There is one good reason to subscribe to Esquire: to read Charles Pierce, one of the most perceptive writers of our time. Pierce writes about education on occasion, and he’s always on target. In this column, he skewers the casual cruelty of Texas Governor Greg Abbott , who seized control of the Houston public schools on the flimsiest of pretexts, and Houston’s new superintendent Mike Miles, who’s pushing his top-down ideas without regard to anyone else’s views. Miles is a military man who learned about education at the Broad Academy, where one of the central teachings was to ignore public opinion, as well as the views of local teachers.
Pierce writes:
This week, something altogether remarkable, and not in a good way, happened in the city of Houston in the state of Texas. On June 1, the state of Texas, which is wholly governed by Greg Abbott and a compliant, and heavily gerrymandered state legislature, took over the Houston Independent School District. The pretext was flimsy, as so many of Abbott’s pretexts are, where he even bothers to provide them. (That legislature again.) The decision was, well, unpopular. From Texas Monthly:
Mike Miles, the state-appointed superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, might be the most hated person in Harris County. At last week’s school board meeting—the first since Miles was officially hired—residents crowded HISD headquarters, in northwest Houston, to oppose the state’s takeover of the school district. One speaker compared Miles, who is the son of a Black father and a Japanese mother, to a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Another described the state’s recent seizure of HISD, which serves a student population that is 62 percent Hispanic and 22 percent Black—as an “act of racial violence.” Larry McKinzie, an educator and former State Board of Education candidate, appeared to make a physical threat against Miles: “Realize this: you’re safe at forty-four-hundred West Eighteenth”—the location of the board meeting—“but you’ll have to go back [home].” Not one of the 33 attendees who gave public comments had anything good to say about their new superintendent. It was hard to gauge Miles’s reaction to the criticism, because he spent the entire public-comment period in a back room, watching the meeting on TV.
A meeting the night before this one had dissolved into chaos, so the new HISB rescheduled the meeting for the next night, using a plan that had the lovely tang of East Germany to it.
In an apparent effort to keep order, the board allowed only 35 members of the public into last week’s meeting room, which can accommodate more than 300. The remaining 100 or so attendees were relegated to an overflow room. Several attempted to force their way into the main room, only to be turned back by armed police officers. One teacher who had registered to speak at the meeting was arrested for criminal trespassing and spent the night in jail.
Houston officials tried to fight the takeover, and they even got it stalled for four years. But the puppet show that is the government of Texas has many fail-safe devices and they all work.
Houston leaders overwhelmingly opposed the takeover, citing HISD’s overall B rating from the state and strong financial position. In 2019 the district sued the state, delaying the takeover for four years. The legal battle ended in January, when the Texas Supreme Court—whose nine members are all Republicans—sided with the TEA.
Miles beta-tested his sophisticatedly named New Education System in Dallas, where it proved to be a matter of long-term pain for short-term gain. This week, its implementation in Houston was widely interpreted as equally ominous. From Texas Public Media:
Librarian and media specialist positions are being eliminated at 28 campuses designated to be part of Miles’ New Education System (NES), which entails premade lesson plans for teachers, classroom cameras for disciplinary purposes and a greater emphasis on testing-based performance evaluations, among other initiatives. The libraries at those schools will continue to include books that can be read or checked out by students but are otherwise being reimagined as “team centers” where special programming will be held and disruptive students will be sent so as not to interfere with their classmates’ learning, according to HISD spokesperson Joseph Sam. The library-related changes also could be coming to the 57 schools where principals elected to be NES-aligned campuses, with Sam saying that would be determined on a campus-by-campus basis.
If this seems extreme, that’s only because it is — homogenized lesson plans, surveillance in the classroom, “special programs” for “disruptive students.” And libraries turned into “discipline centers,” which, truth be told, are not as dungeon-adjacent as their name might imply, although their name so clearly implies it that the NES folks like to call them “team centers.”
That most of the affected students will be from low-income communities of color should be obvious from jump, which means god alone knows what the NES definition of “disruptive” in practice is going to be. (In some places, “disruptive” students have drawn the attention of the local police. So maybe things are looking up.) What is also obvious is that any complaints will go into a political meat-grinder that is rigged in such an ironclad fashion that an fair outcome is nearly impossible. And around and around it goes.
