Mike Miles: Dueling viewpoints

So, who is the new head at Houston ISD and former leader of Dallas ISD? Someone who takes "my way or the highway" to an extreme? Someone who says his bottom line is kids and reading and nothing had better stand in his way or he can't do his job? Someone well meaning in that way, but at the same time, can't manage people or who is determined to break a few eggs just to break eggs?

The Trib disagrees with Jim Schutze's guest column in the Chronic about the Dallas ISD accomplishments of Mike Miles as he starts at Houston ISD. That said, to be fair, Schutze only focused on when Miles was there; it's not his fault that money for teachers for aggressive reading immersion programs was cut after he left. The Trib also links to a Snooze article but not to anything that Schutze wrote at the Dallas Observer. Nor does it mention the column by four former HISD board trustees sidelined by the new Texas Education Agency board of managers, the four jointly urging Houston parents and the general community to give Miles a chance. Bryan Flores comes off to me as doing little more than a hatchet job. He's young, going by his Trib profile, so maybe it was just bad rather than deliberate. Or maybe it was just deliberate.

The Monthly weighs in with how people in HISD have called Miles, a biracial Black-Japanese, all but a racist. That said, it also notes, which Schutze didn't, that after he left Dallas, he founded a charter school company. The Monthly notes what neither he nor the Trib notes, namely, that, he's swimming uphill against not just school performance but home life, poverty, etc.

Online news site Houston Landing wonder if Miles' attempts to select the best teachers for the reading immersion work will generate cheating due to the attraction of $20K a year or more in extra pay. And, it cites another sidelined board trustee, Kathy Blueford-Daniels, not one of the four above, expressly wondering about that, as well as how well Miles can fight the family and economic background issues these kids face.

Per Houston Press, Miles has promised bilingual programs won't be eliminated, though the reading immersion is English only.

My thoughts? Being in North Texas, I tracked at least the basics of Miles' career at Dallas ISD, as well as tracking the dueling coverage of it by Schutze and the Dallas Snooze, from my location and media vantage point at the time. Houston's going to be a bigger effort yet, and Miles will — even if he's tempered his management style to some degree — butt heads with activist parent groups and above all with teachers' union leadership. Can, and will, these folks moderate themselves as well?

They'll probably learn they have to. If Miles wants to stay beyond 2026, after all, he'll be retained by a state-appointed board of managers, not an elected school board. In other words, he has a degree of insulation that he didn't in Dallas.

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Update, July 28: Miles may be Black-Japanese biracial, and may not be a racist, but closing a number of HISD school libraries and turning them into discipline rooms sends a horrible message; Sly Turner is right to talk about "targeted communities." Even without turning them into "discipline rooms," closing libraries even as the Lege pushes book censorship and many wingnut "community" activists are ready to pile on sends the wrong message — especially if you claim to be about boosting reading.