Epigraph: “There is something fundamentally anti-democratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society’s wealthiest people.” (Ravitch pg 200)
It’s impressive that Mike Miles can embody both Icarus and Sysiphus at the same time in his tenure at HISD, however short it may be. His hubris in thinking he could allegedly funnel money from one of Houston’s largest school districts to his Third Future Charter schools in Colorado, and the futility of the brand of regime he has led in the long run. As teachers, we see many like him come and go in the halls of public schools in America. The forceful and aggressive push to hamstring public education will not succeed, however, and the trajectory is visible in the career of Mike Miles himself.
Diane Ravitch in her 2010 book The Birth and Death of the Great American School System, describes the idea of a “royal road to learning,” explained in more detail in part 1 of this series. To illustrate, she uses the example of Dr. Suess’s Solla Sollew to describe the futility of tried and failed tactics to improve education. The story tells of those who are always searching for that mythical land “where they never have troubles, at least very few,” She also uses the story of Dumbo’s magic feather to analogize the idea that there are no shortcuts in this particular game. Instead she writes of “the elixir that promised a quick fix to intractable problems…one festooned with banners celebrating the power of accountability, incentives, and markets.”
Diane Ravitch claims in her 2010 book The Birth and Death of the Great American School System, that certain foundations involved in education policy – such as the Annenberg Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, WK Kellogg Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, as well as the Gates and Walton Foundations – are organizations that have made targeted investments in education reform. She wrote that they came to be known as venture philanthropists, or donors looking for a return on their investment from largely tax-free orgs run by extremely wealthy individuals. It was dubbed “philanthrocapitalism.”
The Broad Academy, of the venture philanthropies, is where Mike Miles received his training in school administration. Criticized by Ravitch in 2010, as promoting charter schools and encouraging a “marketplace” around education. She writes, “ the problem with the marketplace is that it dissolves communities and replaces them with consumers.”
Broad adjacent policy centers around testing, accountability, merit pay,” and filling decision-making position in school district with “noneducators who had degrees in business, law and management.” Let’s all say it together: education is not a business it is a public good.
Ravitch likens the Broad Foundation’s work to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did in taking over a district in New York, where they “mirrored their own experience in acquiring huge fortunes, such as competition, choice, deregulation, incentives, and other market-based approaches.” Market based approaches that Mike Miles seems to have experience with due to his consulting work with Focal Point, a firm that helped school districts change their organizational structure, overhaul curriculum and rewrite teacher evaluations. His consulting work was barred by Dallas ISD, but his market based approaches rose from his tumultuous exit from Dallas with Third Future Schools, the charter program where he served as CEO. It’s exactly the type of tired old panaceas that have plagued education and is more fully explained in Part 1 of this series. Here comes these administrators, business-minded, “passionate” and divisive, swooping in from out of state to institute sweeping reforms that continuously fail.
Is Mike Miles personifying Sisyphus or are the students of his district? If all goes according to Dallas, and Colorado before that; dramatic, sweeping reforms won’t significantly increase performance but will succeed in fracturing the ability to meet their students’ needs. In Dallas ISD it ended up being worse when Miles unexpectedly departed before his contract was up and the education of the students suffered the most for it. Jonathan Kozol in 2005 called this phenomena “primitive utilitarianism…Taylorism in the classroom,” and “commodification” of the children. American psychoanalyst Erik Erikson said, “the most deadly of all possible sins” in the growth of children was what he called “destructive forms of conscientiousness.” I’m sure the uptick in competition pay for teachers, the skewed measurement provided by standardized testing, and the constant, drastic restructuring of schools and school systems doesn’t do that, not at all, right?…right?
The earliest example of the playbook currently being used by Greg Abbot, Mike Morath, and Mike Miles that I could find dates back to a New York City School district in 1967. The Ford and Carnegie Corporations, in their infinite capital wisdom, dramatically restructured the schools and put non-educators in decision-making positions.
According to Diane Ravitch, they “passed legislation in 1969 decentralizing the schools and creating elected local school boards while eliminating the three upstart districts” that had confronted their elected officials about disparities and equality in education.
“This began an era of decentralization for the city’s schools, a period that lasted from 1969 until 2002, when the legislature restored control to the city’s mayor, going from one extreme – in which political authority was dispersed among many officials – to the other – in which the mayor was granted complete dominion over the schools.” (Ravitch 2010)
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In part one of this series, you’ll notice in the list of things education should not be. Part 2 outlines the decentralization and centralization playbooks used throughout the states. But what there needs to be is balance. The state taking over and rehauling one of the largest districts in the state, with a democratically elected board, probably won’t benefit from a jarring switch to state control that affects 190,000 students. If the system, one already largely dictated by the state, was in such dire need for immediate action, perhaps a smaller pilot program would have been beneficial.
Instead, the Mikes (Miles and Morath) gained support from Republican State Senators such as Paul Bettencourt, former Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings. Rawlings led a similar and similarly failed effort to to institute a “home-rule charter” policy to rewrite local rules. He said Miles created a “culture of accountability” in Dallas ISD and, while short-lived, laid the foundation for Dallas ISD’s improvements in the years to come, according to the Houston Chronicle. It’s a foundation that crumbled in Mike Miles premature flight from the district, where test scores went up in the years after Miles’ policies were implemented, then came crashing back down when Dallas leaders pulled money from the program. Effective or not, many educators in the city said his reforms were unsustainable, divisive and demoralizing.
In his short time in HISD so far, Mike Miles seems to be well connected in the state to people pushing school privatization. He has met with Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and was in contact with the lieutenant governor in the days ahead of the Texas legislature’s vote on school voucher legislation. According to the Chronicle, who quoted assistant professor at UH College of Education, Duncan Klussmann, it is rare for a superintendent to have direct interaction with the governor outside of a group setting. He has also met with State Board of Education Member Jule Pickren, who appeared with the controversial media organization PragerU; Texas Rep. Charles Cunnignham with the public education committee, which, on it’s face, doesn’t seem very unusual except for the fact that the GOP platform hasn’t exactly valued public education in the past few decades. Remember, Reagan favored classroom prayer, tax credits for parochial schools, and named judges who ended school desegregation at a time when cities were embroiled in riots and uprisings from minority communities protesting poverty, school inequality, police brutality, and dilapidated housing. A partisan may suggest impropriety by the GOP, and they’d be correct, but if the history of national education policy is any indicator: Democrats have had no trouble profiting from privatization and deregulation either. Miles has met the most with local Houston Democrats.
The company you keep, eh? The state appointed nine board of managers. Individually the board of managers by all accounts are successful people in their area of expertise. However, out of 9, only one appears to have any classroom experience and only two have degrees in education. The rest are business owners, a trial attorney, and an Army Veteran. Three are parents of HISD grads or students. One particular appointment that raises eyebrows is the appointed of Janette Garza Lindner, who voters rejected in her bid for the school board in 2021 with over $150,000 in GOP PAC money. But the absence of educators with classroom experience sticks out the most to any advocate of community schools.
Mike Miles’ cabinet appointments don’t fair much better. We’ve got a DC insider in Kerri Briggs. Orlando Riddick, or ⅓ of the Division Superintendents have previously worked for charter school networks. There are three remaining cabinet members in Chief Operating Officer Wanda Paul, Chief Information Officer Scott Gilhousen, and General Council Catosha Woods. The three new cabinet appointments all have previously worked for charter school networks, and two worked for Miles own charter network Third Future. For someone who has previously said he doesn’t need charter schools, he sure is surrounded by a lot that seem poised to push for it. Miles has also already hired consulting firm Kitamba and nonprofit Good Reason Houston. Both of which have been criticized for being “largely pro-charter (and) pro-using standardized testing as the primary means for determining student success,” by local education activist Ruth Kravetz (co-founder of Community Voices for Public Education). “Had we not started fighting the takeover in 2017, had we not started raising our voices in January, in June (Miles) would have quietly come in and it would have taken a lot longer for people to realize he’s a narcissistic potentate and he has some really crazy, archaic ideas,” said the group’s co-founder, Ruth Kravetz
It’s almost easier to report on the advocates of privatization and deregulation than to quantify what the Texas Tribune called “a steady hymn of condemnation from a chorus of takeover opponents.” According to the Chronicle, his detractors raise concerns about the alarming turnover rates and “an atmosphere of fear and intimidation from the top down.” Houston Education Association President Michelle Williams warned Miles in the Chronicle that he mustn’t “bully” educators as he did at Dallas ISD. Mike Miles is described by the Chronicle as a “military minded” and “combative” leader who “sometimes derailed his own reform attempts by making enemies of district stakeholders.” Similarly, Mike Morath somewhat proudly claims in an article from D Magazine from 2014 that he “has a lot of enemies.” Not the first attributes you want for working in an educational environment. Although both are described as “passionate,” throughout media coverage. Passionate for what, we ask?
President of the Alliance/AFT teachers union in Dallas, Rena Honea detailed the “chaotic” rule under Miles at Dallas ISD, with “ a lot of uncertainty and instability…for employees on the campuses serving the kids.” Multiple Wheatley teachers also told the Chronicle that the instability harms their students.
The performance based salary model that Miles is pushing injects such chaos and instability into the teacher population as well. It’s a model that has largely been adopted across Texas despite being tried in the past by former HISD superintendents Abelardo Saavedra and Terry Grier. Houston Teachers Union President Jackie Anderson has said the program relied too heavily on standardized test scores and pitted teachers against one another, to the detriment of students.
Houston Education Association President Michelle Williams said. “The problems in HISD are systemic and rooted in the historic failure of the governor and the Legislature to provide enough funding, not only for classroom resources but also for the health care and other support services that most HISD students need to have a chance at success.” What the Texas Tribune called “the chorus of condemnation,” also includes widely publicized protests with support from Texas ACLU, the NAACP has called for a federal investigation, and the Chronicle has . The Houston Abolitionist Collective have also organized in opposition.
There is good reason for such opposition. Around the same time real political pushes started to shift the educational climate to vouchers and charter programs, the idea of a state takeover started to gain popularity. I don’t have the time or space to go into the relevance of blatant coincidences, but the general trajectory, again, remains the same. According to a 2023 piece by the Washington Post there were 114 school districts between 1988 and 2016 that were taken over, compared to 139 reported by the Brookings Institute over roughly the same time period. Beginning in Jersey City in 1989, this political tactic, whether well-intended or not, does not lead to increased academic achievement, according to a well-sourced article from the Intercultural Development Research Association from 2020. A study from Rice University in 2023 found the same results.
The Rice study also stated that “takeovers are significantly more likely to occur in districts with higher concentrations of low-income learners and students of color; districts that have a larger charter school sector; and districts in states with a Republican governor as well as states with the same party controlling the executive branch and both chambers of the legislature. In particular, researchers find that districts serving larger concentrations of Black students are more likely to experience a takeover — regardless of academic performance.” This conclusion was also presented by the Chronicle in June of 2023, which claims “each school included in Miles’ plan is either majority Black or majority Hispanic/Latino. The vast majority of student sat each campus are also from low-income families.” The average percentage of economically disadvantaged students – says the Chronicle – is higher than average across HISD. It’s a Tale of Two Cities meets Oliver Twist in the forum of public education (see parts 1 of this series).
With so much contrary evidence from decades of educational policy history, and so much fervent local opposition, not to mention alleged interstate embezzlement through Mike Miles’ brainchild charter network Third Future Schools, how and why does the takeover continue?
Mike Morath was directly appointed to lead the TEA by Greg Abbott. This is our 5% (from part 1) at the State and National Levels. Abbott has supported many policy initiatives that have been criticized as misguided at best and racist at their worst. In a political climate that aims to ban books and libraries, eliminate DEI initiatives, and limit the teaching of history to what amounts to apologist and revisionist renditions. In an article from D Magazine mentioned above, Morath is “still one of the two or three most influential backroom operators in education reform in Dallas. He remains in regular contact with legislators, big-money groups, and education think tanks all over Texas, championing his plan to fix DISD”
From the Abbott brand of GOP, we’ve got a boogeyman in what their party claims to be “liberal indoctrination” and a narrow view of policy enforced by a man claiming to be on a “mission from God” with views on diversity inspired by what D Magazine describes as “passionate – obsessive, really – about helping poor kids learn.” Self-described as a “super nerd” who was “very popular with the cheerleaders” who learned of diversity from joining Alpha Phi Alpha in college, listening to Wu-Tang clan, and being involved in Big Brothers/Sisters of Houston. Experiences he claimed “showed him the urban education struggle from the kids’ perspective.” But, the article concludes, “he remains an entrepreneur executive at heart, which means he wants to fix problems, not have a round-table discussions about them. He is impatient,” and dismissive of democratic processes. There seems to be a theme here, as God sent Sisyphus infinitely up a hill as Icarus crashed behind the horizon.
The GOP presence in HISD paired with it’s national policy platform don’t bode well for students subject to Republican controlled state legislatures or district school boards. And that seems to be all part of the plan: Disrupt, Deplete, Destroy. If all else fails, there is always the path of St. George, Louisiana; segregation reincarnated. It’s all states rights and federalism until the GOP decides inclusive education is the devil.
Not to pile on, but should there be impropriety on the part of Mike Miles, Mike Morath, and/or Greg Abbott, the attorney general, in his own cesspool of legal troubles, doesn’t seem concerned with anything except a drunken escapade in Florida. “Arguably the most vicious & corrupt state in the Union,” is what Hunter S Thompson called it at the turn of the century after Bush pulled the wool over Al Gore’s eyes with the help of the Florida Supreme Court, “so many of its elected officials are so openly For Sale that politics in Florida is more like an auction than a democratic process.” In Icarus they Trust, in Sisyphus’s path they travel, all along the Old South and Gulf Coast.
