The Bungled Texas Observer story calling Mike Miles a crook calls for a touch of penitence.

Is there such a thing in journalism?

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The Texas Observer, a weekly newspaper published in Austin, long a mainstay of good disruptive journalism in Texas, has been on very hard times lately, not to say life support, not to say hospice care, not quite living among the unhoused yet, so I can’t help feeling a bit chary of kicking it in the teeth just at this moment. And yet every time I think of their recent story calling Houston school superintendent Mike Miles a crook, my kicking toe gets very very itchy.

Their headline last July was, “Mike Miles Moved Texas School Funds to Colorado Through a Possible Shell Corporation Without a Paper Trail.”

Texas Observer

So, crook. I mean, that’s what that headline says. Funds to Colorado. Shell corporation. No paper trail. Hood. Crook. Con man. What else can it mean?

I have confirmed with the reporter who wrote that piece that The Texas Observer will have “a separate story soon.” I asked, because the Texas Department of Education recently released a 29-page summary of findings from an exhaustive months-long investigation into each and every allegation in the Texas Observer story.

TEA report

The investigative report leaves no stone, no pebble unturned. It concludes – it offers proof -- that every syllable in the very accusatory story published by the Texas Observer is skunky bunk junk. Wrong. False. No true. Based on terrible reporting, replete with utterly unsubstantiated conclusions and accusations.

To that I would add what the TEA report does not say – that the story was written by a reporter with a history of stories about the Mike Miles school reform regime in Houston written with bald one-sided and undisguised bias in favor of the Houston Teachers’ unions that have been waging open warfare on Miles and school reform for the last year.

I can’t imagine what The Texas Observer will say about the TEA report, because the report is tight as a drum, leaving no open margins on which to attack. I think I know what The Texas Observer should say, if at all inclined toward honesty. They should say they saw it on TV.

And, yes, it was on TV first. The TV story wasn’t that great, but at least it didn’t claim to know all the answers. It was more like, “Hey, what about it?” The tone of the Texas Observer piece, on the other hand, was almost exultant, as in, “Man, we are taking this dude down for good.” And now all they have for their efforts is egg on their face. A lot of egg.

For one thing, the Texas Observer piece dove headfirst into a subject matter area where all good journalists should fear to tread – accounting.

I’m retired now, but I was a pretty decent reporter in my day, and it was my privilege to work among reporters and editors who were better at it than I was. One of the things I gleaned from too many late night barroom confessionals was that accounting and chemistry often were the college courses that persuaded many of us to go into journalism. Not because we got good grades.

It’s not that The Texas Observer should never have taken on an accounting story. But a story like that usually requires a certain humility where the reporter admits to herself or himself that she has no idea what she’s talking about. Time to grab that cell phone and dial up an accountant. The right accountant. Somebody to whom you can show everything you’ve got so they can tell you if you’ve got anything.

The thesis of the Observer story was that Mike Miles was a principal or recently had been a principal in a shifty corporate set-up. The set-up, The Texas Observer reported, was designed to suck money out of beleaguered Texas school districts and send the cash to the equivalent of a dodgy Swiss-style bank account in Colorado. All sorts of laws being broken, the Observer said.

So investigators for the TEA spent months going over every syllable of accusation in the Texas Observer story. I assume they knew they would be accused of a coverup if they allowed the tiniest opening to attack. They didn’t.

The Texas Observer had the law wrong. They had the accounting wrong. They had the facts wrong. They quoted so-called experts who had no idea what they were talking about.

Speaking as an accounting-challenged journalist, I would say it was possible to see what was coming just by reading between the lines. This is from the lede or first paragraph of their piece:

“In 2012, (Miles) was hired as superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District (DISD) and was found the following year to have violated district policies. Miles avoided termination, but he resigned in 2015 shortly after the DISD board did not approve changes to his contract that he’d requested.”

That’s the absurdly cherry-picked version of Miles’ career in Dallas that is handed out by the unions. The truth is the opposite. The reforms Miles put in place in Dallas have only grown more robust since his departure, making Dallas a model written into state law for both school reform and school funding.

And let’s say you don’t believe me. You disagree. You think Miles failed in Dallas. OK, you’re wrong, but at least you should recognize that the point is controversial. Don’t bake it into your lede as if it’s something Moses carried down from Mount Sinai.

That was all I had to see, and I knew everything that followed was going to be jabberwocky.

But let’s be fair. Let’s give them a chance. Maybe The Texas Observer will come out on stage now flailing itself in sackcloth and ashes, begging our forgiveness. The betting window is now open.

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