They are succeeding in having their guy destroy HISD.
I had a meeting with someone who works closely with the HISD board. He said the last board before the takeover was a dysfunctional joke. He said the quality of boards and superintendents had been declining for quite a while. He said the only thing that kept it up was the appointment of Rod Paige who understood HISD. He said two board members pushed Paige to resign from the board so they could elect him superintendent. There was a lot of complaining about the process but it kept HISD out of the abyss for a while. Now HISD is a failed state
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Had a part time gig selling library books to schools the last few years. To say HISD was dysfunctional is a vast understatement. From the Super down to the classrooms, horrendous on every levels.
This is sad because the district has a direct result on the future of the economy and as a UHS feeder. Houston doesnât need to repeat 1970s-80s NYC schools. CUNY still hasnât recovered from having to dumb down its courses to make up for the poor education.
So I donât think anyone could honestly say HISD was in really good shape pre-Miles and be considered an honest broker. It was certainly badly in need of necessary reforms. As V put it HISD was dying a slow death, it had cancer if it was a medical patient analogy. And yes sometimes with cancer the patient needs brutal chemo treatments to survive.
However itâs obvious at this point, that Mikey isnât the rough chemo thatâs harsh but designed to get the patient better. Dr. Hot Wheels gave the cancer patient, HISD in this analogy, AIDS in Mike Miles.
AIDS also works because Miles is a d*ck who prison raw dogged HISDâs butt
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And I donât think Mike Miles is doing anything but accelerating the decline.
Not sure, lots of turnover which may be a good thing. Lots of dead wood.
You donât know that it was a lot of dead wood. Could have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Considering some of the principals let go were previously recognized for excellence. Plus the replacements are mainly uncertified teachers.
30 out of 40 teachers leaving an A rated school is likely not dead wood either, and may make that school hard to achieve an A rating in future.
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Miles isnât the long term solution by any means, but a hatchet man was definitely needed. All departments.
Based on the schools I know, yes, dead wood
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Also, I will point out from the tweet I posted, there were some budgetary questions too. $7Million allocated for library books and they closed the libraries. So what happens/happened to that money?
Went to the 3rd Way ScamâŠI mean charter school he âconsultsâ for
Dudeâs a crook.
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Canât speak to HISD statusâŠbut all this lamenting about mismanagement within public school district administration reminds me a story a friend told me.
She is a very organized and successful administrator in the title company business who volunteered to help her local suburban Houston area school district (while her kids were in attendance there). So she was assigned to help with the bus operations and she did so for the entire school year.
While finding a way to save the district ~$150K in administrative waste, she noticed an older fellow who came in and slept under a desk for several hours each day. When she inquired, she was informed that he was a district principal who just needed another year or two of his pay in order to get his maximum teacherâs retirement benefit. Needless to say, that didnât sit well with her as an unpaid volunteer.
Then when she informed district management that she had found ways to save the bus operations ~$150K over the school year, she was perpexed to hear at the very next meeting that they needed to find a way to spend (or waste) another $150K in the bus operations so that the next yearâs bus operations budget wouldnât be reduced. Once she learned that this school districtâs administration was run like most any other governmental entity she left very frustrated and disgusted.
I am sure there were plenty that were dead wood and needed to go. However, from the reports Iâve seen, I have no confidence that the majority was dead wood. I also have no confidence in the people who are hired as replacements. I see a lot of involved parents upset at changes, I consider those parents to have a much better idea of what is going on in their schools and the effect than anyone else does.
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Yeah no way it was all or even majority âdead wood.â And even if it was itâs only âdead woodâ if you have better replacements otherwise itâs just a hole created. And thereâs no way they have better replacements lined up, maybe crappier, cheaper ones sure.
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The 7 million was allocated before Miles. The money was spent on books, multimedia, furnishings, etc.
I canât remember the exact %, but HISD only had about 30% of their schools staffed by librarians at that time. Money would have been better spent on hiring more librarians and rebuilding the libraries at a slower pace. All of these schools are now sitting on books that become more obsolete year by year, especially in the nonfiction area.
Strongly disagree with Miles and his shutting even more libraries. Iâm not in the business any longer, so doesnât effect me outside of knowing how it hurts the students.
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Wrong on where the money went.
I will say, I know thereâs some really bad teachers out there. Iâve had some (that hopefully retired a long time ago) that really were awful. However, they were a small minority of the teachers I had. Thatâs just my experience and well, I graduated high school a few decades ago.
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HmmmâŠthat reminds of the way a very large and profitable oil company works too. I mean there
are layers of bureaucracy in any large organization staffed with humans. But I learned a similar thing early on in my career, how budgets are done and handled. Never want to return funding you
have fought for and been allocated. Because the department down the hall, or on the other floor, or in the other building, or other city, or other country, would capture your funding.
Now on the other hand, when oil busts would roll around periodically, things would get reset
and cost cutting would result in some dead wood finally going away. Amidst the endless internal reorganizations and renames, etc. And some of that sours it for live wood that becomes disenchanted with the whole larger picture of boom and busts.
Honestly, it appeared to me HISD had turned a corner under the previous admin with schools that previously had multiple failing grades finally showing progress. But state government wanted to
make an example out of HISD and probably doesnât care if it fails. Just more justification for
a desired voucher system. And latest reporting and polling seems to indicate they might now have
enough public support to push it thru. HISD may be toast at this point and not salvagable anymore.
This⊠who are these bright shining star teachers that are going to want to go to HISD now that Miles is done with it? Are they getting a ton of resumes from fbisd, Katy, Aldine, humble isd etc now that all these spots are open?