The Texas Department of Education decided to take over Houston, one of the largest school districts in the nation, because one high school was not improving fast enough for state commissioner Mike Morath. The state ousted the elected school board and replaced a strong superintendent with military man Mike Miles, who had a rocky tenure when he led Dallas schools a decade ago.
Miles has launched a campaign of disruption—the signature move of “reformers,” especially Broadies, and he is offering what he calls a New Education System (NES). The details are not yet fully developed, but here is one aspect: 28 of the schools that are part of Miles’s NES will close their libraries and use them for other purposes. One such purpose is to serve as a “discipline center” for students who act out.
Houston Independent School District will be eliminating librarian positions at 28 schools this upcoming year and converting the libraries into ‘Team Centers” where kids with behavioral issues will be sent, the district announced.
This comes as part of the new superintendent Mike Miles reform program, New Education System (NES). Currently, there are a total of 85 schools that have joined Miles’ program, and of those, 28 campuses will lose their librarians. The district said they will have the opportunity to transition to other roles within the district.
The remaining 57 NES schools’ librarians will be assessed on a case-by-case basis, according to the district.
Retired HISD Teacher in Charge of Library, Lisa Robinson, believes the library is full of some of the greatest stories ever told.
“It was such a joy to help them find the perfect book,” said Robinson.
She said those stories are now ripped to shreds.
“My heart is just broken for these children that are in the NES schools that are losing their librarians,” said Robinson.
Librarian positions have been an ongoing debate in HISD. Robinson said the former superintendent, Millard House II, made efforts to keep library staff.
“The mandate for librarians had been put back in place. With one swipe of a pen that has been destroyed,” said Robinson.
Superintendent Mike Miles said students are behind on reading levels, especially in 4th grade.
Former HISD Librarian and Manager of Library Services, Janice Newsum believes eliminating librarian positions could hurt reading performance even more.
“When students engage in reading as an activity of choice, they are not only building that reading muscle, but they are also developing their vocabulary they are understanding a bit about the world that exists outside their block radius,” said Newsum.
Mayor Sylvester Turner believes the move is unacceptable.
“You don’t close libraries in some of the schools in your most underserved communities, and you’re keeping libraries open in other schools,” said Turner.
What’s the logic here? Many students are not reading well, therefore eliminate the librarians who might find books that interest them?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There is NO LOGIC, here at all.
OMG…but, no surprise. I feel sorry for those kids placed at this disgusting proposed center in Houston.
The rePUG-ni-CONS look at everything, even people, as their property. SICK.
Thank you for your column, Diane. 👍🏽
There is a kind of twisted logic for those of the mindset that one cannot afford to have an educated population…. 😦
Commandant Mike strikes again. This man should never be near a school, be he is im Houston’s and it’s for a specific purpose. With the tacit approval of the commissioner, he will mess everything up so badly that the schools will convert to Charters and the wealthy will get their pockets lined. Morath and then Miles tried this in Dallas, but the community said no. Will Houston fight back?
The Houston mayor is trying to.
Just goes to show that you don’t need Plessy v Ferguson and separate schools to have segregation. You simply call it a Team Center and your racist detention system might eek by. And edutech is designed to help you create a pretense of education in your school prisons. Book burning is just the logical byproduct of segregationist tech fantasy. Your student prisoners will get a two dimensional torture chamber while everyone else gets three dimensional classrooms and teachers. The only thing missing will be the heavy chains and cage bars.
A Traveller to a new school in the late 1800s noted that “the books were housed better than the boys (few girls in those days). When he was president of Princeton, Woodrow Wilson visited this school to see why such good scholars were coming from there. The answer was simple. Wisdom, as preserved in literature and philosophy, was the most important thing to an education.
Libraries are the essence of education, and anyone who thinks they are educated, but never spent time in one is fooling themself.
This is Morath’s morass. Miles will create a separate and unequal system within the public schools. Anyone that does not value libraries should not be leading schools. Libraries are essential in any democratic school in order to provide students access and opportunities to those that live in homes that may not have reading materials. He is not going to improve schools by turning them into prisons.
Insane!
Just how far will the fascists that control most of the Republican Party and the RED states go to achieve their nefarious agenda to successfully launch the Fourth Reich in the United States.
The high school where I taught the last 16 of 30 years I worked as a Public School teacher had one classroom we called BIC (Behavior Improvement Center). One physical Ed teacher with an admin degree taught that one class where students were sent when they would not stop disrupting the learning environments in the other 100 classrooms at that high school.
We (students and staff called that teacher Mr. D (because his last name was too long and sort of a tongue twister). Easch year he reported how many referrals had been written to send students to BIC and that report included this.
FIVE PERCENT of the Student earned 95% of the more than 20k referrals written each year.
Mr. D. required his students to work in BIC and not talk. If teachers didn’t sent work, he had worksheets ready for reading, math, history, et al. to hand out depending on what class they came from.
If one of his students disrupted BIC, they ended up losing their next Saturday (a lot longer than an hour). He wrote another referral sending them to Saturday School, that he also monitored and managed that class where the students had more worksheets to complete. If they didn’t show up to Saturday school, they might end up on a behavior contract or enter the expulsion track that eventually would require a judge in the juvenile court system to approve after a hearing.
So, Insane Fascist Mike Miles, who must dream of wearing a Nazi military uniform one day, is getting rid of public school libraries that benefit 100% of the students that use them, to torture and bully the five percent that will earn 95% of the referrals.
Instead of a program to help these few students that are probably living with PTSD due to poverty and anger issues that come from living in poverty, abuse in the home, or abuse outside of the home in the community where those children live, Mike Miles will insure those student grow up to become mass killers and criminals.
I think Fascist Mike Miles is a Nazi lover and his hidden agenda is to censor all books by getting rid of those libraries, so all the students in the schools have no freedom of choice when it comes to what they read.
Just because Miles served in the U.S. military doesn’t mean he isn’t a Nazi lover. The U.S. military does not turn its officers into Nazis like Mike Miles.
My first principal was Ralph Pagan. He’d been an officer in the U.S. Army and he served in Korea during that war. Pagan was the best principal I worked with during my 30 years as a public school teacher, and he was totally the opposite of Mike Miles, Nazi Lover. Pagan managed his school from the bottom up, not the top down. He was the only principal I worked with that managed his school like that where he listened to the teachers and students and acted accordingly, supporting us not ordering us.
Pagan was only one of the ten principals I worked with during those decades.
I should have included the demographics of that high school. When I was still teaching there, 70% of the students lived in poverty. About 8 percent of the students were caucasians.
Last time I looked online at that high school’s annual report card, the child poverty rate was up to 80%.
The community on one side of the high school is the poverty area dominated by violent, multi generational street gangs.
Still, only five percent of the students at that high school earned 95% of the referrals that sent them to BIC. That shows me that most children living in poverty still came from homes with some form of family stability and support, maybe with grandparents, older siblings, or relatives filling in when the parents were working two or more poverty-wage jobs to make ends meet.
Slavery is the original form of capitalism
and it always, everywhere reverts to type.
Again,
There is NO LOGIC, here at all…
Education is not confined to a
library, or the time spent in
one.
Filling heads with the
ready-made thoughts of others
doesn’t develope faculties of
discernment.
To wit:
Effective propaganda begins
where faculties of discernment
ends. See #45 for proof…
Are you saying reading is harmful? Maybe I misunderstood.
Because if you were saying that students should gain no knowledge from school and should instead develop skills to figure everything out for themselves, you must be a big fan of Common Core standards and “close reading” strategies.
Critics call M4L, “Klanned Karenhood.” Raw Story reported today that M4L has been hit with an IRS complaint.
Ha! And, ha!
An excellent twitter thread here, just in case you need proof that Miles doesn’t have a clue how to run a school system:
Fahrenheit 451 by another method.
“Miles has launched a campaign of disruption”
That’s what members of the military are trained to do: disrupt. And they do it exceedingly well.
But unfortunately they are not trained to put things back together again after they blow them up. And when and wherever they try, they fail miserably, as we have seen time after time.
But of course, when it comes to their own organization , the military are adamantly opposed to any sort of disruption.
Missing the Obvious
Schools are not a military
Schools are not a business
Schools are just a liber-ary
Many folks have missed this
Even hallways will work differently. Miles wants principals out of their offices and in the halls, stationed at a standing desk that more closely resembles a bird’s perch than an administrator’s headquarters.“
Actually, what that most resembles is a military checkpoint (not surprisingly). My only question would be “Will the principals have rifles?”
Checkpoint Charlie
Checkpoint Charlie: “Where’s your pass?”
“I don’t have one”
“Ass is grass!”
The Texas Two(million)-Step
All my hexes live in Texas
Texas is the place I’d really love to leave
All my hexes live in Texas
And that is why the Texit’s calling me
The Texas Two -Step
Texas two-step
Then two more
Pretty soon
You’re out the door
Wouldn’t it be cool to see a sit-in at Houston ISD building to protest the library closings? I visited the office in mid 80s; it’s huge!