The problem with the Mike Miles mini-scandals at HISD

A: I’ve never been too good at that. B: I was dying of curiosity. I wanted to see if Miles would be greeted the same way in Houston he was in Dallas 10 years ago when he was our reform school superintendent. I was especially curious to see if the scandalettes would reappear.

A bit of back story. The program of reform that Miles brings to Houston is based on a system of merit pay for teachers, sometimes called pay-for-performance. If a teacher demonstrates effectiveness on a number of assessments including student achievement, the teacher gets bumped up to a higher salary.

In this country, public school teachers have almost always been paid on a basis of straight seniority — more time served, more money. The teachers unions, supported by some respected researchers and intellectuals, have strongly opposed merit pay since it was first championed by President George W. Bush and then later when it was promoted again by President Barack Obama.

The unions say it doesn’t work and it’s demeaning. Proponents say it does work and it helps recruit better teachers. It’s a fair debate.

My own observation in Dallas, which I admit was personal and anecdotal, was that the unions never wanted to go in front of the cameras and take on merit pay frontally. I’m not sure why. Instead, they attacked Miles personally with a barrage of planted stories that never stuck. I called them the scandalettes.

The scandalettes were naughty little news stories that popped up like summer rainstorms and then disappeared as quickly. Before you could find out how one scandalette ended, a new one popped up.

Indeed, the scandalettes have come to Houston. For example, Miles recently put on a massive district-wide event at the NRG convention center to kick off the new school year. He invited all of the district’s 11,000 teachers and a good many of the additional 12,000 staff.

The Houston Chronicle’s coverage of the event ran under a headline, “’Walmart on Black Friday’: Teachers fear for safety as overcrowded HISD conference turns chaotic.”

That headline made my pulse jump. The reference is to an event in 2008 when a Walmart employee was trampled to death by shoppers. 

Hmm, nobody dead. I kept reading. Hmm, nobody trampled. Kept reading. Hmm and hmm again, nobody even knocked down, although it does sound as if at least one person was significantly frightened by crowding in a hallway. Apparently there was a “shortage of chairs” forcing some “educators to sit on the floor during Superintendent Mike Miles’ keynote address.”

Walmart on Black Friday? Really? Because somebody had to sit on the floor? C’mon. I found this same story reproduced almost word for word in lots of other Houston media, sometimes directly quoting the union reps.

I was still scanning the next day for what I hoped would be the corrective stories stating that nobody was injured at the event and that, even though somebody (wonder who) called the fire marshal, the marshal found no infraction. Instead, I found the next scandalette:

Oh, my double goodness. A high school drama student who took part in a skit with Miles during the event told reporters afterward they felt duped because they “didn’t realize that the performance was intended to justify Miles’ sweeping reform agenda.”

Of course, as a parent, I would have been inclined to give the student a refrigerator sticker just for knowing there was such a thing as a sweeping reform agenda. I couldn’t help noting that Houston Federation of Teachers President Jackie Anderson was quoted in the same story denouncing the skit as a “colossal flop.”  

This stuff would almost be funny if it were cost-free. But the scandalette stories eat up oxygen, ink and air time at the expense of truly important stories.

For example, in all the attention given to people sitting on the floor and the drama student dramatically unhappy with her drama, I saw little mention (did I need a magnifying glass?) of what happened at the Aug. 10 meeting of the school district’s new board of management.

The board voted to approve what Miles is calling the biggest pay-for-performance teacher compensation system ever adopted anywhere in the United States.

Big urban school systems have been experimenting with merit pay for more than a decade, with mixed results. Not long after Miles was named to take over HISD, Matthew Stone and Caitlynn Peetz at Education Week took a comprehensive look at the history of past performance pay experiments.

Their examination found that, in most of the places where merit pay systems have failed or come up short, those systems were partial, piecemeal, voluntary or short-term for the life of a grant. In Houston, Miles is saying boldly, not this one. Not this time. This is it.

The Miles reforms in Houston are the straight deal, no-hole cards; a compulsory, comprehensive merit pay policy for the first time in a major American school district, with no back doors or easy outs and — notably — no excuses either way. And the Houston school system board of management just greenlighted it.

I say that’s a story. It’s big news no matter which way it goes. Either way, Houston makes national history — good, bad or ugly. Instead, I’m reading about people sitting on the floor and the unhappy drama kid.

It’s not an accident. This is exactly what I witnessed here in Dallas ten years ago. With experience as my guide, I can assure you that my writing about it will have absolutely no effect. You will see lots more scandalettes in the months ahead. I hope you will look between them for the news.

Jim Schutze, a long-time Dallas journalist, is author of six books, including The Accommodation. In his Substack email newsletter, Shoots, he’s covering Mike Miles and HISD. And yes, he understands how little anyone from Houston wants to hear from anyone in Dallas.