Texas Monthly and Houston Public Media get curiouser and curiouser about the Mike Miles story.

A case of the wrong leading the wrong.

In the curiouser and curiouser department: Texas Monthly magazine has a very curious story in its current edition about some very curious events involving Houston Public Media and a curious bit of business about the Mike Miles school reform regime in the Houston public school system.

Texas Monthly

Houston Public Media (HPM) is an asset of the University of Houston, providing radio and television broadcasts and an online digital news service similar to a newspaper. Texas Monthly, the venerable and admired magazine about Texas, reports that HPM recently killed a podcast it had been working on for four months about Miles and Houston.

The Monthly, as most Texans call it, said HPM killed the podcast before releasing even the first installment. HPM was reluctant to tell the Monthly why.

Displaying what sound to me like some fairly ingenious reporting chops, the Monthly forced HPM, a public entity subject to state open records law, to release all of the installments it had completed so far along with a ton of internal emails and other communications.

The ostensible reason for killing the podcast – the one revealed in the HPM emails – was the discovery by HPM that the podcast’s producer, Dominic Anthony Walsh, was involved in a romantic relationship with a Houston teacher.

Oh, tsk-tsk. If all news media obeyed that rule, there would be no news. Or news media. Anyway, according to what the Monthly dug up, Walsh had already told his handlers at HPM about the relationship early on, way before HPM committed a bunch of money and time to producing the series. A plan had been agreed upon. The relationship would be fessed up at a certain point in the series. It was sort of a footnote.

So that means Walsh’s relationship with a teacher was not the real reason HPM killed the podcast. And here’s the thing HPM is pretty dumb about: even though they’re supposed to be in the news business, apparently they don’t know the first rule of stonewalling.

Rule #1 of stonewalling: reporters love to be stonewalled.

In the news business, we love it when people stonewall, because, when they do so, they hand us a license to speculate. And, hey. I happen to be a professional speculator.

First off, I think HPM was working on this podcast or something like it for a lot longer than four months. They have called me and interviewed me at some length at least a couple of times in the last year, not one word of which have I ever heard or seen in any broadcast or digital account.

And that’s OK. I figured they thought I was boring or didn’t know what I was talking about. I harbor those same doubts.

What I was telling them in those interviews happened to be pretty much the contrary of what they have been reporting for more than a year since Miles was appointed by the state to take over Houston’s failed public school system. With a few notable exceptions, almost all of their coverage has been a parroting of the teachers’ union line on Miles.

That line is that Miles is a military-style martinet who has no idea how to educate children and whose real agenda is the scorched earth destruction of the Houston public school system.

My line in talking to HPM was that Miles was immensely successful in reforming the Dallas public school system ten years ago when he was here (I live in Dallas), and that everything he does is from science and peer-reviewed experience. The teachers’ unions, I said, have refused to debate legitimate education issues, attacking Miles instead with a barrage of transparently false accusations of corruption. Their only other strategy has been sobbing endlessly on any willing shoulder about how terribly burdensome it is for teachers to be expected to teach.

I’ve been around this business a long time, and, in addition to doing countless hours of interviews myself, I have been interviewed a lot. I can kind of tell when the fade comes into the interviewer’s voice, as in, “Mr. Schutze, you can keep running your mouth if you must, but not one word of this crap is going into my story.”

So here is the curiouser bit in the Monthly story. Based on the segments of the podcast they were able to pry loose from HPM, the Monthly says this:

“The podcast finds that Miles is running a familiar playbook, one that has arguably failed over and over again for decades: top-down, test-based school reform, often implemented at the local level by a charismatic leader under pressure to show proof of concept.”

Let’s see if we can un-knot some of the curiouser there. The Monthly is telling us that the podcast exposes the Miles regime as illegitimate. But the Monthly goes another step. It agrees with HPM.

The term “familiar playbook” goes unsourced and unexplained. I was dying to know if the playbook had a title, because I’ve never seen it. Apparently not.

But then the all-important word – “arguably.” Everything Miles is doing is a fool’s errand and an inevitable failure, arguably.

But who is arguing that point? Texas Monthly is. Arguably.

In the meantime, while HPM was cooking up its podcast, an avalanche of news from Houston in recent months has been turning every syllable of HPM’s argument on its head. Terrible schools where minority kids had been left to rot decade after decade were turned around dramatically in one short year under Miles. That means the lives of children have been rescued from the kindergarten to prison pipeline – a dream that must be replicated in cities all over the nation.

And all of the whining and sobbing about teacher abuse – droves of the very best teachers supposedly ditching out of Houston. Well, guess what? When the numbers were finally tallied, it turned out the vast majority of those defections have been by the very worst of the district’s teachers – the ones you want to see quit because they harm children. Meanwhile, the best ones are staying.

So now we get down to my favorite part, the sheer speculation. If indeed the HPM podcast is correctly modeled by that paragraph in the Monthly piece, the one saying Miles is arguably a fool and nothing he’s doing will work, arguably – then it’s a classic case of the facts overtaking the story.

While HPM was polishing up its podcast crooning from the teacher’s union hymnal, the facts blew up in their face. There was no way they could continue to push that line in the face of evidence going off like Fourth of July fireworks at Houston school headquarters.

I speculate that some grownup somewhere in the mix, probably somebody who was being asked to write checks, raised the WTF flag. Why in the hell are we devoting all these resources, not to mention our good name, to a podcast that will only fly in the face of manifestly evident reality and make us look like monkeys, arguably?

The really curiouser part, for me, is the Monthly. My read of their story is that they are bending over backward to imply the podcast got killed because it was just too hot: It was going to blow the lid off the Mike Miles regime, so some damned Republican malefactor of great wealth must have stepped in to kill it.

That’s only my speculation, you understand. But if I’m right, it’s pretty hilarious. This would indeed be a case of the wrong investigating the wrong.

Who knows what happened to Walsh, the producer? I speculate that he fought for his show. Maybe he fought a bit too hard.

When I worked for a daily newspaper in Detroit, I invented what I called the blame alert. At the appropriate moment, I rose from my desk, cupped my hands over my mouth and said in a low monotone: “This is a blame alert. This is not a drill. All personnel report to their blame shelters.”

Everyone thought it was funny. I was never invited to advance into the ranks of management.

I suspect Walsh got caught in a blame alert. But here is the thing I find truly curiouser: I think Texas Monthly, for all its good reporting, still doesn’t get what’s really going on here. Arguably.

Miles is right. The unions are wrong. And that’s not even arguable, because it’s a fact.

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