Grading Texas

Beware of superintendents calling themselves “reformers”

I was on vacation when Mike Miles finally quit his reign of dictatorial mediocrity at Dallas ISD, but I notice now that the Dallas school board paid the former superintendent $275,000 in a separation deal.

That money could have been spent paying five teachers for a whole year of work, but if that is what it took to get rid of Miles, I doubt that too many teachers are complaining. You may recall that TSTA’s local affiliate, NEA-Dallas, had been urging the board for months to fire him.

With Miles gone, it also seems that Tonya Sadler Grayson, the scandal-ridden human resources executive whom Miles refused to fire, will soon follow.

Now what for Texas’ second largest school district?

The board has rehired former Superintendent Michael Hinojosa as an interim replacement at $25,000 per month while it decides what to do long-term. Hinojosa is a former DISD teacher and coach with deep roots in the district. He saw the district make some academic improvements under his previous tenure as superintendent from 2005 to 2011, when he resigned to head the Cobb County School District near Atlanta.

But hundreds of DISD teachers lost their jobs during a 2008 budgetary crisis while Hinojosa was superintendent. And, according to The Dallas Morning News, he plans to continue, at least for now, Miles’ programs, including a performance-pay plan for teachers that will do nothing to improve educational quality in DISD. The plan, as long as it ties teacher evaluations and pay to student test scores, will discourage the best teachers from taking jobs at the low-performing campuses where they are needed the most.

The departure of Miles, who drove away hundreds of good teachers with his top-down, dictatorial style, is in itself an improvement for DISD, but it will be only a temporary one.

In picking a long-term, new superintendent, board members need to be leery of anyone promising “reform,” at least until they are sure the applicant actually understands what the word means.

Miles was an alleged “reformer” who unveiled high-sounding programs. But mainly he messed with teachers, played musical chairs with principals, defied the school board and infuriated a lot of parents while doing little to improve educational opportunities for the vast majority of DISD students.

Reform is not simply change, not simply doing something because it upsets the status quo. Real reform is change that makes things better. For a school district, real reform is improving educational opportunities for all of its students. And, real reform for DISD, in the wake of the Miles era, can begin only if the new superintendent makes a priority of listening to the real education experts – the district’s teachers – giving them the resources they need to succeed and building a program from there.

How do you wipe slavery from school buildings?

I am all for burying the Confederate battle flag in the back room of a museum and requiring remedial education for politicians who persist in denying – or downplaying — the historical fact that the South’s shameful passion to preserve slavery was what caused the Civil War.

Following the recent, racially motivated murders in South Carolina, I also understand why some people in the Old South, including Texas, want to consider renaming schools that bear famous (or infamous) Confederate names. But that task may be more complicated than it seems.

Renaming schools may or may not be easier than, say, removing the Confederate monument on the state Capitol grounds. But where do you start – or stop?

Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, and General Robert E. Lee may be among the first targets of people trying to wipe Confederate names from schools and other public entities. But Texas also has a Jeff Davis County and a town named Robert Lee. Do we also rename them?

Other Confederate names are lesser known but still widespread.

The Reagan state office building that sits a stone’s throw from the state Capitol is not named for President Ronald Reagan, but for John H. Reagan, a former U.S. senator from Texas and the first chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission. John Reagan also was postmaster general of the Confederacy, and high schools in Austin and Houston also are named for him.

And, if we are going to wipe the names of armed defenders of slavery – which is what the Confederacy and Civil War were all about – from schools and other public buildings, what about the names of prominent slaveholders?

Eight early U.S. presidents – including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison – held slaves while they were in office. But no one, including me, is proposing the removal of their names from innumerable buildings and monuments or changing the name of the nation’s capital.

Closer to home, early Texas hero Sam Houston opposed secession and resigned as governor when Texas left the Union, but he owned slaves. Stephen F. Austin recruited slave owners to move to Texas and, according to at least one author, once owned a slave himself. But their names will remain fixed on the Texas landscape.

Two of my children graduated from James Bowie High School in Austin. Bowie, as we all know, secured a place in Texas history by dying at the Alamo. Lesser known, however, is the fact that before he made his way to the Alamo, Bowie was a slave trader. He and his brother bought captive slaves from the pirate Jean Laffite and made thousands of dollars selling their fellow human beings to southern buyers.

Is Robert E. Lee – who as a young officer in the U.S. Army played an important role in the U.S. victory in the Mexican War – any less deserving to have his name on the side of a school building than James Bowie?

I don’t think Texas is going to see an extensive renaming of schools and other public institutions. But what Texas policymakers can – and should — do is quit playing politics by downplaying the role of slavery in our past and instead help educators prepare our school children to thrive in a racially diverse future.

Educators have reason to fear a Walker presidency

Despite what it may often resemble, the long race to elect the next president of the United States is, of course, more than a bad vaudeville show. It will result in our turning over the White House to the next leader of the Free World, and some of the wannabes already are causing nightmares.

So far, the candidate whose prospect of becoming president I most dread is Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, and not simply because he is a union-buster. What he is trying to do goes way beyond destroying unions. He is intent on destroying jobs, individual livelihoods, and depressing wages, union and non-union alike, beginning with education and the public sector service so critical to millions of Americans and the country’s economic future.

At this point, Walker’s chances of becoming the Republican nominee probably are better than several other candidates. His chances will be boosted if the Koch brothers decide to put their enormous wealth behind him and Jeb Bush continues to stumble. Walker is the Kochs’ kind of politician, an officeholder trying to manipulate government for the benefit of anti-government one-percenters. And, he has accomplished in Wisconsin what the Kochs would like to see happen all over the country.

As Wisconsin governor, Walker led a successful drive to abolish collective-bargaining rights for most public employees, including educators, further weakened unions with a “right to work” law and now is trying to dumb down higher education by abolishing tenure for faculty members. There also is an effort afoot in Wisconsin to let people teach school with only a high school diploma. And, Walker has been trying to mislead the rest of the country by claiming improvements in Wisconsin’s economy.

In truth, according to a cover story by Dan Kaufman in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Wisconsin has fallen to 40^th among the states in job growth and 42^nd in wage growth since the collective bargaining ban was enacted in 2011. The Wisconsin Legislature this year cut $250 million from the state’s university system to help cover a deficit in the state budget, and Wisconsin now is among the first 10 states from which people are moving.

From a more general perspective, the same New York Times article noted how the decline in union bargaining power has been blamed for suppressing wage growth for all middle-class workers, both union and non-union members, while incomes of the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans have been increasing.

Millions of individual, middle-class wage-earners, including educators, have been suffering under Walker’s policies, the policies about which he has been bragging on his unofficial presidential campaign trail. He is expected to officially enter the race at some point – the umpteenth Republican to do so.

We can hope, for the sake of the country, that he will encounter his own “oops” moment, forcing his withdrawal before he gets much farther down the road.

Dallas ISD needs a superintendent, not a bully

Mike Miles, the dictatorial superintendent of Dallas ISD, may or may not have skated closer to the precipice of getting fired when he recently ignored the wishes of a majority of his elected school board and terminated three principals, including one who was extremely popular and worked very well with parents.

Although this incident may have been his cheekiest yet, this is not the first time Miles has shown disrespect for school trustees and the taxpayers who elected them. You may recall that last year he ordered DISD police to physically remove one trustee, Bernadette Nutall, from a campus in the district she was elected to represent.

This time, though, even The Dallas Morning News editorial board, a long-time Miles defender, sat up and took notice with a hand-wringing editorial that chastised the superintendent but stopped short of demanding his termination.

Dallas ISD faces challenges, and effective educators are ready to take the opportunity to turn them into successes. But Miles would rather bully than lead. His administration has been marked by top-down, ineffective policies and a highly paid management team that has created a hostile working environment for teachers and other school employees – and a hostile learning environment for students. All, of course, in the hijacked name of “reform.”

Teachers have been saddled with excessive paperwork and excessive meetings, and some have been chastised by administrators in front of their students during surprise classroom visits. Miles also has imposed an evaluation system that does not truly reflect the work that educators are doing.

NEA-Dallas, TSTA’s local affiliate, has long demanded Miles’ removal.

In his latest bit of arrogance, Miles fired the three principals who had the support of a board majority. One was Anna Brining, an elementary principal who had been personally praised by Board President Eric Cowan for her work and strong engagement with parents. Cowan’s daughter attended Brining’s school.

To make matters even worse, Miles continues to employ a DISD human resources manager who, according to an internal investigation reported by the Dallas News, has lied, bullied staffers and falsified records. And, you can bet the human resources manager is paid more than any of the ousted principals were.

The News, in its editorial, said Miles needs to “adjust his approach.”

It’s too late for that. The DISD board needs to show him the door.

http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/2015/06/mike-miles-double-standard-on-hiring-firing-and-gauging-professional-leadership.html/#more-56514

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