Nancy Bailey fears that the takeover of the Houston Independent School District should set off alarm bells in other districts. The new superintendent Mike Miles is taking steps to de-professionalize teaching and to impose untested programs on the schools. He is the tip of the spear of destructive education “reform.” Please recall that the Texas Education agency took control of the entire district because one high school—with disproportionate numbers of students who are in need of special education and in high poverty—was not getting the test scores the state expected (even though its scores increased in the year before the state takeover and the school rose to a C grade). Is Mike Miles a harbinger of the future or an echo of failed policies forged by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top?
She writes:
I think there is a likelihood that we will be seeing more state takeover of districts.
Houston faces harsh public school reforms, a sad example of the continuing efforts in America to destroy all public education and end professional teaching.
State takeovers aren’t new. Nor are they known for innovation, but for creating school voids, cutting services, and firing key staff, promising to close learning gaps. Takeovers usually only weaken schools, breaking them up and leaving communities with fewer and poorer schools.
The Superintendent
Superintendent Mike Miles has never been a classroom teacher. Miles replaces Superintendent Millard House II, hired in 2021, only there two years before being hired elsewhere.
As CEO of Third Future Schools, Miles ran a network of public charter schools in Colorado, Texas, and Louisiana. The Texas Tribune describes his leadership in the Dallas Independent School District as tumultuous after six years as superintendent of the smaller Harrison School District in Colorado Springs.
The Dallas Morning News claims the district has few academic gains to show for all the disruption.
Miles participated in the Eli Broad program at Yale. On his LinkedIn page, another school reformer writes they matriculated through the Broad Academy now within the Yale School of Management.
The late Eli Broad pushed school privatization with a 44-page document to show how to break up public schools, originally reported by Howard Blume in the LA Times $490 Million Plan would Put Half of LAUSD Students in Charter Schools.
Those who subscribe to Broad’s philosophy disrupt public education to privatize it. Realizing Miles is a Broadie (name reflecting Broad’s agenda), makes what’s happening in Houston clearer.
Miles has degrees from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, served in the army, and attended the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University. His degrees are in engineering, Slavic languages and literature, and international affairs and public policy. He has no known formal education about running a school considering student developmental needs.
The New Education System (NES)
Miles’s program is called the New Education System (NES) and HERE. Principals, teachers, and staff join.
Under the NES, according to the Houston Chronicle, administrators will handle discipline, stand in hallways patrolling, and make children walk in single file, quietly, and schools look sterile, cold, and cookie-cutter. If they use the bathroom, they must carry an orange parking cone. Teachers might get to keep their desks.
Compensation under the NES will be differentiated. Teachers will likely be evaluated with test scores, and their autonomy is stifled. Curriculum developers will provide lesson plans and materials for grades 2-10, removing the teacher’s instructional expertise. Student work will be graded by support personnel, even though teachers glean information about students by grading their work.
The district will hire apprentice teachers. They will expand the reach of the best and brightest teachers. How will they make this determination? Shouldn’t all teachers be hired with the credentials they need to do the job?
The plan calls for four periods of the staff performing duties each month (75 minutes each time), and this is unclear.
Replacing School Libraries and Librarians with Disciplinary Centers
Most controversial is that when principals join the NES they can lose their school libraries and librarians. From Click2Houston: 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.
Instead of school libraries, children with behavioral difficulties will face screens in “Teams Centers” or “Zoom rooms.” There’s concern they’ll associate libraries as punishing. Students who misbehave need human interaction and support, not to be left to face screens.
Librarians with advanced degrees in library science will be removed, despite being knowledgeable and critical to a child’s learning. They could be transplanted to non-NES schools, which will get school libraries and librarians.
We’re not doing things that are just popular. We’re not doing things that we’ve always done, we’re not doing things that are just fun, we’re not doing things that are just nice to have or good unless we can measure its success.
He’s not doing what works! It’s common knowledge among those who understand children that when children have access to great school libraries learning results improve.
Losing Teachers: Moving to Online Amplify to Teach Reading
HISD is losing qualified teachers, school libraries, and librarians, and advertising for 350 long-term substitutes who don’t require a college degree. The online program, Amplify, will be used.
In State Legislative news in May, Education Bill “Amplifies” StatePower, Threatens Teacher Autonomy, Jovanica Palacios states:
Despite promises to the contrary, this bill [House Bill 1605] would cut a slice out of Texas’ education funding, taking money out of school districts and giving it to a vendor. The proposed legislation is actually dubbed “the Amplify bill” due to its association with curriculum development company Amplify, which received a $19 million emergency state contract during COVID.
At least 85 NES schools under Miles will use Amplify, which advertises the Science of Reading, an online program once owned by the education division of Rupert Murdock’s News Corp. and purchased by Laurene Powell Jobs. Where’s independent research providing proof that this program is effective?
Please open the link to finish reading her important post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ah, yes, the never-ending, holy grail “measurement” of success. More misuse of data and the kids and teachers pay the price. Awful.
yup
Interestingly, there is no accountability for the accountability mavens. They fail and fail and fail and then are given the opportunity to double down on that failure.
Failing up. It’s what Education Deformers do.
Poster child for this: David Coleman, chosen by Master of the Universe Bill Gates to be the Decider for the Rest of Us
Agree. See also Arne Duncan and Senator Michael Bennet.
Ah yes, I have heard this song before. Years ago the superintendent told us in a meeting, “We are going to hire the best teachers for our students. We are scouring the finest universities.” — looks good on paper! I thought, “Geez, then what are we?” I stood by my mantra, “I am the eyes, ears, and soul for my kids. They. feel the heat, the cold, the power outages, so do I.” We were forced to take furlough days with no pay at one point. THEY kept telling us they had no money; teachers should give money back; and at one point I was being paid at the poverty level (statistics supported this for a family of four). And then THEY wanted to do “scripted teaching” where an admin would walk into a room 2, 3, 4 or whatnot and ALL the “Stepford Teachers” would be saying exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. Hey, but they were great “robot dancers.” I maintained if THEY really wanted to save money, they should be a monitor in each year, get rid of real teachers, hire paras, and thousands of kids could watch the “tellie” taught by their instructor. The paras (typically paid very low) could pause, rewind, handout/collect papers. Rinse, repeat — next please! Save thousands of dollars, but at what cost? All kids want is a chance to be “human” and someone to listen, not make fun of them, or put them down. Promote their uniqueness and tell them, “You will be okay. It’s going to be alright. We have a goal and the road your on make not be the smoothest, but you will get there. I will be there to guide you. As they say, “The beatings will continue until the moral improves.” Once again, I remember my schooling (public school) as magical, making puppets, learning to sew, taking Spanish in fourth grade, speed reading, rocket club, creative writing, reciting poetry (to this day Robert Frost stands out) and I just found my old journal (8th)from my Oceanography field trip to Point Reyes at Dillon Beach for a week where I got to work at the Marine Science Research Center classifying seaweed for my project. From there I learned isometric and orthographic drawing (then onto working with a lathe, bandsaw) (7 and 8 grades); Algebra 1 in 8th grade; auto shop, metal shop (learning about a metal lathe with micrometer and welding and a host of very interesting subjects along with sports (we not only had a park director, but each school had an after school sports director as well). I remember all my teacher’s names. And when I qualified to be moved up a a grade, my principal told my parents it would be better for a young man to be older (get his license in high school rather than be the youngest) and it worked out well. He was out on the black top shooting baskets with me and said, “If you learn to use your left, no one will stop you.” Real people who grew up in our community and raised their kids in the same community giving back to the next generation. I was blessed. I feel sad for the kids of today. Peace out.
Nice.
What Abbott is doing to Houston is an unjustified, stealth takeover of a relatively successful school district. Otherwise, Houston schools would not have received a B rating from the state. Abbott’s motives are wholly political. He had his cronies put a trigger law in place to provide a smokescreen for his anti-democratic actions in Houston. The law allows the state to intercede based on the performance of one public school while the under performance of many charter schools is routinely ignored. Abbott is setting the state to emulate the privatization scheme of New Orleans. This is a classic smash and grab which he seeks to implement before a groundswell of resistance organizes.
Ultimately every single Texan who voted for Abbott shares responsibility for this horror. Do Texas voters care about anything other than low taxes? Just curious.
Privatization does not really save money, although politicians may make that claim. It diverts funds out of public schools and into private pockets. It undermines the public sector in order to enrich the private sector. It degrades the ability of public schools to provide needed services to public schools that often lose support services, and it results in larger class sizes for public school students.
BTW, Texas has the 6th highest property tax rate in the nation. The only people with low property taxes in Texas live in shacks.
This book is STILL very appropriate:
The Manufactured Crisis
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/019263659608057619
This week, we have learned that reform is dead. This word may be dead, but now all pretense is removed, and the group that used to say reform openly now says destroy openly. That is why all the stuff as bout “woke” is being shoved down the public throat. They can no longer claim any superiority.
Looks like we have to view Miles’ run as head of HISD [or whatever “head” he appoints] as an experiment in radical disruptive ed-reform. Let’s make sure we’re all on the other end as he reports “progress” or “improvement” or “success” after 4 or 6 or 10 yrs– to slice & dice the results, & show them for the fraud they undoubtedly will be.
How despicable that the non-white majority kids of HISD have to be the victims of Gov Abbott’s vendetta against “blue” districts that have refused to go along with his calls for fragmentation of the pubschoolsystem.
But most disturbing about this move is what I have read at other news outlets. It’s obviously not about improving ed per the state’s ed accountability system. Of 274 pubschools, Houston had only 4 ranked “failing” when Abbott started pushing state takeover of HISD in 2018. By 2021, 3 had moved out of the “red zone,” and the only remaining one [Wheatley] moved from F to C+ in 2022. The current “grade” for HISD schools is 88%. Yet as soon as the judicial injunction was lifted on Abbott’s proposal (earlier this year), he announced the state takeover. By then there were ZERO HISD schools ranked “failing.”
There appears to be no judicial curb on this governor; he uses “state takeover” at will, regardless of ranking of schools in a district [i.e., regardless of applicable state ed law (other than as modified by some faux ‘trigger law’]. Apparently with the backing of his puppet Rep legislature. He finds this tool handy as a way to exert political clout over a blue city in the midst of his red state. Other red states will mimic his action to do likewise, modifying their state laws (as TX has done) to take over targeted “blue-city” school districts regardless of ed performance, at their whim.
I have a question…Say Superintendent Miles were a General during a war. Would he replace the experienced battlefield officers with officers who are basically desk jockeys on a front where a particular division is struggling? I think not. State takeovers have never worked and they have been tried enough to come to that conclusion. Such action results in continued struggle among teachers and principals at the expense of students. It results in a level of intra-organizational resentment and distrust that cannot succeed. I would think Miles class on the history of warfare at West Point would have shown him this. Unless, of course, he nor the Governor Abbot Palpetine actually care if Houston Schools succeed. The learning casualties will be profound, but to these disruptors, students are only numbers.