When Texas education commissioner Mike Morath named Mike Miles as the superintendent of Houston ISD back in June, it represented a throwback of sorts to a more muscular period of school and district accountability. From Los Angeles to Chicago to New York, the reform galaxy as it were has dimmed, but Miles’s arrival in Space City suggests that Texas’s star is again on the rise. In the short time he’s been at the helm, Miles has moved with breakneck speed to implement his “Destination 2035” plan—a complete structural overhaul that promises to uproot and upend the district’s way of doing things for years to come.
Indeed, the scale and scope of what’s happening in Houston can be dizzying to comprehend. I’ve had a close-up view, having spent this summer in the Lone Star State working closely alongside Miles and his whip-smart team to help lift these systems off the ground. Twenty-eight schools (out of approximately 270) have been completely reconstituted (i.e., replacement of teachers and principals) as “New Education System” schools. Teacher compensation in these NES schools was raised to about $85,000 per year with an additional $10,000 stipend, and is differentiated based on grade level and subject matter. An additional fifty-seven schools voluntarily opted into the same wholesale transformation model. Reading and language arts will be taught in these schools using a well-regarded curriculum aligned with the science of reading. A comprehensive, research-based teacher and principal appraisal system is being installed. HISD’s unwieldy central office has been entirely reorganized, with 2,000-plus positions eliminated. Teacher vacancies, which were close to eight hundred on June 1, were reduced to zero before classes began on August 28. And this list is only a fraction of what’s now underway!
Back in the halcyon days of ed reform, the zone was flooded with courageous leaders like Miles, who at the time had his hands on the tiller in Dallas. Houston was looking good, too, under the leadership of Terry Grier, who moved with a similar sense of impatience and urgency. The prevailing wisdom, lubricated by a healthy helping of hubris, was that reformers knew exactly what needed to be done to tame large, bureaucratic systems like HISD. Looking back, these leaders were often left out to dry, and the districts they led tended to regress soon after they left. Will Houston’s fate be any different this time around? Despite the hefty list of accomplishments thus far, it’s far too early to tell, but some familiar parallels—and stark differences—have already emerged.
What’s similar is that the forces of resistance and repeal have been kicking and screaming ever since Morath announced his intention to take action in Houston four years ago, this despite providing the then-elected district leadership an opportunity to avert a takeover. Unable to get out from under its own malfeasance and incompetence, the elected board was replaced, Miles was brought in, and a relatively small, albeit loud, opposition has ever since behaved unseriously. Never mind the district’s woeful performance. The objectors’ chosen course has been to traffic in spurious, ad hominem attacks and borrow heavily from the union’s dog-eared playbook of misinformation and misdirection.
The most egregious among these is the patently false allegation that the district converted its libraries into discipline centers—a tall tale that was irresistibly and credulously picked up by the New York Times and MSNBC and amplified by California’s insufferable governor. The truth is that libraries in the NES schools are essentially being used as study halls to help differentiate instruction and encourage students who have already mastered content to continue accelerating ahead. During the first week of school, I observed a number of these libraries in person, chock full of books—which students read once they completed their assignments—and not even one was being used for disciplinary purposes.
Different this time around are the larger political and cultural atmospherics. A decade ago, there was a bipartisan consensus on education reform that recognized the necessity of drastic intervention in the nation’s most distressed school systems. Any shenanigans that status quo apologists tried to pull were likely to be frowned upon by Democrats and Republicans alike. Randi Weingarten herself once proffered the need for changes in teacher evaluation akin to what’s being done in HISD. What’s more, anyone who has worked with Miles knows that his unapologetic focus on high-quality instruction and teacher effectiveness can be taken at face value. The man is laser-focused on academic excellence and does not abide excuses or mediocrity. For Miles, the mission of getting every Houston student well-educated and well-prepared is a labor of love.
But blinded by the fog of negative polarization, alleged “book bans,” and the funhouse mirrors of the broader culture wars, everything that Miles says or does is viewed by his adversaries as a sinister plot. For example, one popular conspiracy theory connects the reform efforts in Houston to Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s enthusiastic support of school vouchers. It’s an odd line to draw, but one would be hard pressed to parse that out from the overheated rhetoric and frantic media coverage. All of which is to say that, while the policy prescriptions underway today in Houston harken back to NCLB and Race to the Top, the politics animating things underneath bear no resemblance to the Bush-Obama era of school reform.
I’ve known and admired Miles for years, but this summer was the first chance I’ve had to see him up close and to witness the way he—to the chagrin of the conflict entrepreneurs—is converting the staff, students, and community in HISD to his cause. I listened as he extemporaneously and compellingly delivered “The Man in the Arena” to a group of NES principals, encouraging them to tune out the naysayers and critics. Afterwards, I asked him about the ceaseless flak, to which he replied, “Who cares what those people say? Let’s just do what’s right for kids.” No matter what obstacles may come in the years ahead, nothing will distract Miles from his assignment. That’s because Miles’s cause is Houston’s children.
