Is My Substack Thing Some Kind of 1950s Iron Curtain Propaganda for Mike Miles?
Who's paying me to write this stuff?
credit: PAP (Polish Press Agency)
This is a personal note to readers. The other day I received an email very politely asking me if somebody is paying me to write this stuff on Substack about Mike Miles, the new school superintendent in Houston.
The person emailing me said she was trying to figure out if what I write here is “propaganda.”
It occurred to me that I would ask exactly the same questions if I stumbled across something like this blog myself. I don’t live in Houston. What goes on there is none of my business. And my blog is very one-sidedly pro-Miles.
So why? What’s up with that? Am I on somebody’s payroll? Is this all propaganda?
The first question is easy. No. Nobody is paying me. Not Miles, not some group or patron, nobody. No money. Not dime one.
The propaganda question is harder. What I am writing here is not down-the-middle traditional objective journalism. It’s 90 percent pro-Miles. Maybe 97 percent. Ninety-nine?
I have written about and reported on racial issues as a reporter/columnist/author for a very long time. If you click on the link below, you can hear me blah-blah-ing about my book on the racial history of Dallas.
I was a working newspaper columnist in Dallas when Miles was superintendent here a decade ago. I was skeptical at first but gradually decided that Miles was part of a group of people leading us on a meaningful path forward, giving us a chance to resolve the most intractable and heinous inequities in our city.
Others in that group were Mike Morath, then a member of our school board, now Texas Commissioner of Education, and Todd Williams, founder of the Commit Partnership, an education nonprofit, and many more people. Miles was not the Lone Ranger, but he was the guy leading the charge.
You can’t explain or define that group according to partisan loyalty. I’m an ex-hippie pinko liberal Democrat. Miles ran as a moderate Democrat for the United States Senate in Colorado in 2004 (took 30 percent in the primary against Ken Salazar, who went on to beat Pete Coors in the general). I have no idea what Morath and Wiliams are party-wise.
But, yes, definitely. I believe in Mike Miles. I’m sure he’s not perfect. We all have feet of clay. But I believe Mike Miles is offering Houston a path to a better tomorrow.
I know, because I watched this show in Dallas, that the unions in Houston will oppose him. I know that some elected black leadership will fight him because his reforms threaten a deeply embedded system of patronage.
The Democratic Party establishment in Harris County will line up against him out of loyalty to the unions and black leadership. I know that all of my wife’s best friends – well, people like her friends – will have negative views of him.
I believe adamantly that they will all be dead wrong. They will find themselves on the wrong side of history. Life is complicated. Irony abounds.
I present my own views here because I think that somewhere around the margins and in a very minor way I may be able to fight the irony and counteract some of that negativism. That’s all.
So, sure, you can call this propaganda. But I have this question for you. Is it still propaganda if I’m right?
I’m not sure if you’re talking about me (I asked you this question back in June), but I appreciate your addressing this with your readers -- both the issue of funding as well as your intentions for what this writing project will be.
What is happening in our district is complicated. Somebody whose opinion I really respect said that there are a lot of truths to it, and I think that’s exactly right. Even though your goal for your Substack is to tell only one of those, I hope that you can still still treat the other people in the system with respect. I was so disappointed to see you argue yesterday that the teachers who have been raising concerns are just doing so because they are lazy and don’t want to work hard. I have been trying to mostly listen in this conversation about the future of public education in Houston, but the teachers who have been speaking up are some of the most dedicated and effective educators I have ever known in my career.
I know what it is like to believe in a leader with a vision for transforming education, but I think there needs to be a layer of loyalty that extends beyond the individual to the ultimate good that they are trying to serve. If you believe in Miles because you think he has the answer to fixing the schools in our community, I hope that you will get to know that community and treat their perspectives fairly and with sensitivity.
If Miles weren't his own worst enemy quite so often, then I am not sure you'd have felt the pull to tell this story in this manner right now. He did not make it easy to stay in his corner when he was in Dallas at times, and he was personally a jerk to me, but he offers a better chance for kids than the alternatives.