My nomination for villain of the year in Houston -- State Rep. Christina Morales

Don't leave the kids alone with this lady

“Fired off a letter” is not a phrase that will ever appear accurately or honestly in the same sentence with the name, Mike Miles. Before Miles became a national figure in school reform, he had distinguished careers in both the military and the United States diplomatic corps. If he fires anything off in your direction, look out, because it’s not a letter.

But he does write a strong one when he puts his mind to it.

Last week Miles sent a stern letter to nine Houston-area state legislators who have been carrying out a sandbag campaign in the state capital against Miles’ year-old reform regime in the Houston public school district. He implored the nine at least to take some cognizance of the stunning successes Houston students racked up on statewide end-of-year achievement tests this year after only one year of reforms.

I have been sort of keeping my peace on this story for a week, because I truly couldn’t think of anything I could write that wouldn’t result in my wife putting me out of the house. So I have calmed down a bit, and I’m going to see if I can do this within the bounds of acceptable adult behavior.

The nine legislators in question -- State Representatives Ana Hernandez, Jolanda Jones, Jarvis D. Johnson, Christina Morales, Jon Rosenthal, Hubert Vo, and Gene Wu, and State Senators Carol Alvarado and Molly Cook -- were authors of a letter complaining about Miles to ultra-right conservative Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. The letter asked Paxton to open a corruption investigation into Miles and his relationship with a Colorado education consulting firm.

The corrupt consulting story has been around the block. It is being aggressively shopped to media all over Texas by the Houston teachers’ unions, with very few takers. So far only Spectrum, a fledgling Texas cable news network, and The Texas Observer, a venerable weekly newspaper in Austin, have given it credence.

The Houston Chronicle, normally not a friend to Miles, tore the story apart the day after it first aired on Spectrum. The Chronicle story demonstrated plainly and conclusively that it simply is not a story that can be taken seriously by responsible journalists. And none has.

Story Shot Down

But the nine Houston legislators, all Democrats, mostly minority and nominally liberal, crossed party lines anyway to take this scurrilous piece of junk to Paxton, who is easily the most ethically and legally challenged elected official in Texas. It’s not a stretch to say that Paxton is not in prison at this moment only because he is the state’s top law enforcement official.

And he’s seriously anti-minority. Paxton’s latest trick has been sending armed raiders into the homes of elderly Mexican-Americans who have never been charged with even a parking ticket in an effort to terrorize and suppress the Hispanic vote.

And yet here they are, the nine Democrats from Houston, cuddling up to Benito Mussolini Paxton, running an errand to curry favor with the teachers unions.    

I have known for a long time that politics makes strange bedfellows, but I didn’t know it could be responsible for actual crimes against nature.

The worst of the nine by far in my book is State Rep. Christina Morales, who took a tour of an elementary school at Miles’ invitation and then rushed to the Chronicle with an op ed piece denouncing the horrors she claimed to have witnessed. Even at that, she had to reach pretty far to find a horror:  

  “Even the places that we were shown,” Morales wrote, “felt sterile, rushed and threatening.”

So apparently Rep. Morales is particularly threatened by order, cleanliness and hard work.

 Here is the truly infuriating thing, the thing that keeps trying to make me use language that will have me sleeping in my pickup tonight in front of the house if my wife sees this. The school Morales denounced as an emblem of failure was indeed a failure before Miles showed up. The last official letter-grade rating that Wainwright Elementary received from the state before Miles was an F, meaning state law called for the school to be closed permanently or taken over by the state.

Yes, all of those children at Wainwright before Miles were attending a failed school, a school of failure, a home to failure, a cradle of failure. They were children of failure.

Under Miles in one short year, Wainwright went from an F rating to an A. From an F rating to an A. From the bottom to the top. Wainwright is now a school of success. The children at Wainwright are children of success.

Sterile and rushed? Maybe, depending on how you choose to view things. I have visited Houston schools and watched the Miles reform program in action. It is intense, no question. It definitely is orderly. It’s no-nonsense. The kids and the teachers work intensely and hard. I told you Miles came from the military and the diplomatic corps, not the circus.

But I didn’t see any kids looking threatened. I saw kids with that certain shine in the eye that all children get when they feel themselves learning.

Kids love to learn, if you show them how. It’s instinct.  They are delighted to learn how to do something today that they couldn’t do yesterday. Like reading. Like math. They don’t know it yet, but these are accomplishments that will completely change the entire rest of their lives.

A school doesn’t go from an F rating to an A rating without enormous effort and hard work on the part of the kids, and kids don’t work like that unless they want to.

It is truly terrible, egregious, even unforgivable for Morales to do what she did. She denounced Wainwright Elementary and the children in it in order to service a sleazy political alliance, I’m sure also holding on to a steady stream of money from the unions. And then she joins the other eight in embracing Ken Paxton, the ugliest man in Texas, to do the unions another even sleazier favor.

Those kids deserved a huge party for what they accomplished, a festival with balloons and pinatas and all of the state and federal elected officials and city council members and mayors and any other big wigs who could be scraped up. Morales and the other big shots needed to go to that school and tell the children how great they are.

Instead Christina Morales calls their school a piece of junk, and then she and the rest of them call in Ken Paxton to help kill the reforms that made the success at Wainwright possible.

And these are Democrats. Liberals. Man. Don’t leave your children alone with this crowd. (Phew, OK, I’m done, and I’m not in the pickup tonight, right?)