The new superintendent of the Dallas public schools, Mike Miles, is off to a rousing start. He is a military man, and he thinks in terms of organizational goals, the mission, the beliefs.
The story about Miles’ plan appears in the Dallas Morning News behind a paywall, so I can’t link to it.
But here are the essentials:
Like his predecessors, Miles has a long list of impressive goals.
He wants the district to embrace “a vision and a mission of raising academic achievement, improving instruction and not accepting excuses.” (What were they doing before Miles arrived?)
He said at a meeting of the school board:
“We cannot just post it and market it and put it in little brochures. We have to practice this,” said Miles, adding that he wants 80 percent of DISD employees to be “proficient” on those beliefs in a year. It is not clear how he plans to test the proficiency of all DISD employees, whether the test will be multiple-choice, and whether the test will be created by Pearson.
By 2020, he says, the graduation rate will be up to 90% from the 2010 rate of 75%.
By 2020, SAT scores will jump by 30%, and 60% of students will achieve at least a 21 on the ACT.
80% of students will be workplace ready, as determined by assessments created by the business and nonprofit communities.
He will create a new leadership academy to train principals in one year, based on what sounds like NYC’s unsuccessful one.
Teachers will be observed up to ten times a year, and these observations will factor into a pay-for-performance plan.
All classroom doors must be open all the times. so that teachers may be observed at any time, without warning.
Principals will have one year “to demonstrate that they have the capacity and what it takes to lead change and to improve the quality of instruction.”
Miles did not say how he intends to measure whether principals have this capacity.
By August 2015:
“At least 75 percent of the staff and 70 percent of community members agree or strongly agree with the direction of the district.
At least 80 percent of all classroom teachers and 100 percent of principals are placed on a pay-for-performance evaluation system.At least 60 percent of teachers on the pay-for-performance evaluation system and 75 percent of principals agree that the system is “fair, accurate and rigorous.”
Create a rubric to assess the professional behavior and effectiveness of each major central office department.
Miles is one heckuva corporate reformer. Nothing in his plan refers to the quality of curriculum, instruction or teaching. Nothing about meeting the needs of children. It’s all about the carrots and sticks, all about the shape of the container.
He not only has big goals, but he demands that DISD employees and the community agree with him. Wonder if Pearson has a test for that?
Diane
PS: I neglected to mention, when I put up this post, that Mike Miles is a 2011 graduate of the Broad Superintendents Academy. Perhaps that explains why he is focused solely on organizational and management goals and overlooks anything having to do with raising the morale of teachers or addressing the needs of children. Thanks to commenter Jack Stansbury, for reminding me of the BS background.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
You know Texas is in trouble when they’ve established number goals. Those in charge will simply scrub their way into achieving quotas. You want to raise your graduation rates? Easy — credit recovery by online for profits. Raising test scores? Just follow the New York City model, and make the tests easier.
It’s all about the bean counters, and figures can always be manipulated. Real change? How about sharing your love for scientific discovery and epic poetry? Those joys can’t be measured, so why bother?
Mike Miles is a 2012 graduate of the Board Superintendent Academy, but I could guess that from how his message was stated.
http://www.broadacademy.org/fellows/354_Mike+Miles.html?page_filter=0
While he does have impressive credentials, I can’t find his teaching degree on the above web site. What is his teaching experience? What subjects has he taught? How many years did he teach?
“All classroom doors must be open all the times. so that teachers may be observed at any time, without warning.” I’m not so sure he has any kind of teaching experience at all with a statement like that. When kids are taking a state test in my state, the door is required by state law to be closed with a “Testing in Progress” sign on it. At other times, what if the noise in the hall is disturbing your class – are you required to leave the door open then?
Did he set any quotas for himself? What if these “education reform” ideas don’t start working after one or two years? Will he fire himself?
Hmmm…this one’s easy: “By the end of his speech, 100% of REAL educators, including principals, will consider this plan as ignoramus as NCLB and RTTT = epic failure with many casualties –> students.”
Seriously. Where do they find these people? He is the epitome of why most supers only last 3 years. A catalyst of why only half of teachers go beyond 5.
These kinds of pronouncement always remind me of Mao’s Five-year-plans in China. Look how well they worked. It’s similar to the failure of No Child Left Behind. You can’t just say that 100% of children will be proficient or above average (mathematically impossible) and it becomes so. Sad for Dallas. DISD has a long history of mismanagement.
I live in Dallas with adult children and grandchildren living here as well. I am encouraged by some of the goals, and concerned by others stated above as less than realistic, but here I will only focus on one goal. He wants to raise the graduation rate to 90%. That is a 15 percentage point rise from the current 75% graduation rate.
I’ve been tracking the DISD graduation rates for years using total 9th grade enrollment numbers and then number of diplomas given out four years later. We have made wonderful progress since 2006! See http://schoolarchiveproject.blogspot.com/2012/05/dallas-isd-academic-graduation-rate.html. This simple “raw graduation rate” has gone from 40% in 2006 to over 52% for the class of 2011. To be exact, 524 diplomas were handed out in 2011 for every 1,000 9th graders enrolled in DISD in 2007/2008. This 12% rise was matched by a 12% rise in the Texas Education Agency calculation so that the 2011 TEA rate was 75%.
Given the progress made, I think another 15 percentage point rise in the graduation rate is very possible by 2020. However, education budget cuts in Texas may kill those plans, as well as the fact that the higher the graduation rate gets the harder it is to make progress. It’s like climbing Pike’s Peak. The closer you get to the top the less oxygen there is. I’ve had that experience. It was a beautiful climb! A 90% graduation rate will be beautiful too, just not as easy to achieve as climbing as Pike’s Peak. I hope it happens!
Did it surprise me that DISD’s new superintendent is a Broad graduate? Not at all. From previous readings on the goals of the Broad Superintendent’s Academy, the goals he aspires to have the district meet sounded as if they came right out of a series of classroom notes.
It’s a match from heaven, military authoritarianism and discipline with corporate fraud. With no real concern for education this Mike Miles will serve the goals and the methods of Obama, Bill Gates, Rhee, Arne Duncan, Bloomberg and their crony capitalists in Pearson. Just like the rest he doesn’t seem to have an educational background. They do have a problem with putting an educator or an expert in charge of the education system. A person with some professionalism, morality, ethics, and concern about students and their community will probably not give a hand to the destruction of education. Their goal of failing public education, privatizing its resources and abolishing democracy can be done best by military and business people. Both come from authoritarian tyrannies where there is no need to justify one’s deeds to majority of people and get their approval. Obama via people like The business world also offer its only talent that is in abundance, namely fraud. Cheating, fudging numbers, playing with the books are all practiced by DOE and Wall Street, creating a bubble of faulty success that burst every now and then, leaving millions without homes/jobs/education. But the benefit of both the military and the business worlds is that no one can or would be held responsible.The incompetent administrators will demand accountability day in day out from teachers, but they themselves are protected from the inconvenience of paying for their failing policies and the lies they tell all of us. As they are turning schools into barracks of drilling rather then educating and arguing that one does not need to be an educator in order to be in charge of education, perhaps they should consider to put a teacher to run JP Morgan Chase, or as the next Joint Chiefs of Staff, I have a feeling a teacher would do a better job.
Everyone wants to think that the tools at their disposal and that they understand will make a difference.
Don’t fault people for trying to bring those tools to bear.
Don’t fault the goals. The goals are clear — a good thing. The goals are specific — a good thing. The goals are understandable by all stakeholders — a good thing.
Fault this problem with a lack of theory of action. Fault this missing steps in the causal chain. Fault the lack of attention on the how.
Fault the lack of a clearl instructional vision or plan for improving instruction.
Problem is, as you almost get to at the end of your post, Miles forgets his military training almost completely. What Ranger would go into battle and win after his/her commander tells him he gets pay for performance, and by the way all the previous performance was crappy?
Key differences between Dallas ISD and Hamilton #2: Size and institutional inertia. Miles must change himself first — he can’t spend a day at each of 400 school buildings in a year, not and get anything done.
In Dallas, we run out of paper to copy readings for students, tests — and we’re out of printer toner to print the stuff if we had the paper to copy it. (My cartridge has been dead since November; I supply my own technology in this sometimes third-world district.) Daily floggings of teachers until morale improves won’t deliver paper, toner, clean bathrooms, nor academic results.
Miles will be gone in 18 months if he doesn’t adapt quickly. Me? I’m gone now. Advice I got from Dallas pros when I left Department of Education rings in my ears: Stay out of Dallas. Who’d have thought it would stay so bad, so long — or get worse?
Check out more crappy news from Dallas ISD…now Miles has paired up with TFA (Teach for Awhile). We saw it coming.
http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/DISD-Super-Mike-Miles-outlines-Destination-2020-plan-152641395.html
[…] Enter the New Dallas Superintendent (dianeravitch.net) […]
1. Miles’s goals do not strike me as much different from those of his predecessor, Michael Hinojosa — except that Hinojosa couldn’t get there in his time. I’m not sure what makes Miles think he’s better. The bloodletting at Dallas ISD HQ and in the schools suggests that there will be a lot of new people teaching next year. Judging by the number of Master Teachers and AP teachers I know we’re losing, that’s not a good thing.
2. Dallas has been abusing Teach for America for about three years. Frankly, the people we’ve gotten from TFA are great. But they won’t hang around to fill out their terms, too often, because they’ve not been able to tolerate the bureaucratic misdealings. Can it help to bring in someone from TFA? If he’s looking for talent, then he’s already on the wrong track — Dallas has a lot of talent, and the talent is being chased away. If he’s coming in to make it so that the district will support teachers organically and organizationally, more power to him. I doubt Miles knows enough yet to bring a TFA exec in for the right reasons.
3. Miles isn’t on the job until July . . . sort of. He’s got a fat consulting contract to work in Dallas until his term officially starts (is he collecting from Hamiliton #2 also?). Miles had his first press events this week; here’s a link to his interview with the in-house video group. Slow pitches right over the plate, in the wheelhouse: http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/new-dallas-superintendent-mike-miles-warns-the-troops/
I wish him luck, because the kids of Dallas deserve better than they are getting. Alas, luck may be their sole resort for a while.
A year later, and what has Dallas seen?
1. Bloodletting has extended to principals. Board formally fired two principals, both popular with teachers and students.
2. Board no longer supports Miles. Budget meetings last week were nasty. Board was very unhappy with $4 million spent for a “principals academy.” Board members realize that their favorite principals are in Miles’s crosshairs, and they realize there is probably no good reason for that.
3. Miles’s staff has been wracked with dissent. His hand-picked “cabinet” of seven or eight top aides has fallen apart, with some positions turning over three times in a year, with experienced and respected pro administrators leaving abruptly, and with one indicted in the Atlanta cheating scandals. The TFA hire hasn’t worked out.
4. Texas has turned on teachers AND administrators.
5. Dallas ISD has what looks like zero swat in Austin, with the legislature refusing to restore death-dealing cuts to education from a year ago.
6. Test results and fair measures of student performance seem to have stalled.
7. Summer school had to scale back. Teachers refused to work for extra money because they fear arbitrary evaluations, which continue during summer school classes.
If there is a single, clear educational advance in Dallas, can someone point it out to us?
Alas, our wishes of good luck were all the teachers got.