School Reform in Houston and the World (from "Shoots" on Substack)

Houston Landing, an online daily news publication with a significant following, has published a story today that marks a major turnaround in media coverage of Houston’s massive school reform campaign.

Houston Landing

We can always hope – and it should be the case – that this very new journalistic grasp of the story will prove to be a first step in a radical new awareness of what school reform may mean for the city at large.

Not to mention the nation.

The Houston Landing story reports on a keen awareness of what’s going on in Houston among education experts and watchers across the country. The story quotes experts elsewhere saying that, if the reforms underway in Houston work – and they seem to be so far -- then at some point everybody in public education in America is going to be coming to Houston to look.

The story tells readers something that should have been trumpeted from rooftops in Houston a long time ago: the program of school reform ongoing in the Houston public school system now is the largest, most comprehensive and most intensive effort ever carried out anywhere in America in an urban school district this size.

Sheer size doesn’t make a success. The possibility is always there that it could turn out to be the biggest flop ever.

What’s so striking to me in the Landing story -- the thing so frustratingly missing in Houston media so far – is a simple declarative recognition of the stakes. This is the first man on the moon. This is ten times bigger than the COVID vaccine. Not including World War II, I honestly don’t know if during my own life we’ve fought a war this consequential.

Education – in particular public education, mass education if you want to call it that, education for children whose families are not affluent – lies at the very heart of our greatest challenges as a people. It has everything to do with racial, ethnic and economic division, employment, crime, productivity, health, the good life and the bad.

Houston School Superintendent Mike Miles is telling us that the reforms he is putting in place in the Houston public schools are capable eventually of turning out poor kids, minority kids, disabled kids, every kind of kid equipped to read and do math as well as rich kids.

Think about that.

Can he be dead wrong? Of course he can. But after his first year of effort, Miles looks like he’s right. So far.

If Houston were engaged in putting the first colony on Mars, it would be a sexier story than this, but it would not be as consequential for life on Earth.

The most significant opposition to the Miles reforms has been mounted by the teachers’ unions. They oppose the part of school reform that does away with seniority pay for teachers and ties pay instead to student achievement. I have sort of ragged on about that ad nauseum already in this space.

I do think it’s important to note that the unions have put a lot of money and effort directly into stirring up opposition among parents and kids. Meanwhile, local media in Houston (not helped by The New York Times Houston bureau) consistently have read the anti-reform claque as a spontaneous expression of grassroots sentiment. I happen to think it’s about as grassroots and spontaneous as an embarrassingly bad toupee, but let’s move on.

Missing all during this first year of a multi-year reform program in Houston has been an organized, concerted and enthusiastic opposition to the unions. And that’s a tough one for a lot of liberals like myself. Who wants to be anti-union?

I think the Houston Landing story today takes a big first step toward solving that problem. It does so by implicitly posing the most important question facing Houston today:

What if this does work?

If what Mike Miles is doing in Houston now does work, if he pulls it off, if Houston pulls it off, then all of a sudden Houston is at the center of everything.

That’s worth a good hard try, is it not? Even worth fighting for.