Is successful school reform in Houston an indictment of democracy?

Herodotus didn't take modern urban school districts into account.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Here is something I started writing about on Facebook: is the success of the Mike Miles school reforms in Houston an indictment of democracy?

Well, not all democracy, like not all the way back to Herodotus. I’m talking about hyper-local democracy with huge budgets, enormous responsibility and almost no serious voter participation, therefore captive to bad special interests. How do we know that isn’t what sucks in public education? And if it is — if that’s the real problem — aren’t we just nibbling around the edges?

The Houston school reforms, a striking success in only one year, are working now because the school district has been virtually expunged -- the elective board abolished, at least temporarily, the superintendent canned and everything run pretty much from Austin by the state. If the elected board were still in place, none of the progress of the last year would have been achieved.

When the vast multi-billion dolllar entity was operating as a local democracy, it was an irretrievable kleptocracy, its top executives regularly carted off to the federal pokey, its core mission a stubborn failure.

This is in spite of Houston itself. Houston has been an engine of education success for decades, birthplace of no-child-left-behind, birthplace of the KIPP schools, training ground for a host of school leaders who have gone on to prominence and success elsewhere,

Houston is a port city, a truly international and diverse city, a city with world-class institutions of culture and higher learning, a place that has been a successful engine of upward mobility for multitudes of Americans for a century.

I'm saying this in Dallas where I live, which is awkward, because Dallas has a serious case of Houston denial, but the truth is that Houston is a great city ...

... with an almost inexplicably stupid school district.

I guess it doesn't absolutely have to be that way. I ran into a top Dallas school reformer on a dog walk yesterday evening, and he told me about a fascinating initiative here to reform and rationalize the way the Dallas school district uses and manages its vast real estate holdings.

But that's because the way the district manages land now is utterly feckless.

You have to wonder -- I do -- about the basic model. Take a democratically elected body for which almost nobody votes and about which nobody knows anything or cares. Give it a $2.2 billion dollar budget. Entrust it with the lives of your children.

What could go wrong?

No wonder the teachers' unions don't want anything to change. They're like the bad son and daughter who have come home and moved in with rich senile daddy. “Just click on the little bank thingy, Dad, and you can have another pop tart.”

How do we know the problem isn't the basic structure of local school districts? The dominant trend now is for people escaping failed school districts to want to set up their own little mini-districts — understandable, I suppose, for people who feel they have fled the edcational equivalent of a Soviet gulag.

But isn’t the idea of hyper-local control how we got into this mess? Why should teaching kids to read and do math be hyper-locally controlled any more than brain surgery? I don’t think the libertarianish Republicans would like where I find my own thoughts drifting — the farther from local control the better.

One way or another, I do think the ultimate questions raised by what’s going on now in the Houston school district are questions about the reach and limits of democracy. And as for that bad son and daughter who are in there telling rich senile dad what to do with his bank account? Usually the only people I’ve ever seen who could get those types out ofthe house were sheriff’s deputies.