The Houston Chronicle exposed a scandal involving Houston’s state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles.
The Chronicle reported:
State-appointed Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles played a central role early in negotiations for a nearly $1 million contract between a Texas charter school network and a for-profit Colorado consulting firm, according to records obtained by the Houston Chronicle.
Miles used his private Gmail during those talks, emails show, sending a proposal with the consulting firm’s cost breakdowns; flagging a major price increase; and directing where contract documents should be sent.
The firm’s services — plus the free use of HISD’s curriculum and training by Miles himself — were intended to help the charter system replicate HISD’s controversial reforms and turn around several of its struggling campuses.
The mystery behind the scandal is why anyone would want to adopt Mike Miles’ top-down scripted curriculum. Its main effect is to drive away students and teachers. Test scores are up, to be sure. Miles’ greatest accomplishment seems to be raising a cohort of trained seals with higher scores who have never experienced love of learning.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Grift?! How could it be?
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Miles is another skeevy privatizer whose mission is not to improve public schools, but to undermine them. Tests scores are a very narrow snapshot of student performance. There are many more effective formative methods that can evaluate student and school performance. Students can demonstrate understanding in the variety of ways such as class discussions, portfolios, project-based assessments, oral presentations, structured observations, creation of charts, graphs, writing of poems, essays or plays. These alternative assessments require far more critical thinking than any standardized test, and they are far more relevant to the school’s curriculum.
Test scores tell us nothing about a student’s character as well. I am sure most of the members of Trump’s cabinet had high test scores, but look at them now. They can turn a blind eye to the destruction of democracy and reject the rule of law. They are dishonest people despite their test scores.
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