Endorsement watch: The Chron gets on the “no trust, no bond” train

Wow.

The students of HISD shouldn’t have to worry if traces of lead are seeping into the water, past the district’s jerry-rigged mitigation efforts. Or whether a troubled individual with a semi-automatic can slip past a lack of fencing and secure entry vestibules at hundreds of campuses.

We, the taxpayers who fund the state’s largest school district, should be willing to invest our hard-earned money to fix these things, and to build others — including more Pre-K classrooms and career and technology centers — for our young scholars who will someday become Houston’s workers and artists and parents and community organizers and political leaders.

We should pay it forward the way past generations did for us. In normal times, that’s how public education is supposed to work.

But these aren’t normal times. Voters are being asked to approve a $4.4 billion bond for HISD on the November ballot at a time when our school district is under state control, led by a state-appointed board of managers that replaced our democratically elected trustees and by a state-appointed superintendent who is wholly unaccountable to the community he serves.

From the beginning, this editorial board made it clear that, if the takeover had to happen, we wanted Superintendent Mike Miles to succeed. Kids’ futures at chronically failing campuses depended on it. We also implored Miles to build trust among teachers, parents and the general community.

At almost every turn, he failed to build that trust.

His conversion of libraries into study hall/detention centers was almost Dickensian in its austerity — and especially bad optics at a time when some Texas political leaders were vilifying librarians and banning books across the state.

Despite hopeful bumps in test scores last year, HISD is hemorrhaging students and staff, including veteran teachers and principals at higher-performing schools who’ve been abruptly fired or pushed out. Miles didn’t just fail to get teacher and parent buy-in on curriculum and scheduling changes, he often antagonized critics and dismissed their concerns as “whining” or “noise.”

The scope of the state takeover seems ever-oozing, with Miles’ rigid New Education System model now in 130 schools and essentially reaching every campus, since even non-NES principals are evaluated on how well their teachers perform Miles’ preferred teaching methods. (Think daily quizzes, timers and multiple response strategies.) He seems bent on fixing what isn’t broken, which isn’t only a waste of limited resources, it’s potentially harmful if attempts to bring up the floor at low-performing campuses leave the ceilings sagging at higher-performing schools.

At times, Miles has misled or reneged on promises, backtracking on some teacher bonuses, vowing no school closures and then unveiling a plan not to close but to “co-locate” 15 schools, preaching teacher effectiveness and then allowing 1 in every 5 HISD teachers to be uncertified.

The “high quality” curriculum Miles touted as the cornerstone of his HISD reforms was actually written in real time, included worksheets with stilted passages and flat-out errors, according to teachers. It became clear in our recent meeting with Miles that he didn’t know the name — “Prof Jim Inc.” — of the Artificial Intelligence software writing some of it.

From the get-go, Miles has been dogged by sloppy implementation, tone deaf communication and basic logistics flubs. It took weeks to get bus riders to school on time and the district is currently clawing back erroneous overpayments to some 4,000 teachers.

[…]

Our gut is to support kids, including the ones at HISD campuses that our own kids attend. HISD hasn’t floated a bond focused on elementary schools since 2007 and frankly, we’ve gone back and forth on this decision. We’ve watched as groups take sides: organized labor including the Houston Federation of Teachers, and both Democratic and Republican parties are against. The Greater Houston Partnership, Houston Food Bank and Children at Risk are among the supporters.

We were struck by a group of moms we met with, including early Miles allies, who explained why they couldn’t vote for the bond. One, whose child attends NES school Crockett Elementary, brought us a stack of worksheets, including those she says her son is forced to do in study hall after typically mastering class lessons early.

Another HISD parent, Tish Ochoa, said, “Many of us were appointed by the board of managers or by Miles” and “came into that room saying, ‘We do support you and we want this to succeed and we want to collaborate with you.’” But they felt that when they asked in-depth questions, they weren’t answered, and their public information requests were “held up and held up.”

As for us, when we studied the facts provided, scrubbed the plans, reviewed the history and talked with parents, teachers, elected officials and others who feel passionately on both sides, one question persisted:

If taxpayers give the Miles administration the power to spend $4.4 billion of our money — nearly $9 billion with interest over some 30 years — what power do we have to make sure it’s spent properly?

Answer: practically none.

That’s a long quote, but I assure you, the full editorial is a lot longer. They did not spare any words. I remain unconvinced that anything will make Mike Miles think he’s not on the right path and ought to consider changing how he operates, but I understand why people see this as their best way of trying to do that anyway.

I will refer you once again to my interviews with Plácido Gómez and Dani Hernandez for the HISD bond, and Ruth Kravetz of CVPE against the HISD bond. If you’re tired of me shilling for my own interviews on this topic, listen to Tuesday’s CityCast Houston, which features a debate between former HISD Trustee Judith Cruz, who is the co-chair of the bond’s community advisory committee, and HISD parent Traci Riley. One minor quibble: Cruz said at one point in regard to a question about the bond’s timing that the Board has preferred to have these elections during high turnout years. That would be true for 2012 and 2002, but very much not true for 2007, which was the lowest turnout election of this century until we started having odd years with no city of Houston activity. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things but it was a record-scratch moment for me when I heard it, so I had to mention it here.

Related Posts:

• HISD approves the bond referendum for November
• On the bonds and closing or not closing schools
• A closer look at the HISD bond proposal