Nasty Flap over School Principal Evaluations in Houston Public Schools
Fine to assess those other principals, but how dare they assess our principals?
People often think the thing wrong with big public school systems is politics or some kind of off-kilter social policy or dogma.
Not what I see. Not that those factors cannot be present. But I don’t think they come close to being the big one.
Both in covering schools as a journalist and being the parent of a public school kid in Dallas, the failing I have come to see more often is slack. Whatever we call that. Slackitude.
The tragedy is that most public school systems probably already have teachers and the curricula they need to teach every single kid in the system to read fluently and do arithmetic by the end of the third grade. Instead, they send half their children out into the world as functional illiterates – to lives of serial incarceration and homeless encampments – because management can’t be bothered to do the hard managing.
So how did that happen? Is it some kind of horrible coincidence? All the most slack lazy-bones in the world just happened to converge on school management as a great place to be a lazy-bones?
I don’t think so. I think it goes a lot deeper than that. After all, the culture of slack isn’t consistent. Every big school system has its non-slack schools – the tightly run schools where the work gets done, the kids get the scores and college admissions are impressive.
Those are the schools attended by kids whose parents are squeaky wheels – helicopter parents whose ability it is to make serious trouble. In Dallas where I live, those schools were originally geographic – near affluent neighborhoods. Now they tend to be more magnet and specialty – offering a particular curriculum.
You may say – hey, I might even say – what’s wrong with that? In fact, doesn’t it simply reflect the facts of life? Some people insist on excellence. Some people don’t. A public school system needs to serve all of them.
Well, wait a minute. What do we mean by excellence? Can a school administration pursue true excellence in a few selected schools where there might be trouble otherwise, then slack off and let the other kids go to hell in a handbasket? That is excellence? Really? Sounds more like terrible cynicism to me. A scam. Slack.
This comes to mind in the wake of public uproar over a leaked document showing that nearly half of school principals in the Houston Independent School System had earned failing grades on a district-wide midyear performance assessment. At a recent school board meeting, dozens of parents and activists called Houston Superintendent Mike Miles everything from a bully to a fascist dictator – all with a central theme I found especially confounding.
The unhappy mantra at the meeting was that the assessment itself was illegitimate and untrustworthy because it was “one size fits all.” Parents and other advocates representing the school system’s helicopter schools were outraged that some of their own principals had received unsatisfactory midyear assessments. That’s where the one-size-fits-all mantra comes from along with the charges of fascism and bullying.
Really? Is it fascist and bullying to have everybody take the same test? Maybe I need to go back to my dictionary and look up, “Test.”
This was a measurement applied to all of the district’s school principals. The same measurement. It was a district-wide assessment. Isn’t it supposed to be one size fits all? In fact, doesn’t it have to be?
What’s the other way? Two sizes fit all? Three? All of you principals over on that side of the auditorium, please line up under the sign that says, “Hard test.” Those in the middle, please line up under, “Easy Test.” Those principals sitting with wealthy parents chatting and sipping martinis, line up under “No Test.”
That’s excellence? I don’t think so. But what is it? Where does it come from?
It comes from the very issue that sparked the state takeover of the Houston Public School System in the first place. The law requiring the state of Texas to take over the Houston school system, authored by longtime Houston State Rep. Harold Dutton, targeted school districts that allow some schools to wither on the vine while devoting their greater efforts elsewhere. Dutton wrote the law with Houston in mind. And see if you can guess which demographic typically comes out on the short end of that stick?
Behind the charges of bullying and fascism, there is an unspoken assumption that there are two school systems in Houston – theirs and ours. It’s fine for Mike Miles, the state-imposed superintendent, to go reform the heck out of their school system. But if he dares come over the line into our school system, he’s trespassing.
I often hear this kind of thinking described as white privilege, and I suppose that’s a good enough term for it. But we could look more closely.
A dual system that can live with high performance for some kids while consigning others to hell in a handbasket is not based on anything I can recognize as excellence. It’s based on cynicism and callousness. No school superintendent who cares about kids and who believes in true excellence could accept that kind of moral compromise.
I’m thinking back to what I said at the top. I can go with white privilege. But I would also call it white slack.
By the way, I happen to be a white folks myself, and I don’t see myself as pure as the driven snow on this score. I certainly know what it is to just want what you want for your own damn kid. But can I even get there by writing off somebody else’s kid? How could a system based on excellence also contain such an immense moral error? We could all stand to step back and think this stuff through a bit more carefully.
Your principles about slack should be applied to every aspect of life, including business, government service, military service and politics. Sadly, they are not.
From my attempt to read the Houston Chronicle, it seems that principal evaluations will happen at the end of the year anyway using much of the same criteria, but perhaps presented a bit more diplomatically. Do you get down to Houston for the school board sessions? Are they available online?