Gary Rubinstein has been a teacher since 1991. Four of those years were spent teaching in Houston. Gary has been watching what’s happening since Mike Miles arrived and was taken aback when Miles imposed sweeping changes on the district without spending time getting to know it. Miles’ “reforms,” Gary predicts, are heading for trouble. Those reforms come out of the “corporate reform” playbook. Maybe Miles took a page or two from the Broad Academy guidelines, applicable in all situations.
Gary writes:
With around 200,000 students, Houston Independent School District (HISD) is the 8th largest school district in the United States. For years there was talk about the state possibly taking over the district and this finally happened on June 1, 2023. The board was fired and replaced by Texas Education Agency (TEA) appointees. Mike Miles, who founded a charter school network called Third Future Schools and was previously the head of Dallas Schools for three years, was hired as the new HISD superintendent. While most people new to a job like this would take some time to get the ‘lay of the land,’ Miles instantly proposed some radical, and in my estimation, terrible, reforms which I will outline in this post.
He identified the three lowest performing high schools in HISD: Wheatley, Kashmere, and North Forest. Those three schools together with the 26 middle and elementary schools that feed into those high schools were to become part of a new ‘New Education System’ known as NES. This NES is the latest ‘turnaround’ district. Over the past 20 years there have been several of these, the most prominent are the Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans, set up after Hurricane Katrina in 2003 and the Achievement School District (ASD) in Tennessee, created in 2011 with Race To The Top money. There was also Michigan’s Education Achievement Authority (EAA) in 2011 as well as a few more that have popped up around the country. To my knowledge, there has never been a successful takeover of this sort in the history of this country. The EAA has been shut down, the RSD has been merged back into the New Orleans school system and the ASD has floundered, never having any success at all in improving the test scores of the schools it took over. It is funny/sad to see this hopeful panel discussion by the leaders of these districtsbefore it was known how badly they would fail. (I’ve written a lot about the ASD, but here is something I wrote summarizing the history of these turnaround efforts.)
These turnaround efforts sometimes have school closures or staffs at schools having to reapply for their jobs and often have the schools converted into charters. For the HISD NES model, the schools are not getting taken over by charters but teachers do have to reapply for their jobs. Teachers at these schools will get raises and opportunities for bonuses with test score based merit pay. Other changes that will happen at these 29 schools are a restructuring of the teacher role where the teacher is like a ‘surgeon’ doing the most important part of the job while other tasks like grading, lesson planning, and discipline are done by others. Also, you may have read about elsewhere, libraries at these schools are converted into discipline centers where students are sent to watch a live streamed version of the lesson on a computer screen.
The reason that no turnaround effort like this has ever worked is that it is based on faulty assumptions about what the cause of the low test scores are at those schools so any solution based on those assumptions is doomed to fail. It is like trying to treat a broken leg by giving a patient a complete blood transfusion.
As someone who has been teaching since 1991 – and my first four years were in HISD actually, looking at the list of changes makes me shudder. Anyone who ever taught can see how most of these changes will make the schools worse but I want to summarize some of them here.
All teachers have to reapply for their jobs – When students come back and learn that many of their favorite teachers were not hired back, this can be very traumatic. There is no guarantee that the teachers who replace those who weren’t hired back, even if those teachers have been successful at a different school, will necessarily be a good fit at this school. This uncertain improvement coupled with guaranteed disruption is a pretty big risk. Why not first see how the current staff does with these new supports?
Please open the link to finish this important article.
Gary reviews the other major elements of Miles’s prepackaged plan and explains why they are unlikely to make a difference. They haven’t worked before, why will they work now? As Gary writes, takeovers typically fail because they are based on fake assumptions and prepackaged cures.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
But disaster is exactly what they’re after —
The destruction of a profession, the disintegration of a community.
We must understand there is no intention of having any positive effect.
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“The reason that no turnaround effort like this has ever worked is that it is based on faulty assumptions about what the cause of the low test scores are at those schools so any solution based on those assumptions is doomed to fail.”
I think predicting test scores is a futile exercise in general due to all the shortcomings we have discussed here. It is my unsupported opinion that the reason state takeovers fail is that the state is a generally poor administrator of education. State administration is always staffed by people so far from the actual process that they have no basic understanding of that process. It is reminiscent of the situation David Halberstam described one The Reckoning, his book on the failures of the American auto industry in the early 80s. You have to work with people who know their business.
Of course, there is the added motivation on the part of the reform movement for that movement to fail, causing disruption that leads to privatization. Maybe failure was the goal.
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And North Forest was its own separate school district until 2013.
State-Forced Consolidated into HISD. Which meant HISD had to absorb the burden of a long-struggling and quite IMPOVERISHED Entire Community.
The troubled North Forest is then cited as yet another reason to smash and grab HISD. With malicious Miles leading the charge.
What a racket.
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So Mr. Steward, do ya have
the “juice” now, the power
to undo what happened
under your watch?
What changed, to empower
you now, to right the
wrongs you didn’t or
couldn’t stop then?
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State takeovers are more counterproductive policy. Since this one is particularly unjustifiable, it is likely just a step in a larger privatization plan. Applying business practices to education also generally misses the mark. Teaching is a human process that is built on relationships. Grading papers, as burdensome as it is, is where students demonstrate understanding and learning. It is also guides teachers planning for future lessons, but these teachers are expected to implement canned material. He is detaching teachers from meaningful engagement in the teaching-learning process. Miles’ ‘efficiency measures’ will likely fall flat. Every public school deserves a functioning library, not a former library that serves as a detention facility. Miles is on the wrong track with his top down decisions, and so it Abbott.
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As I recall hearing it, probably not exactly:
“My students write papers. But I do not grade them to grade the students. I grade them to grade me. How am I doing? What don’t they seem to understand? How am I failing?” –W. Edwards Deming
Evil is a fitting word for Mike Miles on account of his destruction of what Vanessa Rodriquez terms the “teacher-learner system” in her book, The Teaching Brain.
“While research about the nature and science of learning abounds, shockingly few insights into how and why humans teach have emerged—until now. Countering the dated yet widely held presumption that teaching is simply the transfer of knowledge from one person to another, The Teaching Brain weaves together scientific research and real-life examples to show that teaching is a dynamic interaction and an evolutionary cognitive skill that develops from birth to adulthood. With engaging, accessible prose, [former] Harvard researcher Vanessa Rodriguez reveals what it actually takes to become an expert teacher.
“At a time when all sides of the teaching debate tirelessly seek to define good teaching—or even how to build a better teacher–The Teaching Brain upends the misguided premises for how we measure the success of teachers. This game-changing analysis of how the mind teaches will transform common perceptions of one of the most essential human practices (and one of the most hotly debated professions), charting a path forward for teachers, parents, and anyone seeking to better understand learning—and unlocking the teaching brain in all of us.”
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“The struggle with that is that when you put students at the center you are acting as if the teacher doesn’t exist. And that means you’re avoiding the perspective that that teacher is utilizing. That’s a problem.” – Vanessa Rodriguez
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/12/27/371702341/q-a-the-teaching-brain
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Well said. Miles sees teachers as cogs in the wheel, but teachers are knowledge guides. It is a process that shouldn’t be sliced and diced into component parts by someone that does not understand this.
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