Texas Monthly Profile leaves out one important person in Houston school reform.

Also muffing the role of the teachers' unions

“OH, NO!”

Wikipedia Creative Commons

Andrea White has a piece in the current Texas Monthly about the state takeover of the Houston public school system, written as a profile of state-appointed superintendent Mike Miles -- a generally good and informative story with one great yawning hole.

The teachers’ unions.

And I get that. The teachers’ unions have been the most difficult part of the school reform story for me, too, mainly because I look at what they are doing, and it’s not at all what I as a liberal expect or want to see teachers doing.

The story is paywalled. I’m not sure how it works. I think the Monthly has kind of a paywall-not-really. You might be able to open it up.   

Texas Monthly

White acknowledges the success the Miles regime has achieved in one short year in the improvement of student achievement, especially among the poor and minority children who were most egregiously neglected by the Houston school system in previous decades.

It’s good that White at least reports those successes, given the extreme reluctance of local media in Houston to acknowledge them. On the other hand, Miles’ successes have become pretty hard to ignore. Another approach to the same story that the Monthly could have taken might be, “In one year Mike Miles makes Houston a national model for school reform.”

But I knew we were not going to get to anything like that when, midway through her piece, I read this line: “But as the decade passed—and many realized that poverty and other social-justice challenges, not just faulty schools, were the primary obstacles to students’ success—the promise of school reform began to fade.”

Ah, the fatal “many realized” attribution, sort of like the Trumpian “many people say,” to which I always mentally ask: “Many who? Do you mean, perchance, many you?” Because, you know, if it’s that many people, you ought to be able to scare up at least a couple of them you could name.

And it’s not a minor or incidental point. For the last seven years since Occupy Wall Street, the teachers’ unions nationally have used “poverty and social justice issues” as a weird rebuttal of the successes achieved by various iterations of no-child-style school reform. The idea is that school reform puts cruel pressure on children to succeed when really we should be about bringing an end to poverty and racism first, then trying to teach the kids to read.

That model conveniently would install quite a major delay before teachers could be expected to teach kids to read, obviating the need to test the children to see if they can read and protecting teachers from any serious measurement of their own instructional effectiveness.

More to the point, the poverty and social justice argument winds up protecting the thing that’s most important to the unions -- seniority pay, which White euphemizes as pay based on “experience.”  I mean, yes, no, it’s pay based on years in place whether the kids can read or not, if that’s what you mean by “experience.” I think it’s easier to get the basic idea across if you just call it seniority pay.

White concludes: “Big questions remain. Will he (Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath) declare victory based on a year or two of better test scores? Or will he and Miles recognize that without buy-in from frontline teachers and parents, their success is likely to be short-lived? If NES belongs always to Miles and never to Houston, then it’s just another timer ticking down.”

Let’s see if I can sleuth out who may be missing in that paragraph. OK, we’ve got big bad Mike Miles counting up his victories. I see him front and center. We’ve got “frontline” teachers, as opposed, I suppose, to rear-guard teachers. And here are the parents, darling things. Can’t forget the parents.

Um … oh I know who it is! The children!

I knew we had forgotten somebody. It’s the kids – the ones who are getting those “better test scores,” which we might also express as learning how to read, which we might also view as being rescued from what the child advocacy groups call the kindergarten to prison pipeline.

In White’s story there are several profiles of wonderful beloved teachers who feel oppressed by the Miles regime. One sensitive beloved teacher in particular is unhappy because of something to do with her classroom pet lizard. It’s a little unclear why the lizard may be under threat, but I get it anyway, because I love lizards. I feel for both the teacher and her lizard, especially if anything bad is going to happen to the lizard.

But I really would have liked to read a few anecdotes about the children. I am especially curious about the kids who quite suddenly are doing better at reading – the ones who supposedly weren’t ever going to learn to read because of poverty and social justice issues.

I wonder what they were told about themselves before Miles showed up. What did they believe about themselves before Miles? And how has that changed since they started looking at those horrible, cruel Draconian test scores and realized they were actually learning to read? What happened in the hearts of those parents when their kids started coming home from school learning to read?

I’d love to read about all that in the Monthly, too. I could get so enthusiastic, so incredibly uplifted, so stunned by the miracle, you know, if it were the only way to keep it all going I would say go ahead and kill the lizard.