Broad-trained Dallas Superintendent Mike
Miles is in big trouble. He is under investigation for
interfering with bidding for contracts and with internal audits;
several of his top staff have quit; DISD teachers are quitting in
large numbers; Miles’ family moved away from Dallas. But he has
good news: Miles’ special assistant is running for a seat on the
school board. Miguel Solis is not only running for the board, where
he can protect his unpopular and tyrannical boss, he is the Dallas
director of Stand on Children. Stand is a national organization
that was once grassroots but now reflects the interests of wealthy
investors in privatization and high-stakes testing. It will be
interesting to see if he has a credible opponent who cares about
public education. Of course, Stand will provide ample campaign
funds to keep the board committed to its program.
Since the arrival of Superintendent Mike Miles a year ago, the Dallas Independent School District has been in constant turmoil.
Of course, Miles wanted it that way, as he is a Broad-trained superintendent and he apparently believes that disruption is good.
He started off with ambitious goals, some of which seemed wildly unrealistic, including a goal that by 2015, 75% of the staff and 70% of the community would agree with his vision for the district.
In his year on the job, seven of his top staff resigned, and nearly 1,000 teachers quit. Just this month, another 300 resigned.
The district sent letters out to 150 other school districts urging them not to hire the teachers who left DISD, trying to get them permanently blackballed from teaching in Texas.
Miles is under investigation for interfering with bidding for contracts and with internal audits.
To add to his problems, some of the city’s business leaders have expressed no confidence in his “disruptive” leadership style.
And now he has announced that his wife and son are moving back to Colorado to get away from the negative press about him.
A reader of the blog sent this private email to me:
“Not only is Miles under investigation for corruption, cronyism, and contract bid rigging, now, after leading DISD as a little dictator with a management style characterized by morale crushing fear, intimidation, and bullying, he is demanding that other Texas school districts not hire the DISD teachers he has run off. DISD plans to report those teachers to the Texas Education Agency for them to be sanctioned which effects their certification.Miles has worked tirelessly to make the lives of DISD teachers so miserable that no one in their right mind would want to stay at DISD, Anyone with a better option would be a fool not to take it after experiencing Broad Foundation management. These efforts are designed to replace veteran teachers with low salary TFAs. Miles is reviled and hated by ALL teachers. None of his ‘reforms’ help kids. Miles’ reforms were designed specifically to dump additional work on teachers while doing nothing for kids in order to intimidate and exhaust teachers with the goal of running them off. More teachers were run off than expected leaving DISD with an extreme teacher exodus making fall classes untenable. Miles is toxic, his reforms are cancerous. He drove away so many teachers that now DISD is in a precarious situation with school starting in less than a month and no teachers to staff the classrooms. The sooner this guy goes along with his reforms the sooner DISD can get back to the work of educating kids.”
I AM REPOSTING THIS BECAUSE I FORGOT TO ADD THE LINK TO JASON STANFORD’S WEBSITE. JASON IS A GREAT TEXAS BLOGGER WHO HAS THE INSIDE TRACK ON THE POLITICS OF TESTING AND THE BIG MONEY ATTACHED TO IT.
Jason Stanford watches Texas politics closely and has become fascinated with the state’s devotion to high-stakes testing. As he shows in this post, there is plenty of accountability for kids, but none at all for Pearson.
In 2010, Pearson won a $468 million contract to test Texas students. When the legislature decided to reduce mandated high school testing by 67% this year, Pearson cut its budget by less than 2%.
A state audit showed that no one is monitoring what Pearson does or how it spends the state’s money. There is no accountability for Pearson.
As Stanford says, the new state motto might be “Don’t mess with ethics.”
Jason Stanford watches Texas politics closely and has become fascinated with the state’s devotion to high-stakes testing. As he shows in this post, there is plenty of accountability for kids, but none at all for Pearson.
In 2010, Pearson won a $468 million contract to test Texas students. When the legislature decided to reduce mandated high school testing by 67% this year, Pearson cut its budget by less than 2%.
A state audit showed that no one is monitoring what Pearson does or how it spends the state’s money. There is no accountability for Pearson.
As Stanford says, the new state motto might be “Don’t mess with ethics.”
A bit over a year ago, I wrote about the arrival of a new superintendent in Dallas. Mike Miles is a man with a military background who is a graduate of the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy. What could go wrong?
He had a long list of goals, for example:
“By 2020, he says, the graduation rate will be up to 90% from the 2010 rate of 75%.
By 2020, SAT scores will jump by 30%, and 60% of students will achieve at least a 21 on the ACT.
80% of students will be workplace ready, as determined by assessments created by the business and nonprofit communities.
He will create a new leadership academy to train principals in one year, based on what sounds like NYC’s unsuccessful one.
Teachers will be observed up to ten times a year, and these observations will factor into a pay-for-performance plan.
All classroom doors must be open all the times. so that teachers may be observed at any time, without warning.
Principals will have one year “to demonstrate that they have the capacity and what it takes to lead change and to improve the quality of instruction.”
Miles did not say how he intends to measure whether principals have this capacity.
By 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.”
But things did go wrong.
A reader sent this commentary. If you live in Dallas and you have a different perspective, let me know.
The reader writes:
A year later, and what has Dallas seen?
1. Bloodletting has extended to principals. Board formally fired two principals, both popular with teachers and students.
2. Board no longer supports Miles. Budget meetings last week were nasty. Board was very unhappy with $4 million spent for a “principals academy.” Board members realize that their favorite principals are in Miles’s crosshairs, and they realize there is probably no good reason for that.
3. Miles’s staff has been wracked with dissent. His hand-picked “cabinet” of seven or eight top aides has fallen apart, with some positions turning over three times in a year, with experienced and respected pro administrators leaving abruptly, and with one indicted in the Atlanta cheating scandals. The TFA hire hasn’t worked out.
4. Texas has turned on teachers AND administrators.
5. Dallas ISD has what looks like zero swat in Austin, with the legislature refusing to restore death-dealing cuts to education from a year ago.
6. Test results and fair measures of student performance seem to have stalled.
7. Summer school had to scale back. Teachers refused to work for extra money because they fear arbitrary evaluations, which continue during summer school classes.
If there is a single, clear educational advance in Dallas, can someone point it out to us?
Alas, our wishes of good luck were all the teachers got.
The world knows Wendy Davis as the state senator in Texas who filibustered for 11 hours straight against an bill that would restrict abortion. Unlike Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” she was not allowed to take a drink of water or go off-topic or even lean on the speaker’s desk.
What you may not know is that this was not her first filibuster. That was in 2011, when she filibustered against the mammoth budget cuts to public education of $5.4 billion, which crippled many schools and turned out to be completely unnecessary ( but the funding was not restored).
For her valiant resistance to the cuts, the Republican leadership kicked her off the education committee, but she continued to sit in on its meetings and even to offer legislation. She joins the honor roll today as a champion of American education and an all-around champion of courage in public life.
She knows more than most people how crucial education is, how it offers a lifeline to those who reach out for it. The following appears in the New York Times:
“My mother only had a sixth-grade education, and it was really a struggle for us,” she said in a 2011 video for Generation TX. She said she fell through the cracks in high school, and shortly after she graduated, she got married and divorced, and was a single mother by age 19.
“I was living in a mobile home in southeast Fort Worth, and I was destined to live the life that I watched my mother live,” she said in the video. A co-worker showed her a brochure for Tarrant County College, and she took classes to become a paralegal, working two jobs at the same time. From there she received a scholarship to attend Texas Christian University in Fort Worth — becoming the first person in her family to earn a bachelor’s degree — and then went on to Harvard. “When I was accepted into Harvard Law School, I remember thinking about who I am, and where I came from, and where I had been only a few years before,” she said.”
Wendy Davis is a true American hero. She has tenacity and guts. She has intelligence and wisdom. That’s a great combination.
She never forgot where she came from or how she got to where she is today.
She doesn’t use her life experience to tell others to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. She uses her elected position to extend a helping hand. She knows what free public education meant to her. She wants to keep the promise alive for the millions of boys and girls in Texas who are counting on her.
She is only 50. What a great future she has before her.
Now that Rick Perry is stepping down, I hope she runs for governor.
Following John Merrow’s withering critique of Michelle Rhee’s tenure in D.C.,–in which he debunked all of her claimed gains– as well as his continuing effort to obtain documents about the cheating scandal, Rhee kept a low profile.
But Jersey Jazzman has tracked her down. She will appear at a statewide charter school conference in Fort Worth, Texas, next December.
Want to know how well “reform” is working in Houston? Read this. I wish Superintendent Terry Grier would read it too. I would love to get a comment from him in response to this letter.
This letter is about a teacher awakening to the grim political reality of what is deceptively called “education reform.” Her letter should go viral.
She writes:
“This is the sick process education reform has created in big city districts. They just churn through teachers, especially new ones, as fast as they can with no regard to the person’s life, skill set, or qualifications. The harm they do to the students by destabilizing their neighborhood schools cannot be measured. They don’t care if you are a blazing success in the classroom; your teaching certificate is basically meaningless to the administration.
She goes on to add:
” In the student’s mind, a standard classroom teacher is a disposable throwaway. They see no reason to follow the rules, do their homework, or take the exams seriously. They know the teacher will probably get fired, possibly in the middle of the year. They have no respect for their teacher, and no reason to believe their teacher has any ability to discipline or instruct.
“This is the message inner city students have been receiving for over a decade. This is the message reformers convey to the students, the parents, and the taxpayer.
“At new teacher orientation you are led to believe something much different; at the job fair, and in the media, you are told that working for HISD is wonderful, with a fair evaluation system, great pay, and fabulous bonuses.
“Working at HISD is the biggest mistake I have ever made.
“I was warned about education reform. I was told not to do this, and I didn’t listen.
“Honestly, I didn’t even know what “education reform” meant…I thought it was a bunch of talented people swapping ideas about how to best educate the children of poverty. I thought it would be fun, challenging, and engaging. In my ridiculous mind, I could see a group of teachers sharing ideas, lesson plans, and stories. I really believed I was going to learn something positive about public school. I didn’t know it was a scam engineered to deprofessionalize the teaching business, and hand the jobs off to cash strapped ivy leaguers that couldn’t find positions in their fields of study.
“Now I know that people like Michelle Rhee made millions off the backs of the teachers she fired. I know that most of these people have cheated, including some in my own Apollo program. The Atlanta Journal Constitution even did a nationwide study, and can prove mathematically that these districts have failed to educate these students in spite of their “so-called” reforms. This wrong-to-right erasure math is indisputable…
“As for me, I don’t need a study; I can tell everyone about the chaos, the achievement gap, the poverty, the filth, the lies, and the smokescreen.
“It is funny that Arne Duncan (Obama’s Secretary of Education #erasetothetop) came out here and toured Lee HS with my SIO, and he listened to a few talented students, and the police cracked down on the school before his arrival, and they managed to sign up all of the students to some kind of college (mostly 2 year institutions) and convince Arnie that it is a “turnaround success.” But you only have to look at him closely to see he is a Walmart kind of guy. And now we have the privatization of the public trust…we have the Walton Foundation, The Broad Foundation, The Gates Foundation, and countless other vultures, and venture capitalists, including Pearson (the great testing empire), all throwing money to this “teacher witch hunt” fully engaged in the age-old philosophy of “you gotta spend a buck to make a buck.” So, they are making the bucks off of me and my students, and I am helpless to stop them.”
https://www.facebook.com/TexasKidsCantWait
Texas parents created a Facebook page to vent their anger at Governor Perry for vetoing HB 2836, which would have reduced the heavy burden of testing in the elementary and middle school grades. Presently, as much as one month–sometimes more–of the school year is devoted to testin and testing preparation.
HB 2836 passed both houses of the Legislature unanimously.
Our hero? Rep. Bennett Ratliff.
Read more here.
But don’t forget, Pearson has a contract for $500 million for five years of testing. It would be rather unpleasant, wouldn’t it, if the state didn’t want so much testing. After all, the state already reduced the number of graduation tests from 15 to 5. Pearson can retreat just so much and no more. Fortunately, Pearson has its top lobbyist, Sandy Kress, taking care of business. You know Sandy, the architect of NCLB. The testing industry’s best friend.
If you want to keep up with the anti-testing movement, follow their Facebook page.
Now that parents understand that all that testing doesn’t help their children, the game is up.
Governor Perry of Texas vetoed HB 2836. This was a bill that would have reduced the pressure to test and test and test, then test some more, in the early grades.
He earlier approved a bill to reduce the amount of testing for high school students but the anti-testing moms forgot about the elementary school children.
So Governor Perry vetoed a bill that would have cut back on testing the little ones.
Jason Stanford explains what happened here and why Perry did it.
The bill he vetoed was passed unanimously in both chambers.
This isn’t over.
Diane Ravitch's blog 