Houston and the End of an Era

Maybe you missed it because VP choices and the assassination attempt sucked up so much oxygen, or maybe you are not a fan of the author, but in mid-July Robert Pondiscio put up a piece about the Houston school takeover, and you should read it.

In "The Last Hurrah," Pondiscio frames the Mike Miles takeover as the last gasp of the big urban takeover model of reform, a model, he suggests, never really worked. 

There are two things that have always set Pondiscio (AEI Fellow and former Fordham guy) apart from the rest of the reformster crowd-- five years spent in an actual classroom, and real experience in journalism. Like his book about Success Academy, this piece clearly reflects a bunch of legwork and some level reportage that will annoy people on all sides.

There's history here. Pondiscio locates Houston in particular and Texas in general as the "Bethlehem" of ed reform. Teach for America. The Texas Miracle that Bush II used to sell No Child Left Behind. Rod Paige. The first Broad Prize for Urban Education, given in 2002, went to Houston. Then in 2013, Houston won it again. Then they stopped handing it out because the judges couldn't find a worthy district. 

That, Pondiscio shows, was reflective of a "gloomy pattern" in the world of "wholesale systemic reform." He looks back at the big marquee names in the field (Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, et al) and notes that "promising initial gains prove evanescent or quickly plateau" and years later have vanished.

His profile of Mike Miles emphasizes the reformster's "hard-charging" super-self-confident attitude, including the belief that he will succeed where all these others have failed because they just didn't reform hard enough. He also notes, at length, and throughout the piece, the many, many, many objections to Miles both in terms of substance and style.

In particular Pondiscio notes Miles's military approach to management and the micro-management that comes with it. There's a goal here to grab the less capable teachers and force them into a very specific model that, Miles believes, will get results. 

The problem with totalitarian-style management is, as always, that if what the boss says goes and what the worker bees do is comply, then what the boss says had better be right, all the time, and Pondiscio points to some Mile ideas that are "more speculative and stand on shakier empirical ground." And Pondiscio is not sugar-coating the pushback:

A group calling itself Community Voices for Public Education organized protests, petitions, and testimonials from parents and teachers decrying what they saw as the “tired old script from 2012,” and asserting that NES was leaving children “overwhelmed, crying, and complaining.”

This year, “they’re not relating to us at all,” said one student. “This is not fun,” said another. “I feel like I’m in prison.” A former Houston ISD principal said Miles is instilling a “culture of fear.” The district’s largest teachers union mounted a picket to protest the reforms. At a September board meeting, members of the audience set alarms on their phones to go off every four minutes to mock the NES requirement that teachers stop every four minutes to do a multiple response strategy, which conjured up images of timers ringing on a fast-food deep fryer to goad a Pavlovian response from low-skill McTeachers. Nor did it help that the takeover was marked by what one former Houston ISD board member described as a series of unforced errors. Early on, district-made curriculum units were riddled with errors, and poor communications led to national news stories erroneously claiming that Miles was turning school libraries into detention centers for misbehaving students.

For Pondiscio, Miles's problems are a sign of how the context for full-scale reform has changed. "Ed reform embodied youthful energy and do-gooder earnestness" he says, having elsewhere noted more than once that Miles is--well, he's not young (he's my age). Back in the day, reformsters like Rhee were on magazine covers, and Waiting for Superman was a hot ticket, even shown at the Democratic Convention. 

As for Miles himself and his reaction to the criticism of his work-- "I'm old and I don't care."

It's not quite that simple, and Pondiscio crams a lot of nuance into a small space. But he notes that the clock is ticking for Miles, for a variety of reasons, including the super-voucher love of Governor Abbott, Miles's main patron. In one sentence, Pondiscio captures the current drift of reformsterism:

Among many red state Republicans, who often view traditional public schools as irredeemable cauldrons of “woke” indoctrination, ESAs have become the preferred remedy for public education.

For reformsters, particularly the reformsters of the past twenty years, the article may sting with its elegy for a style of reform whose time has passed, and a lack of optimism for Miles's prospect for success in Houston. For defenders of public education, there will be irritation with what Pondiscio has left out: details like how Miles did in Dallas, and details in the presented history that invite debate, particularly in the pictures from reformy days gone by. Regular readers of this space will have repeated urges to say, "Hey, yeah, but, wait--", including a longer litany of Miles's missteps.

But Houston's takeover and the history of big urban school takeovers would require a book. What Pondiscio has condensed into a tiny space shows many serious flaws in the Houston takeover, put in the context of a change in the reformy world. The piece suggests that Miles is doomed to fail, not just because of his plan's faults, but because it is a reform model that has always failed, and if it had ever had a time at all, that time has passed. 

Pondiscio's observation is that support and patience for Houston-style reforms has gone. 

If parents, politicians, philanthropists, and the news media have grown impatient with urban public-school reform, not even waiting for measurable outcomes before pronouncing the entire enterprise a failure—too disruptive, too disrespectful of teachers, too stressful for children—who is the constituency left for big-city reform? Who is left to champion change for the vast majority of children who, even in an emerging era of increasing choice, are likely to remain in urban public schools and struggle to read or do math at a reasonable standard, limiting their future opportunities and life prospects?

There are unexamined questions here--how is it that big city reform lost all of its supposed constituencies? And is it possible to champion change for those students without championing the Superstar CEO Takeover model for improving big city schools?  

Maybe being a) powerful and b) sure that you're right is not the recipe for successful leadership, and maybe that is doubly true when that particular management model has never produced any significant, lasting success. Maybe this idea has lost support because it's a bad idea. And maybe putting a hard-charging high-powered person in control of a school district is not the only way to lift up those students who are falling behind. Maybe this was a tree that was never going to bear fruit, and reform fans should have been cultivating something else entirely.

It's a piece that deserves some attention and discussion, well-crafted, with something for everyone to object to. It's an interesting picture of what's going on in Houston combined with an encapsuled history of one slice of reformster history. You may find plenty to jeer, but I recommend reading it anyway.