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John Thompson: Who Caused the Havoc in Tulsa Schools?

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2025 //
7

John Thompson, historians and retired teacher, keeps us informed about the news from Oklahoma. In this post, he looks at the blame game surrounding the Tulsa public schools.

He writes:

As the Tulsa World recently explained, State Auditor Cindy Byrd issued a “scathing new forensic audit of Tulsa Public Schools” which “laid the blame on the administration of former Superintendent Deborah Gist, who served as Tulsa superintendent for the audited time of 2015-2023.” Byrd “also said multiple school district administrators ‘created and fostered a culture’ of noncompliance and systemic lack of internal controls that ‘potentially placed millions of taxpayer dollars in jeopardy.’”

I’m not qualified to comment on the financial side of the audit, but I strongly agree with the World that Byrd has an impeccable record as a financial auditor.

And as I completed this post, another impeccable institution, The Frontier, discovered, “Deborah Gist and her deputies were quietly arranging an exit plan for the official behind it (Fletcher) — and using secret payments to a private consultant to manage the transition, according to internal district records obtained by The Frontier.” It further explained: 

The newly obtained documents — including auditors’ notes and memos, internal district emails, and procurement records — shed new light on these gaps. They show that Gist and her deputies began planning Fletcher’s departure as early as December 2021, more than six months before the district reported his scheme to the police. 

Moreover:

Gist and former assistant superintendent Paula Shannon hired a New York-based human resources consultant, Talia Shaull, to manage Fletcher’s exit, paying her $175 per hour through the Foundation for Tulsa Schools, emails and contracts show. According to the documents, the arrangement to pay her directly through the foundation was designed “to avoid Board approval, keeping the project confidential” and violated district procurement policy.

Getting back to the history I witnessed, in 2019, a comment by a Tulsa teacher was posted on the Diane Ravitch blog with the title of Tulsa: Broadie Swarm Alert. It began with the teacher’s statement, “Welcome to my Hell in Tulsa.” The introduction explained that a Broadie “is someone ‘trained’ in the top-down management philosophy of Eli Broad at the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy. They are known for setting high goals and meeting none of them.”

In other words, their methods foreshadowed those of today’s Elon Musk.

The Broad Center was a “venture philanthropy” committed to everyone being on the same page for test-driven accountability, mass firings of teachers, and charter schools. It had an extensive record of spreading disruption, imposing script-driven instruction, and driving teachers out of the profession, while failing to improve student outcomes.

Byrd’s audit found that during the Gist administration the TPS “received payments totaling $554,772 from the Broad Center.  It “utilized at least 23 different vendors with Broad Academy connections. The majority of these vendors did not have a relationship with [the] TPS prior to the hiring of the Broad related alumni.” Moreover, the “TPS retained 33% of the employees who received the recruitment or retention bonus payments, 40% of these employees did not continue their employment for more than five years, with 25% remaining for less than two years.”

The audit and reporting on the Gist administration are consistent with my experience with Broadies, and their questionable approaches to data. During the first meeting I had with a consultant hired to implement their agenda, I showed him scatter-grams from the TPS web site that showed how difficult (or completely impossible) it would be to take into account the effect of the district’s segregation when trying to measure individual secondary school teachers’ effectiveness. He replied in a scientific manner, “Oh Sh__!” I repeatedly spoke with consultants who, like him and like me, could not get Gist or her Broadies to listen to social and cognitive science, or to teachers.

Similarly, when the OKCPS hired John Q. Porter, a Broadie from an affluent district’s finance department, he would blow off concerns expressed by my students, colleagues, and researchers. He was adamant in demanding frequent surprise visits by administrators and, then, placing a camera in every classroom so he could see if each teacher was teaching the same lessons in the same way according to the same schedule. Porter was forced to resign in less than a year due to seemingly small violations of district policy, but the Washington Post later reported that he had not properly divested from “Spectrum International, the document management company he founded in 1993.”

Finally, I’m not in a position to comment on the Tulsa World’s concern that Cindy Byrd, who is running for lieutenant governor, was being political when investigating diversity, equity and inclusion efforts,  and whether its funds could be “associated with violations of House Bill 1775.” The World acknowledged that Byrd “stops short of saying any law, such as the mean-spirited House Bill 1775 or Gov. Kevin Stitt’s order to report school DEI expenses, was violated.” It properly noted that, “Classifying DEI or HB 1775 programs is subjective, but it’s already being seized upon by anti-TPS and anti-public education critics.”

And that brings me back to the real harm done to Tulsa by the ideology-driven “Billionaires Boys Club” – not DEI. Back when Deborah Gist and her funders were imposing test-and-punish on schools, I found that many or most conservative legislators who I knew were opposed to the campaign to run schools like venture capitalist institutions. I hope they will remember that the real scandals that fostered a destructive culture that the audit documented were linked to corporate school reformers, not DEI or the efforts to defend meaningful teaching and learning in public schools.  

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Oklahoma, Tulsa

A Message to Journalists: Don’t Be Fooled! Follow the Money!

By dianeravitch
April 5, 2025 //
3

Every once in a while, I read an article that is so important and so powerful that I want to give it as much attention as possible. This is such an article. Please read it and share it. Post the link on every social media site. Send it to school board members and journalists.

The article was written by Dr. Maurice Cunningham, a retired Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts. Cunningham has been studying “dark money” in education for years. It was published by “Our Schools” and “Independent Media Institute.”

If you want to understand the attacks on public schools, on teachers, and on teachers’ unions, read this article. If you want to understand how the organized groups that smear public schools got started, read this article. If you read a story about two or three “moms” sitting around their kitchen table and worrying whether the teachers at the local public school are indoctrinating their children, read this article. If those “moms” raised over $1 million in their first year, read this article.

They have fooled many journalists. Don’t let them fool you!

Cunningham warns:

“These groups are the creation of deep-pocketed conservative networks, not “grassroots” advocates.“

By Maurice Cunningham

“If your mother says she loves you, check it out” is a bromide drilled into every journalist. So it is baffling why, if an interest group includes the words “moms” or “parents,” it is just taken at its word, especially when a little digging can reveal that many of these groups are the creations of billionaires out to destroy public education.

As the author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, I have been following billionaire-backed education interest groups for more than a decade. Since big money lacks public credibility, it often masquerades as organizations claiming to represent the interests of “parents,” “moms,” “educators,” and “families.” The concocted stories about how these groups were created are often repeated by an incurious press, which misses the opportunity to tell its readers a more interesting story: how billionaires and right-wing activists pour money into upbeat-sounding organizations to further their aim of privateering our public school system.

These astroturf operations have been proliferating resulting in serious negative impacts. Consider the havoc wreaked on some school boards by Moms for Liberty (M4L). M4L even got into presidential politics in 2024, boosting Donald Trump, at the behest of the donors, who co-founder Tina Descovich termed as M4L’s “investors.”

Consider a November 2024 Washington Post story on Linda McMahon’s nomination to be secretary of education. The article contrasted remarks from National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle with an alternative view from Keri Rodrigues, founding president of the National Parents Union (NPU), which the reporter Laura Meckler called “a grassroots group,” thus giving the impression that NEA and NPU are similar organizations.

They are not. NEA is a well-established teachers’ union that credibly claims 3 million members and is governed by a democratic structure. NPU appeared on the scene in 2020, surfing in on millions of dollars from the foundations of American oligarchs, including the Walton family, Mark Zuckerberg, and Charles Koch.

In 2024, Rodrigues, a fixture at education privateering groups, told the Boston Globe that NPU could get its message to “250,000 families to vote against” a ballot question sponsored by the teachers’ union and would “put that network to work.”

There is zero evidence that this extensive network exists or that it did anything on the ballot question. There is also no proof to validate Rodrigues’s claimthat the organization has 1.7 million members nationally.

A 2021 Washington Post article introducing Moms for Liberty chronicled its claimed rapid rise without raising questions about how it grew so fast. The story simply provided the M4L narrative of its creation story, centered around former Florida school board members Descovich and Tiffany Justice. It omitted M4L’s third co-founder Bridget Ziegler, though it did quote her husband, Christian Ziegler, about the group’s political potency.

Bridget Ziegler served briefly on the M4L board and was replaced by GOP campaign consultant Marie Rogerson. Christian Ziegler was then the powerful vice-chair of the Florida Republican Party and a key Trump supporter. (In 2023, the Zieglers became famous for a threesome scandal. She quickly resigned from her executive position with the Leadership Institute, an established training institution for right-wing activists. Christian was removed from his perch as chair of the Florida Republican Party.)

The Post October 2021 story featured a photo of Descovich pulling aside, Superman style, a white jacket to reveal the group’s logo t-shirt while posing next to an American flag. The questions about the group’s ties to the Republican Party and suspicious financing were laughed off by the founders of M4L. The Post followed up a month later by printing an op-ed by Descovich and Justice.

NPU, M4L, and similar groups organize as nonprofit corporations under sections 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Service Code. As nonprofits, their Form 990 tax returns are made public but only in November, following the tax year. The information is skimpy but valuable. Journalists can access the Form 990s by requesting them directly from the nonprofits or from the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, which helps trace donors as well.

These groups leave clues that no reporter can miss:

  1. Don’t buy the phony origin stories: These organizations all claim to be about moms joining together to improve education. But in no time, they have access to millions of dollars in donations and have the services of elite law firms, pollsters, media consultants, and often, ties to the Republican Party.
  2. Follow the money: It isn’t easy in the first two years of a nonprofit’s existence, but there are signs: easy access to right-wing media, hiring expensive consultants, and big-budget conferences.
  3. Watch how these groups work: The founding leadership usually consists of veteran right-wing operatives or communications professionals with years of experience in privateering organizations.
  4. Get the big picture: Right from the beginning, M4L had obvious ties to Republican and right-wing organizations that often went unreported.
  5. Keep following the money: When nonprofit tax forms finally become public, they’ll reveal how much was donated and can help identify the top contractors and how much they were paid.

Let us expand on these insights to show how these secretive operations can be exposed right from the beginning by using Form 990.

Don’t Buy the Phony Origin Stories

The typical “moms” or “parents” creation story goes something like this: outraged by some aspect of their children’s public school education, two or three “moms” band together to attract other like-minded parents to cure the deficiencies of the system, which are always the fault of the teachers’ unions. In truth, the “moms” are agents of far-right billionaires often tied—like M4L and Parents Defending Education (PDE)—to the secretive Council for National Policy, which seeksto privateer K-12 for profit, expand Christian education, and promote homeschooling.

According to the billionaire-funded online publication the 74, NPU “is the brainchild of two Latina mothers,” Keri Rodrigues and Alma Marquez, who “had disappointing experiences with education, both as parents and students, and with advocacy groups.”

To its credit, the 74 was candid about the funding of NPU: the foundations of billionaires, including Bill Gates, the Walton family, the late Eli Broad, and Michael and Susan Dell, and organizations like the City Fund, which gets its money from Reed Hastings, John Arnold, and Walton family members, inheritors of the Walmart fortune.

Nonetheless, the tenor of the story was of a grassroots moms’ start-up. Other news outlets ignored the 74’s detailing of billionaire funding. An online search through the New York Times website supplemented with a library search through Gale OneFile showed 13 NYT stories or columns that mention the National Parents Union since the group’s public launch on January 1, 2021. Only one column by Michelle Goldberg noted that “The National Parents Union is funded by the pro-privatization Walton Family Foundation.” The Waltons are, however, the only funders Goldberg mentioned.

The New Yorker came closest to the truth in a June 2021 piece: “The Walton foundation set up the National Parents Union in January 2020, with Rodrigues as the founding president.” A review of Form 990s for NPU and the Walton Family Foundation from 2020 through 2023 that I reviewed shows that NPU accepted more than $11 million in contributions. The Walton Family Foundation donated around $3 million of that amount.

The media is failing to cover the single most important fact the public needs to know about “parents” and “moms” groups: who is supplying them with millions of dollars in funding.

As for M4L, although a few media outlets wrote it had three founders, most followed the practice of CNN, which in December 2021 omitted Bridget Ziegler and described “the two women behind Moms for Liberty, a group of conservatives that came together in January,” downplaying the fact that at that time, the state GOP vice-chair’s wife was also one of the co-founders. By January 9, 2021, soon after its incorporation, M4L’s online store was offering magnets, t-shirts, and hats, and a “Madison Meetup” package of right-wing materials.

While mainstream media was valorizing M4L’s origin story, right-wing outlets produced a steady stream of propaganda about the organization. Later in January 2021, Descovich appeared on the Rush Limbaugh Show (guest-hosted by Todd Herman). Media Matters for America found that, by July 2022, M4L “representatives have been regulars on right-wing media, appearing on Fox News at least 16 times and Steve Bannon’s “War Room” at least 14 times.”

Another supposedly grassroots parents’ group that has an origin story grounded in deception is PDE. In lodging a civil rights complaint against the Columbus, Ohio, public schools in May 2021, PDE President Nicole Neily told the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, “We just all work from home… We’re all working moms.”

In fact, Neily is a well-compensated political operativein the Koch network. According to the Koch-connected Speech First’s Form 990 for 2019, which was available after November 2020 and thus before PDE was founded in 2021, Neily was paid $150,000 in 2019.

Follow the Money

Due to the barriers to tracing the funding of such groups, it can be hard to follow the money, especially in the first two years of operation. But in 2021, an article in the New Yorker described how the VELA Education Fund, a partnership of the Walton Family Foundation and the Charles Koch Institute, had given NPU $700,000 in 2020 to “help people with fewer resources,” including promoting homeschooling during COVID-19. This is despite the fact that NPU was not familiar with homeschooling.

Press outlets have also overlooked funding sources of M4L. In 2021, co-founder Descovich told CNN that M4L had raised more than $300,000 through t-shirt sales, small donors, and fundraising events. However, one such event was a gala featuring former Fox News personality Megyn Kelly in June 2021, six months into M4L’s first year. The top tickets went for $20,000. The Celebrity Speakers Bureau pegged Kelly’s speaking fee as between $50,000 and $100,000. The event raised at least $57,000.

In July 2021, Descovich appeared at a Heritage Foundation virtual town hall on “Preserving American History in Schools.” By October 29, 2021, M4L was referring members to the Leadership Institute for training and sending members to the Heritage Foundation for events and other resources. Both these organizations have been part of the right-wing political firmament since the 1970s. A bit of digging showedthat M4L was deeply embedded in far-right politics. But most press accounts ignored that evidence and the public remained largely in the dark.

In April 2021, PDE headed by Neily, brought on Elizabeth Schultz as a “senior fellow,” who had worked under Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos during his first term and was a vocal anti-LGBTQ activist.

Watch How These Groups Work

These groups can be intertwined. PDE, M4L, and another faux-grassroots group, No Left Turn in Education (NLTE), all came on the scene around the same time, with NLTE being founded in 2020. PDE’s website includes a map called “IndoctriNation” with lists of affiliates across the nation. The April 15, 2021, listings (the website appears to have gone live only in March 2021) showed that most of its allies were chapters of M4L and NLTE with few actual members, according to my research in 2021.

Media reports seemed content to accept the “moms working from home” creation story despite the obvious early support from well-resourced groups.

NPU held its organizing meeting, which it claims drew representatives from all 50 states, in New Orleans in January 2020. To promote the event, NPU employedMercury Public Affairs, an international public relations firm. To draw press attention, NPU also commissioned polling from Echelon Insights, a Republican pollster that has also worked for the Walton family.

In the same year of its founding, in 2021, PDE published detailed plans, such as “How to Create ‘Woke At’ Pages,” that instruct parents on how to use secrecy to attack “woke activists” in the education system. PDE also began initiating lawsuits against local school boards, represented by the Republican law firm of Consovoy McCarthy.

William Consovoy, who passed in 2023, was in the Federalist Society, the nationwide network of conservative lawyers that helped form Trump’s picks for the U.S. Supreme Court. Consovoy had been a law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and represented Donald Trump during a congressional investigation. The firm also represented Trump in 2020 as he tried to intervene before the Supreme Court to stop the vote count in Pennsylvania. When PDE’s 2021 Form 990became available, it showed PDE paid Consovoy McCarthy $800,000 in legal fees.

Get the Big Picture

The clues kept coming, only to be ignored by the press.

In 2022, M4L held its first national summit in Tampa, Florida. In its reporting of the event, NBC portrayedthe group as a political powerhouse, reporting that attendees “browsed booths set up by conservative groups, including Turning Point USA, the Leadership Institute and Heritage Action, and the evangelical Liberty University” without describing these organizations for what they are—the critical infrastructure of Christian nationalism.

Media reports on the event generally ignored who the sponsors of the summit were or the amounts of their donations. The Leadership Institute donated $50,000. The Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action for America provided $10,000 each. And PDE chipped in $10,000. Meanwhile, Descovich was still peddling the story that M4L was getting by on t-shirt sales, even though an aide to Leadership Institute’s Morton Blackwell bragged about how the institute had provided the relevant training to help the group “become a national force.”

When there were questions raised about how M4L could fund such a lavish event with t-shirt sales, M4L denied any connections to deep-pocketed right-wing groups, and most news reporters presented a simple “he said, she said” account and moved on. Reporters generally missed the bigger story that the institutional right was creating and passing off phony “moms” and “parents” operations.

Keep Following the Money

Once Form 990s were filed, the deception became obvious, but that didn’t mean it got covered by big media outlets.

The 2022 Form 990 for NPU showed that Keri Rodrigues was paid $410,000 from NPU and a sister organization. She paid her husband, the chief operating officer of both organizations, $278,529. Yet, in August 2024, CBS Morning News presented Rodrigues as a typical parent worried about back-to-school shopping.

PDE’s Form 990 for 2021 was even more revealing, as exposed by True North Research’s Lisa Graves and Alyssa Bowen for Truthout in 2023. Graves and Bowen showed that PDE is deeply tied with far-right Supreme Court fixer Leonard Leo, even paying $106,938 to his for-profit consulting firm.

PDE, a brand-new operation, raised $3,178,272 in its first year in 2021. It paid Neily, who is also on the board, a total compensation of $195,688 for her 40-hour work week.

According to Speech First’s Form 990 for 2021, Neily put in an additional 20-hour week for Speech First, earning another $86,117 and a total of $281,805 from both Koch- and Leo-funded operations combined. In 2023, PDE pushed Neily’s base salary and other compensation up to $341,400. This is quite an income for a stay-at-home working mom.

The trail from NPU leads back to the Walton family and billionaire allies who have been working to undermine teachers’ unions and siphon public money to charter schools for years.

Scratch the surface of groups like M4L and PDE, and you find the Heritage Foundation, the Leadership Institute, and Leonard Leo—the elite of far-right politics who work to replace public schools with for-profit schools, religious schools, and homeschooling. These details make for a very important story that most journalists have overlooked.

Stop Being Fooled

Reporters should not be fooled by the techniques used by these fake “mom” and “parent” groups on behalf of their extremist overseers. As Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway show in Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, these techniques have been used by “scientific” nonprofits created by the same conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation, to contest climate change.

Many have tracked the origin of these techniques back to the tobacco industry’s fight to protect their profits from the growing body of research linking their products to cancer and other health problems.

In 1994, tobacco giant RJ Reynolds created the industry front group Get Government Off Our Back to advance a “smokers’ rights” campaign to fight against the tsunami of scientific evidence exposing the health risks of tobacco. Reynolds kept its backing a secret while promoting it as a movement of “grassroots” smokers.

Meanwhile, in his farewell address, former President Joseph R. Biden warned about how the wealthy are a big threat to democracy:

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

For years, the same oligarchy that threatens basic rights has been threatening our freedom to have access to a high-quality system of public education. There is no reason they should be aided by credulous reporters from trusted news sources. If we can question our moms on whether they really love us, we can question the authenticity of these moms and parent groups.

Maurice Cunningham PhD, JD, retired in 2021 as an associate professor of political science at the College of Liberal Arts, University of Massachusetts, Boston, and is the author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization.

Categories Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corruption, Dark Money, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Fake News, For-Profit, Fraud, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Hoax, Parent Groups, Privatization, Propaganda, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes, School Choice, Shame, Unions, Vouchers

Houston: Mike Miles Denies Transfer of Millions to His Colorado Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2024 //
22

Brett Shipp of Spectrum News posted a video asserting that the Texas charter schools in the network founded by Mike Miles sent millions of dollars to Miles’ Colorado charter schools. His report was amply documented.

Miles was imposed as superintendent of the Houston Independent School District after the state took control of HISD, based on the low performance of ONE school, Wheatley High School. Miles was selected by State Superintendent Mike Morath, who served on the Dallas school board when Miles was superintendent for three years and failed to meet any of his lofty goals. Neither Morath nor Miles is an educator. Morath was in the software business, and Miles was in the military before joining Eli Broad’s Superintendent Academy, which emphasized top-down management and disruption.

Ana Hernandez, a Houston legislator, wrote Mike Morath to call for an investigation of Miles. Morath is unlikely to conduct a serious probe since he chose Miles. The State Attorney General Ken Paxton is under indictment for corruption, so he’s not likely to dig deep into Morath’s choice; Morath was picked by Governor Gregg Abbott.

Sam Gonzalez Kelly of The Houston Chronicle reported that Miles denounced Shipp’s charges:

HISD’s appointed Superintendent Mike Miles is vehemently denying reports that his former charter network, Third Future Schools, illegally used money from its Texas campuses to subsidize its schools in Colorado. 

Miles, in a late night email to “friends, partners and board members,” wrote that the story by Spectrum News in Dallas “badly misunderstands, or worse, intentionally misrepresents the financial practices of Third Future Schools.” The story, by reporter Brett Shipp, who covered Miles during his tenure as Dallas ISD superintendent, accuses Third Future Schools of charging fees to its Texas network to subsidize one of its campuses in Colorado, and reported that Third Future Schools Texas had run a deficit due to debts to “other TFS network schools and to TFS corporate.”

The Spectrum report cites recordings of TFS corporate board and investor meetings, as well as the charter network’s financial records. The Houston Chronicle’s review of the documents confirmed that TFS Texas had sent funds to Colorado campuses, which a charter school finance expert said is generally permitted by state law.

“While I have not worked at the Third Future Schools network for more than a year, I find the piece irresponsibly inaccurate, and I cannot let this kind of misinformation go uncorrected,” Miles wrote. 

Miles wrote that Third Future Schools “was always a responsible steward of every public dollar received” and that school finances were approved by local school boards and partner districts. He acknowledged that Texas schools paid “administrative fees” to the central Third Future office, which is headquartered in Colorado, to provide network-wide supports in areas, including finance and human resources, but said that such payments are common practice for charter networks.

“Spectrum News either intentionally or, through gross incompetence, mischaracterized these common place financial arrangements between charter schools and the charter management organizations that support them,” Miles wrote. 

Neither Spectrum nor Shipp immediately responded to requests for comment. 

Spectrum’s story immediately prompted outrage among HISD community members and some elected officials, who are demanding the superintendent’s resignation and a federal investigation over the charter network’s use of Texas taxpayer money in Colorado schools. 

The Texas Education Agency said in a statement Tuesday that it was aware of Spectrum’s report and was reviewing the matter.

The “charter school finance expert” consulted by The Houston Chronicle worked for the state charter school association. It is not clear that state law allows charter schools in Texas to send Texas public funds to its offices or other charters in Colorado.

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Colorado, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Houston, Texas

David C. Berliner and Gene V. Glass Review “Slaying Goliath”

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2024 //
15

I am almost four years late in discovering this review by two scholars for whom I have the greatest respect: David C. Berliner and Gene V. Glass.

I was happy to read this review because Slaying Goliath had a checkered fate. It was published in mid-January 2020. I went on a book tour, starting in Seattle. By mid-February, I made my last stop in West Virginia, where I met with teachers and celebrated the two-year anniversary of their strike, which shut down every school in the state.

As I traveled, news emerged of a dangerous “flu” that was rapidly spreading. It was COVID; by mid-March, the country was shutting down. No one wanted to read about the fight to save public schools or about its heroes. The news shifted, as it should have, to the panicked response to COVID, to the deaths of good people, to the overwhelmed hospitals and their overworked staff.

To make matters worse, the New York Times Book Review published a very negative review by someone who admired the “education reform” movement that I criticized. I thought of writing a letter to the editor but quickly dropped the idea. I wrote and rewrote my response to the review in my head, but not on paper.

Then, again by happenstance, I discovered that Bob Shepherd had reviewed the review of my book in The New York Times. He said everything that I wish I could have said but didn’t. His review was balm for my soul. Shepherd lacerated the tone and substance of the review, calling it an “uniformed, vituperative, shallow, amateurish ‘review.’” Which it was. His review of the review was so powerful that I will post it next.

Then, a few weeks ago, I found this review by Berliner and Glass.

The review begins:

Reviewed by Gene V Glass and David C. Berliner Arizona State University, United States

They wrote:

In a Post-Truth era, one must consider the source. 

In this case, the source is Diane Rose Silvers, the third of eight children of Walter Silverstein, a high school drop-out, and Ann Katz, a high school graduate. The Silvers were a middle-class Houston family, proprietors of a liquor store, and loyal supporters of FDR.

After graduation from San Jacinto High School, she enrolled in Wellesley College in September, 1956. Working as a “copy boy”for the Washington Post, Diane met Richard Ravitch, a lawyer working in the federal government and son of a prominent New York City family. They married on June 26,1960, in Houston, two weeks after Diane’s graduation from Wellesley. The couple settled in New York City, where Richard took employment in the family construction business. He eventually served as head of the Metropolitan Transit Authority and Lieutenant Governor in the 2000s, having been appointed by Democratic Governor David Paterson.

 Diane bore three sons, two of whom survived to adulthood. Diane and Richard ended their 26-year marriage in 1986. She had not been idle. For a period starting in 1961, Diane was employed by The New Leader, a liberal, anti-communist journal. She later earned a PhD in history of education from Columbia in 1975 under the mentorship of Lawrence Cremin.

Diane was appointed to the office of Assistant Secretary of Education, in the Department of Education by George H. W. Bush and later by Bill Clinton. In 1997, Clinton appointed her to the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), on which she served until 2004. 

Ravitch worked “… for many years in some of the nation’s leading conservative think tanks.

Read the full pdf here.

ravitch-reviewDownload
Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Funding, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, History, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Parents, Privatization, Ravitch, Diane, Resistance, School Choice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers, Walton Foundation

Houston: Mike Miles Takes a Break from Firing Principals

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2024 //
12

Since the state put Mike Mikes (ex-military, Broadie, briefly Superintendent of Dallas ISD) in charge of the Houston Independent School District, Miles has cemented his reputation as a leader who issues orders and doesn’t listen to critics. It’s his way or Mr get out. Many teachers and principals have left rather than comply with his scripted curriculum and mandates.

But, says the Houston Chronicle editorial board, he actually listened and put on hold his intention to fire dozens of principals, including some from Houston’s best schools. It’s worth pausing to remember that the state took control of the entire district because one high school (disproportionately enrolling students with disabilities, ELLs, and high needs) posted low test scores for several consecutive years. Rather than focus on helping that school, the state placed the entire district under the thumb of an autocrat and know-it-all.

Miles is testing out the proposition that the way to “fix” education is by standardization, mandates, data, rigid worship of test scores, and one-man control.

The editorial says:

Late this week, the state-appointed superintendent of Houston ISD did something many thought impossible: he listened.

It took several protests, community outcry and some three hours of overwhelmingly negative public comment during Thursday’s school board meeting, but Mike Miles seems to have heard the message.

The uproar began with the leaked release of a list of 117 principals the district said weren’t performing well enough yet to secure their spot for next year. Several of the principals at top-rated schools were on the list. Parents and students from those campuses showed up in force. Early Friday morning, with the meeting still plodding along, Miles announced that he and the board of managers changed course and said they wouldn’t make any adverse employment decisions this year based off of these proficiency screenings, which broadly measure student achievement with a variety of test data, quality of instruction gathered during spot observations and professionalism judged by a rubric that includes how well principals reinforce “district culture and philosophy.” But, he made clear, he would still use the more comprehensive principal evaluation system approved last fall to make those decisions at the end of the school year.

Miles told us the next day he’d already gotten some emails from anxious community members “saying thank you” for the decision late last week.

“I’m proud of the board who worked so hard to listen,” Miles added.

We’re glad to see Miles pay attention to optics for once. No matter how good his intentions, his reforms won’t succeed long-term without community buy-in. That said, we’re struggling to see how Miles changed his overarching approach on principal evaluations.

Miles never planned to can those 117 principals — in fact, he expected the overwhelming majority of them would return — based on the proficiency screenings but the handful who were already deemed unsatisfactory don’t seem to suddenly be in a different position as best we can tell. Miles insisted those few failing principals not getting asked back didn’t just fail the proficiency screening and that the decision to let them go was based on other input.

“We were looking at all the data for them,” he told us.

And the principals who were told they need to improve, aren’t really in a different position either.

In practice, then, very little seems to have changed for the campus leaders who will still be judged on some of the same metrics, including spot reviews by the district’s so-called independent review teams. Instead, he said the decision was meant to allay some community confusion and ease some anxiety about principal turnover, something he’d been trying to combat since the leaked list was published by the Chronicle ahead of spring break on March 8.

“People have made it a bigger deal than it is,” Miles insisted when he met with the editorial board Wednesday ahead of the school board meeting. “You keep your job if you’re an effective principal,” he said, adding that he expects the majority, at least 80 percent, of the principals to return next year.

What Miles didn’t seem to grasp until he heard from a whole new set of angry parents — not the “usual suspects” who have protested the state takeover from the outset — was how nonsensical his list appeared.

Some of the schools aren’t just top-ranked in the district but in the country. Carnegie. HSPVA. T.H. Rogers. If people had doubts before about Miles’ priorities and evaluation criteria, the inclusion of these high-achieving campuses heightened them. It’s possible a high-performing school can still have a weak leader, just as it’s possible that a low-performing school can have a great one. But the list begged the question.

“You start to wonder what he is evaluating,” a parent with a student at Carnegie told us outside the State of the District event Thursday. She said the school’s principal, long-time veteran Ramon Moss, is an integral piece of the school’s success. 

“He’ll be the first to tell you that the success of the school is due to the teachers and students and community even though his leadership is a big reason why the community is there,” she said.  

Miles has declined to talk about specific campuses and what landed them on the list. So while this decision might relieve some momentary angst, it doesn’t address the lingering doubts about whether the district’s measures of quality instruction and effectiveness are so narrow they fail to recognize the best educators, a concern that extends well beyond the star campuses.

This principal evaluation chaos is just the latest example of a breakdown of communication and trust.

We don’t disagree with the idea of evaluations or consistent standards across the district. It’s entirely possible that an overall A rating at a campus masks concerning disparities. Or that high-achieving campuses don’t show a ton of growth on standardized tests over the course of a school year.

What concerns us about the entire saga of the principal list is how, whether it’s intentional or not, Miles contributes to fear and uncertainty. He hasn’t effectively communicated his vision to the public or to the people tasked with carrying it out, despite his copious slideshows and sincere efforts to clear up the confusion over principals with follow-up press conferences, statements and even interviews with this board.

Last week, Miles and team showed greater sensitivity to the environment. It’s a good start. But they should make more effort to respond to the substance of the criticisms and not just the volume of them.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Broad Foundation, Disruption, Education Industry, Houston, Principals, Texas

Houston: Mike Miles Removes Another Principal

By dianeravitch
October 11, 2023 //
2

Mike Miles, the state-appointed superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, was given control of the district despite his poor track record in Dallas. Nonetheless, he intends to remake the district. He imposed a set of mandates that he called the “New Education System.” At first, he was supposed to reform 28 schools. Then another 85 schools joined his program voluntarily. 190 schools are supposed to be left alone.

Miles has ruled with a heavy hand. A few days ago, he removed a principal from a B-rated school and installed an “apprentice,” an inexperienced one as a temporary replacement.

Anna Bauman of the Houston Chronicle reported:

District officials have removed another principal from a Houston ISD campus, this time pulling the top leader from Jane Long Academy and Las Americas Middle School in southwest Houston.

Myra Castle-Bell, an educator of more than two decades, will no longer serve as principal of the schools located on the same campus in Sharpstown, according to an HISD spokesperson. Castle-Bell chose to align both schools with the New Education System, a reform model created by state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles, when given the option over the summer.

The district shared the news last week in a message sent to families and staff at the schools, informing them that Courtney Riley, a principal apprentice, will lead the campus while HISD searches for a permanent replacement.

“We know these changes can feel disruptive, but we are committed to ensuring every student at both schools gets access to excellent instruction every day,” the district said in the message. “We’ll update you as soon as we have selected a new Principal and thank you for your continued partnership.”

Riley is a member of the HISD Principal Academy, a program introduced this year by Miles geared toward preparing future principals through a year-long, paid residency model.

Long Academy is a B-rated school serving more than 800 students in middle and high school, according to the most recent state data. Las Americas is a newcomer campus that caters to recent immigrant and refugee children who typically have little or no English language proficiency or formal education.

Other schools whose principals have been reassigned in recent months include Francis Scott Key Middle School, Stevens Elementary, Garcia Elementary, Cage Elementary/Project Chrysalis Middle School, and Sharpstown, Worthing and Yates high schools. Additionally, the district appointed new principals at 11 schools in June through the re-hiring process required at NES schools.

HISD provided no explanation for the removal of Castle-Bell or any other principal, saying it cannot comment on personnel matters. Castle-Bell has been reassigned to a new position as Division Support Administrator for the West Division, according to HISD.

Miles is following the Broad Academy “reform” playbook. Disrupt as much as possible. Keep everyone on edge. Create an “academy” to train new principals, bypassing the traditional route of rising through the ranks and serving a genuine apprenticeship for 3-5 years as an assistant principal. NYC had a “Leadership Academy” doing exactly what Miles is doing now; it failed and was eventually closed down.

Categories Broad Foundation, Houston, Texas

Mercedes Schneider: Mike Miles, Master of Chaos, Takes Charge of Houston Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2023 //
7

Mercedes Schneider summarizes the checkered career of Mike Miles, who was put in charge of the Houston Independent School District by State Commissioner Mike Morath, who was appointed by hard-right Republican Governor Greg Abbott. Abbott wants to punish Houston for not voting for him. What better punishment than to install Mike Miles as superintendent?

Schneider writes:

In June 2023, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) became the latest major school district to experience a top-down, ed-reform tactic that largely ignores community investment and fail to deliver on promised academic gains: the state takeover of a school district.

On June 01, 2023, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) appointed Mike Miles as the new HISD superintendent.

Miles is the golden-child product of market-based, ed-reform leadership. As reported in his LinkedIn bio, Miles holds no college degrees in teaching (engineering; slavic languages and literature; international affairs and policy). He has never been a classroom teacher, never a site-based administrator, yet he was a district superintendent in Colorado for six years (2006-11) and superintendent of Dallas ISD for three.

Though he does not mention it in his LinkedIn bio, Miles was a member of the Class of 2011 at the Broad Superintendents Academy A 2011 EdWeek article on Broad superintendents includes the criticism that they “use corporate-management techniques to consolidate power, weaken teachers’ job protections, cut parents out of decisionmaking, and introduce unproven reform measures.”

Indeed.

In 2015, Miles abruptly resigned from Dallas ISD amid being, as WFAA.com states, “at the center of controversy since he took the position nearly three years ago,” which apparently included questions about misdirecting funding intended for at-risk students and the subsequent exit of the Dallas ISD budget director. (Also calling Miles “a lightening rod for controversy,” WFAA.com offers this timeline of Miles’ unsettling tenure in Dallas.)

Despite all of his Dallas ISD controversy, TEA– which is no stranger to stepping into its own controversy— chose to hire Miles to lead its newly-state-snatched HISD.

Following his Dallas ISD exit, in 2016, he founded a charter school chain, Third Future Schools, which has locations in Colorado, Texas, and Louisiana. For two years (2017-19), Miles was a senior associate in an education consulting firm, FourPoint Education Partners.

And according to his LinkedIn bio, Miles is/was on a number of ed-reform organization boards, including Teach for America (TFA) Colorado (2017-20); National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) (2013-present), and Chiefs for Change (2015-present).

Please open the link to finish reading the post.

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Chiefs for Change, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Democracy, Discipline, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Failure, Houston, Libraries, Shame, State Takeover, Teachers, Texas

Mike Miles Removes Two Principals Right Before School Opens

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2023 //
15

In true Broadie style, Houston Superintendent Mike Miles removed two elementary principals only days before the start of school. He started his job of “reforming” the Houston public schools in June, so he obviously did not observe either of them. This is disruption to the max. Teachers and parents learned about this abrupt action through an automated phone call.

Erin Trent (left), principal at Stevens Elementary School, and Linda Bellard, principal at Garcia Elementary School, were both removed from their positions Aug. 23, 2023. 

Erin Trent (left), principal at Stevens Elementary School, and Linda Bellard, principal at Garcia Elementary School, were both removed from their positions Aug. 23, 2023. Houston ISD

Parents and teachers at Stevens say they were “blindsided” by the announcement, which was made via an automated phone call.

“This unexpected and impersonal communication from the district caused immediate anxiety, confusion and fear, not just for me personally but among hundreds of parents,” said Adam Chaney, the parliamentarian for Stevens’ Parent Teacher Community Organization.

“Our community deserves clarification immediately. We are two days away from ‘Meet the Teacher,’ the whole campus is going to be present, and then Monday morning is the start of school,” Chaney said. “It’s become increasingly difficult to avoid interpreting this chaotic situation through the lens of this controversial takeover.”

HISD officials declined to comment further or provide a reason for the reassignments, saying that the district cannot comment on ongoing personnel matters. The call Stevens parents received Wednesday acknowledged that “the change may feel abrupt,” but that it had “become clear that this change is necessary to ensure Stevens Elementary students start the year off well with access to high-quality instruction on day one that meets their needs and supports increased academic outcomes on the campus…”

Trent’s abrupt removal has led members of the Stevens community to speculate that she was reassigned because she did not opt in to Superintendent Mike Miles’ New Education System earlier this summer.

One teacher, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said Trent resisted pushes from the HISD central office to become an NES-aligned school, which would have seen many of Miles’ most sweeping and controversial reforms implemented at Stevens.

Miles also disbanded the HISD team of autism specialists who served schools throughout the district.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Broad Foundation, Cruelty, Disruption, Houston, State Takeover, Texas

Houston: Here Were Mike Miles’ Goals for Dallas in 2012

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2023 //
11

While browsing through some old posts, I stumbled upon this one, which is a story that appeared in the Dallas Morning News in 2012, shortly after Mike Miles took charge of the Dallas public schools. It gives valuable insight into Mike Miles’ thinking. Miles was appointed to lead the Houston Independent School District by State Commissioner Mike Morath after the state of Texas took control of Houston, fired its elected board and their superintendent. Miles is a military man who learned about education at the Broad Academy. Military men give orders; so do Broadies.

Please note that nothing in Miles’ goals addresses early childhood education, class size, medical clinics, or nutrition. Miles believes in metrics, the coin of the conservative, neoliberal realm.

Matthew Haag and Tawnell D. Hobbs wrote this story for the Dallas Morning News. It appeared May 10, 2102.

Dallas ISD Superintendent Mike Miles outlines ambitious plan to help make district one of the nation’s best

Mike Miles not only wants to boost graduation rates but also wants to see more high school graduates go straight into the workforce. To achieve that, he wants to create a “career-ready” certificate that would give eligible students priority for entry-level jobs at area businesses.

 

Dallas ISD Superintendent Mike Miles on Thursday unveiled a slew of ambitious goals, proposals and recommendations designed to turn around the school district and make it one of the nation’s best.

In his first presentation to trustees as the district’s new leader, Miles spent nearly two hours laying out his vision for the district in a presentation that both excited and overwhelmed the board members.

Under the plan, teachers would be under more scrutiny. Principals would have one year to prove their worth. And the business community would be asked to step up.

If the road map is followed, Miles said, Dallas ISD is bound to become a premier school district.

“We are going to raise expectations for our staff,” said Miles, who earned a reputation for disrupting the status quo in the school district he will soon leave in Colorado Springs, Colo. “If you cannot tell that from the presentation, you have to know it from what you heard about me.”

He said DISD will begin rolling out some changes next school year, while other changes will span several years. The most immediate change, he said, will be a philosophical one. The district must embrace a vision and mission of raising academic achievement, improving instruction and not accepting excuses.

“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.

Many of the changes Miles laid out Thursday mirror those he implemented while in Harrison School District 2 in Colorado Springs.

A seemingly small change he suggested — one he said stirred outrage among teachers in Harrison — is to keep classroom doors open all day.

With the doors open, principals and administrators can move freely into classrooms to observe teachers. Under Miles’ plan, every Dallas teacher would be observed up to 10 times a year. In three years, those observations will contribute to teachers’ grades and factor into their salaries, as part of a pay-for-performance evaluation system.

Rena Honea, president of the teachers group Alliance-AFT, said “people are going to be in shock” with Miles’ proposals. “I envision it will be very different from what DISD has seen and experienced,” she said.

Miles has said change will be hard, but it’s necessary.

“If you cannot raise student achievement or have high quality of instruction, you cannot be a teacher in Dallas,” he said Thursday.

90% grad rate by 2020.

If the changes are successful, Miles said, the district will see skyrocketing graduation rates and achieve goals former superintendents promised but failed to reach.

Only three-quarters of DISD students currently graduate in four years of high school — a number Miles wants to see hit 90 percent by 2020. He also wants student SAT scores to jump nearly 30 percent over that time.

“Even if the district was in the best position possible, we would have to change things,” Miles said. “There is growing belief that children need more education after high school. High school is not the end point anymore.”

Throughout Miles’ presentation, trustees said little as they absorbed details of the 29-page plan and asked only a handful of questions. At one point, trustee Nancy Bingham, who appeared in favor of the goals, said Miles had caused her heartburn. Other trustees wondered how he would pay for everything.

Miles told trustees that he will spend the next few weeks finding money to cover new programs and initiatives. He said he would have to cut elsewhere to make room for his plans.

Miles’ plan would allow principals more control over their campuses, but they would also be required to meet higher expectations, such as improving communication with parents and the community. If the principals fail, others will be waiting for their jobs.

Starting next school year, Miles wants to create a leadership academy for 50 or 60 educators who want to become principals. They would spend the entire year in training and will vie for open positions.

The idea brought nods and smiles from some board members, but trustee Carla Ranger questioned the program. She hinted that the people who go through the yearlong training lab would have an unfair advantage to land the jobs over existing principals.

“If the notion is that there is an unfair advantage, welcome to principalship,” Miles told her. “You have to compete. That’s the way the world works.”

Miles said he will be open to tweaking his action plan, called “Destination 2020,” but remained unapologetic about his ambitious goals and plans.

Previous downfalls

Lofty expectations for DISD have been mentioned before.

Former DISD Superintendent Michael Hinojosa rolled out an ambitious reform plan when he arrived in 2005. A major component was to reach a 90 percent passing rate on state exams by 2010 for all student groups.

The ultimate goal, Hinojosa said, was for Dallas to be the top urban district in the nation within five years, culminating by winning the coveted Broad Prize for Urban Education. While test scores improved under Hinojosa’s watch, DISD did not come close to winning the Broad Prize.

Hinojosa also set goals for the district’s graduation rate. Before his arrival, the graduation rate was 81 percent in 2003-04. He had set a 93 percent graduation rate goal for 2009-10. But the goal wasn’t met. The Class of 2010 had a graduation rate of about 75 percent.

Miles not only wants to boost graduation rates but also wants to see more high school graduates go straight into the workforce. To achieve that, he wants to create a “career-ready” certificate that would give eligible students priority for entry-level jobs at area businesses.

Starting next school year, Miles wants 1,000 entry-level jobs for students with the certificates. And he wants the certificate program to grow in the coming years — with 3,000 jobs by 2015.

Miles said he will go to the business community, ask for their support and urge them to focus their efforts on helping DISD students. He said he also wants the business community to help define what it means to be career-ready.

“Let’s let them put their money where their mouth is,” he said.

At a glance: The superintendent’s plan

In his first presentation to the Dallas ISD trustees, new Superintendent Mike Miles unveiled “Destination 2020,” a plan that sets goals for the district. Here are parts of that plan.

STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT GOALS FOR 2020

Graduation: 90 percent of students will graduate on time. [The Class of 2010 had a graduation rate of about 75 percent, which is the percentage of ninth-graders who graduated in four years, according to Texas Education Agency records.]

Test scores: 60 percent of students will receive a 21 or higher composite score on the ACT out of a possible score of 36, or 1110 on the reading and math portions of the SAT out of a possible score of 1600. [For the Class of 2010, the average ACT score was 17.1; the average SAT score was 860, according to Texas Education Agency records.]

Workplace ready: 80 percent of student will be proficient on the “Year 2020 workplace readiness assessments.” According to the plan, “These assessments will be designed by the business and nonprofit communities and will include critical thinking, communications, teamwork, information literacy, technology skills, and worth ethic.”

College and careers: 90 percent of students will enter college, the military or a “career-ready job” right out of high school. A career-ready certificate will be created for students who meet certain goals. Businesses will be asked to commit to providing entry jobs for those students.

AREAS OF FOCUS

Some areas of focus for the next three years:

Effective teachers: “While teachers in DISD are working hard and are committed to children, a quick review of instruction and discussions with instructional leaders in Dallas reveals that the quality of instruction is inconsistent and that good instruction is not pervasive in many schools.”

Effective principals: “While we will provide the best support and professional development any principal in the state could hope to receive, they will have only one year to demonstrate that they have the capacity and what it takes to lead change and to improve the quality of instruction.”

Professional and high-functioning central office: “The entire central office system will be designed to support schools as teachers and principals try to accomplish three main goals: 1) Improve the quality of instruction; 2) Raise student achievement; 3) Create a positive school culture and climate.”

Engaging parents and the community: “We will be much more purposeful in helping community supporters work in reinforcing ways. … We cannot have 100 different partners spraying reform initiative on our schools. That would diffuse the efforts and take us off our direction. Thus, we will help channel the support and ensure the major educational initiatives work in reinforcing ways.”

KEY TARGETS FOR 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.

For 90 percent of new hires, the maximum length of the hiring process will be less than five weeks.

The community provides 3,000 jobs for graduates who have “career-ready” certificates.

 

SOURCES: Destination 2020; Texas Education Agency

Miles started in Dallas with a five-year contract. He resigned after three years.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Broad Foundation, Dallas, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, History, Houston

Nancy Bailey: The Takeover of Houston Schools Is a Dire Warning for Other Districts

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2023 //
14

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. 

~Kenneth Wong, education policy researcher and former advisor to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, March 28, 2023

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.

Miles states:

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.

Categories Broad Foundation, Curriculum, Discipline, Disruption, Education Industry, Houston, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers and Teaching, Technology, Texas
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