The use of the term, curious, is a reference, however unattributed, to the union. The union says it’s curious. The union says it’s double-dipping. The union says it’s a violation of board policy.

One thing is glaringly missing here -- the part where González Kelly goes back to the union and says, “the school district spokesperson says you’re full of it. She gave me all kinds of evidence proving you’re full of it. So WTF?”

Because of those unkind editors who sometimes accused me of coming back to the newsroom with roadkill, I actually learned ways to turn roadkill into dinner. At least I tried. In this case – assuming the union didn’t have a pretty damn good come-back -- I might have pitched a story about why the union keeps ginning up crap like this.

Accusing a person of financial crimes is serious. No matter where it winds up legally, an accusation like that is a serious assault on a person’s reputation.

In this case, the union appears to have published this accusation online on the flimsiest possible evidence, apparently without any attempt to do what González Kelly did – get an answer. I do give him credit for that much. But what is the union all about here?

This is why I started writing this blog, even though I’m in Dallas, not Houston, and I’m retired, and what goes on in the Houston school system is sort of none of my business. The thing is, we saw this same syndrome when Miles was the reform school superintendent in Dallas ten years ago. It is a national pattern.

The teachers unions are ardently opposed to the kind of school reform Miles represents, because it is based on doing away with the time-honored system of seniority pay, replacing it with so-called merit pay. The teachers unions, probably like any union, don’t want management picking winners and losers among the rank and file.

That’s not an unreasonable or even surprising position for a union to take. What is anomalous about the teachers is that they won’t own the pay issue publicly.

They do have a problem: reformers like Miles can bring major research to bear showing that their new way of running schools, done right, can produce measurably higher achievement by students. I guess the unions don’t want to sound as if they’re saying screw the kids, we just care about the Benjamins. Not a good look, I must say.

So instead – and again this happens all over the country wherever school reform battles are fought – the unions spend all their time mining the ground for these little gotcha stories about the reformers, always personal, always alleging corruption or venality of some sort. In this effort they have an unwitting ally – I hope they’re unwitting – in a greatly weakened local press.

Nobody says, “Why did you bring us roadkill?” I think now they say, “Why didn’t you bring us ketchup?”

The individual stories tend to dry up and blow away within 48 hours, because they have no substance, no legs, but over time the sheer drumbeat can create an impression of turmoil, of things gone wrong somewhere, somehow. And guess what else I know from Dallas? It works.

I guess somebody else must know that, too.