Houston school superintendent Mike Miles is not the bull in this particular China shop.

He just doesn't take the bait.

Wikimedia Commons

People send me great stuff. On the same day recently, one friend sent me a link to a podcast about teachers’ unions, and another friend posted a comment on my Facebook page about the personality of Houston School Superintendent Mike Miles. It took me a while to recognize that the two things spoke to each other.

The podcast helped me realize that the drastic dysfunction I have witnessed in the unions, here in Dallas ten years ago when Miles was our school superintendent and now in Houston where he is in charge, is a national problem and looming threat to the good name of organized labor.

The comment about Miles – well-meaning and from an otherwise shrewd observer – made me think about the pass strangely afforded the unions by community leaders and especially by the media. The comment was that Miles was a strong and effective leader but “not a people person and didn’t think he needed to be.”

I read that as bull in the China shop, bit of a bully, maybe a little thick in the head socially. We all know the type. My problem is that I have dealt with Miles for a long time now, and I know that that is not his type. Maybe the opposite.

If you met Miles at a cocktail party or sat down to coffee with him, he would strike you as genial, erudite, polished, a good listener with a great sense of humor. But here is the more important thing. Let’s say that’s not how you meet him.

Let’s imagine you meet him the way I did a decade ago, by writing a column in the newspaper before you ever talked to him calling him a jerk and a dead man walking. Sorry, but that’s how I used to introduce myself when I was still a working ink-stained wretch.

What I learned was that Miles has a style, almost a protocol for dealing with people who call him names. He met me that very day for coffee. He said not a word about what I had written. Instead, he gave me a calm, cool and collected tick-tock on what he intended to do as superintendent of schools in Dallas.

My impression is that everybody gets that first shot with him. He comes to you. He tells you his story. He wants to make sure you hear his version. I must assume he did at least that much for the teachers’ unions in Dallas.

What he got back from the unions was part and parcel of what I now understand is a national posture wherever the teachers’ unions are confronting programs of school reform. The unions in Dallas – and again in Houston a decade later – refused ever to discuss the reforms themselves.

They would not debate or even discuss the basics of teaching, anything about curriculum, anything about student achievement. Instead they mounted a reprehensible onslaught of false accusations, one after another, trying not merely to smear his name but to get him indicted for corruption, just as they are doing now in Houston.

Here in Dallas I called them the scandalettes – really nasty little stories about girlfriends on the staff or misappropriated funds, not a syllable of which ever turned out to be even remotely true.

I’ve been a reporter all my life, retired now. I have watched a lot of people get convicted of crimes and sent up the river for long stretches, maybe for the rest of their lives. When they come out, if they come out, their lives will be severely amputated until death. Falsely accusing someone of crime in the hope of getting him indicted is about a shade and a half shy of shooting him.

Miles is a devoted family person with kids, a wife, siblings, a family name to defend. The unions in Dallas sneered at that.

Both in Dallas and in Houston a weakened local media, dying on the vine and hungry for copy, ate up those stories because they were cheap fodder, a way to fill the pages without doing any real reporting. The truth, when it came out, was a paragraph stuck down deep in a story about something else. I loved the newspaper business when I was young (a long time ago). I often despise it now.

I go back then to the comment by my friend, an important community leader in Dallas, who said that Miles was not a “people person.” I know exactly where that comes from.

After that first coffee, after he seeks you out and tells you his story, if you keep up the name-calling, if you demonstrate that you don’t care about his story, you’re just out to get him, then that’s it for you and him. He turns away and back to his mission.

His great sin in the people-person category here in Dallas was that he stopped answering the accusations and slurs. He had other fish to fry. He turned his back on it.

I have watched a ton of leaders in local politics who would never have been able to do that. They would not have been able to resist jumping straight into the rooster pit and covering themselves in mud and blood.

Then, of course, the mission goes winding. No time for school reform. Gotta fight these roosters. And so the unions win. That’s all they ever wanted anyway – to kill school reform, even if it takes killing the superintendent. Miles was called “not a people person” in Dallas because he had the self-control not to take that bait.

The podcast was interesting. In it, Paul Vallas, a champion  of school reform who lost the most recent mayoral election in Chicago,  said he is seeking out leaders in organized labor to persuade them that what the teachers’ unions are doing nationally to combat school reform is bad for organized labor, not to mention really bad for children. Just Google Paul Vallas. He's all over the place. I think he may be a people person.

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