I think there is a likelihood that we will be seeing more state takeover of districts.
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 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 students 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.
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” State Power, 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?
According to the Houston Chronicle, Miles said If you have to prioritize resources, then you want to get a teacher who can deliver the science of reading versus a librarian.
Reform Austin noted before that Bill’s approval:
Under the legislation, the state would provide approved electronic K-12 curricula that align with state standards and offer financial incentives to districts that adopt them. By utilizing these pre-approved lesson plans, districts would ensure compliance with state requirements while potentially sacrificing some teacher autonomy.
The HISD is the perfect storm for ending public education, replacing school librarians, teachers, and assistant principals, with unproven online programs and staff with little qualifications or experience. One must ask why someone like Miles was hired. Watch as these kinds of reforms become prevalent in other school districts if they haven’t already.
Alice Harrigan says
This is a tragedy! I retired from HISD after 30 years. I am a certified school librarian. I started as a teacher in a middle school. Then became a teacher in a library position. When HISD partnered with IMLIS, they created a grant for 30 teachers to get their Masters of Library Science. I was in that group.
At the Middle School level, I taught works cited classes – many of these. How to use the databases. How to research. How to use the OPACI. I prowled the halls between classes taking books to students who had put a hold on them and the book arrived. The absolute joy on their faces when I personally delivered books was priceless. One year I even taught a scheduled class to match HISD’s famous book competition. I think we might have been in Second place. This from a school in a poor neighborhood.
Then I moved to elementary school. And I taught on the rotation. Research, OPAC, works cited, and lessons requested from the principal. Poetry, journaling, Genre, mostly Language Arts lessons, others I don’t remember. I was required to give grades. This was two full time jobs! Running a library isn’t just sit and read all day. Especially when you receive a library run by untrained persons! It’s a mess to clean up. I researched and ordered appropriate books. I weeded out books that weren’t right – for various reasons. Look up CREW. I ran the AR program.
I showed short videos related to our lessons. The Kindergarten teachers where blown away the day the picked up their students who were singing a song about echolocation. They said their next unit was about bats. Well, I had just finished my unit about bats and all up and down the halls the kids were singing that song.
Librarians teach!
Miles is creating a school to prison pipeline. He’s training good little cubicle dwellers for future jobs – Just Over Broke. Education needs to be fun, exciting, a joy! Children learn through play, songs, music, art activity. Things that can’t be tested. Already there isn’t enough recess or brain breaks. Even adults need breaks at work. But children need to be quiet and focused all day every day. And that is not how children are. They will come to these horrible schools and all their excitement, joy, and possibilities will be stolen from them. You only get one childhood.
This is all about the 1% getting richer and richer. Keeping the 99% under their boot. Just enough education to think they are informed. But not enough to realized they have been bamboozeled and their country, freedoms and future stolen. We are bigger than this. We are better than this. Wake up!
Nancy Bailey says
Thank you, Alice. There’s so much about your comment that shows how devastating school reform has become. I hope everyone reads this. Those making these changes appear to have a troubling agenda as you so clearly point out. Thank you for your service as a school librarian in the HISD. I know that many children benefitted. I know it must be especially difficult for you to watch what’s happening there now. What kind of workers do they think they’re making? How will this ever be productive for their companies or the future?
Tonya says
Nancy, can I repost. We must find a way to stop this. When they took the board, they took our voice. I won’t be silent!!
Nancy Bailey says
I would be honored, Tonya!
Ms. Amber Hadley says
Just nightmarish. Who would want to be a student or an educator in “schools” like this?
Nancy Bailey says
Absolutely, Amber. A way to end them
Tonya says
Exactly. That’s why he’s doing all of the reforms at once. He wants teachers to quit and students to leave do he can make charter schools so his friends will get rich with public funds. I’m writing my dissertation on this now. It’s sad. I went to school in HISD K-12. I did student teaching, taught, administrator, and now retired. I work 2 days a week now mentoring and tutoring and this so sad to see friends of 33 years leaving. Read books by Heinig and Ravitch to learn the formula of how they are doing it. Just sad!
Jackie Anderson says
“We need to make sure we are at every turn doing whatever we need to do for our children,” said Jackie Anderson, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers. “Books open the world. The easiest and most effective way to enslave a man is to keep him unlearned.”
Nancy Bailey says
Thank you, Jackie.
Betty says
Nancy, may I repost this in my TulsaKids’ blog? I don’t know if you’ve heard anything about what is going on in OK, but State Superintendent Ryan Walters is threatening to take Tulsa Public Schools accreditation away. He says he’s been talking to Houston, so I think your blog would be a good one to provide information about what it might mean if Walters takes over TPS.
Nancy Bailey says
How worrisome. With all the complaints concerning Houston’s takeover, why would he do this? But please feel free to use the post, Betty. I hope it makes a difference, but I believe there’s an agenda.
Gary Orfield says
We’ve had a half centry of state takeovers, usually of school districts serving mostly low income stuents of color. The state action sounds like a dramatic move and is full of hubris and confidence about change but the people put in charge about how to positively run such a system, sometimes don’t believe in public schools, do a lot of random damage and, eventually, quietly leave town, leaving worse troubles behind them.
Nancy Bailey says
Absolutely. You describe it well, Gary. They always leave public education in worse shape, driving parents to want something better. Thank you.
Paul Bonner says
As I was leaving my first teaching job at a struggling jr. high school, the principal began exploring the possibility of dismantling our library. I was shocked at this proposal back in 1993. The fact that educators continue to deemphasize libraries after the ongoing evidence of the benefits (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-Y3_L61-d61fc7e27814423689ea44e56c4a9208/pdf/GOVPUB-Y3_L61-d61fc7e27814423689ea44e56c4a9208.pdf) reveals as much the crisis in the qualifications of the public education establishment as it does the misreading of how students learn. As an administrator I came to understand that the library can be the brainstem for the intellectual endeavors in a school. As a principal, my librarians were not only critical resources for text and technology, but were leaders who contributed to school success. I don’t understand why deformers are so insistent on dismissing expertise. The data is overwhelming that professionals at the helm of a school insure success for students. Libraries are critical as a welcoming hub for learning and study. They work!
Nancy Bailey says
Excellent point, Paul. I think it’s intentional to drive students to all-tech curriculum. I think the research is clear on many issues that have become intentionally problematic in education. I would include reading instruction too. Thank you.