Mike Miles and Editorial Board: Read the transcript (Opinion)

You can read the lightly edited transcript from the conversation below.

Lisa Falkenberg  
Before we begin, I can just tell you, you know — on behalf of The Board — I want you to know that we want you to succeed. 

Mike Miles 
Thank you. 

Lisa Falkenberg  
You know, we will cover you critically and fairly. But as a Board, we want kids to get an education. We don’t want schools to fail for years on end and you know, we may agree and disagree sometimes with your methods and your decisions, but what’s been happening in this district — some of the things in terms of leadership and in terms of performance — are not acceptable. And they’re not good for Houston. And so, we want what’s best for Houston.

Mike Miles  
Well, we’re on the same page there, so it’ll be fine.

Lisa Falkenberg 
I thought I would start with a softball question and just ask, you: How about that Russia?

Mike Miles 
Flashbacks to when I was in Moscow, and Poland.

Lisa Falkenberg  
I wonder if there’s ever anything in your time there [in Russia], as a diplomat, that comes in handy in this field.

Mike Miles  
So crisis management is one thing. But I think both as a diplomat and as an Army officer, I focused a lot on organizational effectiveness. How good organizations work, especially public organization; so the not-for-profit at the Embassy in Moscow and the State Department, not a for-profit entity. Neither is the military. So the two circles intersect when you think about education and these other organizations. When I think about what has to happen in Houston, I think a lot about organizational effectiveness. I think about systems and a lot of that I borrowed from the State Department or the military.

Lisa Falkenberg 
In the meetings that you’ve had so far, are there any challenges that you weren’t expecting or pleasant surprises? What observations can you share?

Mike Miles  
Most of what I’ve researched over the last three months has been born out in practice once I’ve gotten here or have talked to people. So there’s not been a lot of surprises, but I reserve judgment a little bit because you really don’t know what you don’t know, number one, but one really doesn’t know about education in Houston unless you’re actually in the schools talking to principals talking to teachers and actually observing instruction. Before I went to Dallas — when I was a candidate — I came down during my district’s Spring Break. Dallas was still in session. This is in March 2012. I acted like I was a parent — because I was — and my son was entering the sixth grade at the time. So I came down and I said look, “I’m thinking of relocating to Dallas, and I’m wanting to see how the school system is.” So I got to go to four schools. I just walked around unescorted in three of them and one of them I was escorted after I signed in. So I got a good feel for the quality of instruction and some of the things that needed to be done. They were four kind-of-average schools. They weren’t magnet schools or anything like that. I wasn’t able to do that here. All that to say, you know, I’ll have a better feel for what needs to happen once I am able to talk to some teachers, principals and students.

Lisa Falkenberg  
Do you know why the intrigue?

Mike Miles  
You mean for HISD? I don’t know all the reasons, but I think probably the biggest one was trying to select the Board of Managers in secret. That process. I guess they wanted to make sure it was pretty tightlipped. I don’t think it had a lot to do with the superintendent. I think it actually had to do with the Board of Managers. But I don’t know for sure, because the two processes were pretty separate.

Leah Binkovitz  
Well on that note, it’s your name that we’ve been hearing for a while. I guess it wasn’t that much of a secret. Tell us about how you got here. What was the process? When did they reach out to you? You said three months of study. Tell us more.

Mike Miles  
I’ve not been named yet. Hopefully that’ll happen tomorrow morning. But I became a candidate shortly after the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of the commissioner. So he called me after that, asked if I would apply and consider being an HISD superintendent. So I said “yes.” Then I started thinking more about Houston at that time and continued to be a serious candidate. I don’t know all the other people they talked to. I’m not privy to that. But I knew I was a frontrunner — I don’t know if that is the right word — but I was a serious candidate after a couple months. 

Lisa Falkenberg  
Why do you think he reached out to you?

Mike Miles 
I think a couple of things: One, I was a superintendent in Dallas when he was a board member, so he could see up close and personal what I did and he was involved in many of those things. Not to talk too much about Mike Morath, but he was a board member in Dallas who really got into the nitty gritty details of the key actions we were doing. He wasn’t getting in the way, he just wanted to know. Like, the evaluation system. We had several conversations — he and I — about that before we implemented it. So I think he was the one who knew most about the actual work and not “the noise.” So I think that’s one. Two: The noise. He knows that I understand noise. By that I mean this: For every change, for every initiative, there’s going to be people who are worried about it, anxious about it and fearful about it. That’s just normal human behavior. That’s okay. They’re going to express that anxiety and fear in different ways. Sometimes it’s just yelling and screaming. But one has to understand — a leader has to understand — that there’s a reason for that. So, forget the yelling and screaming, I try to hear, what is it that they’re actually trying to say? What’s the kernel of truth? What is their truth in all that noise? Then, act upon that or at least understand it. Then I can let the rest just fall off my back. I did that in Dallas, because in Dallas, we did a lot of change. I think that’s the third reason. The third reason is that we did a number of really controversial, but necessary, reforms in Dallas that had great effect on student achievement and student outcomes. Dallas is a much stronger district. Again, partly because of what my team and I did. So I think those are the three big buckets of why he chose me.

Leah Binkovitz  
And why did you want the job?

Mike Miles  
If you look at my last six years and my blogs and what I’ve been telling my colleagues is: We need a new education system in this country. It’s not just HISD. The achievement gap in America is still about 25 to 30 points for Hispanic students and about 30 to 35 points for Black students in the country. We’re worse than that in HISD. But in the country, we’ve not closed that gap. We closed the Black/white achievement gap in the nation two points in 20 years and then we lost those two points during COVID. Two points in 20 years. So that’s a testament to the failure of our education system, when we can’t educate all kids well and where the proficiency rate continues to hover around the 25th percentile. For example, for fourth grade readers in Houston on the NAEP 2022, 11 percent of our kids are reading at the proficient or above level. Eleven. I’m trying not to be too critical of the people because the people respond to a system. And it is the system that is broken. Look first there and then we can criticize people. Anybody working in a failed system can be forgiven a little bit. We spent the last six years in Third Future Schools coming up with a different education system.

What are the principles of an education system that we would have that can prepare kids for the year 2035? We’ve perfected that over the last six years to where we’re a turnaround model. Eleven schools we have now, nine of them are turnaround, meaning we were invited in to take over a chronically existing school or a chronically failing school. And we’ve been able to do that to great effect in just one year. Sam Houston Elementary School in Midland and Ector College Prep in Odessa. So, I’ve been putting into place this wholescale systemic reform. That’s a long way to answer your question, but it’s the “why.” Wholescale systemic reform is the only way we’re going to change the American education system. Wholescale reform. Not piecemeal. Not incremental, which is what we’d like to do. Which is why we’ve as education professionals — have not been successful. So Houston has an opportunity. With the right Board of Managers, with the right team and leadership, and the strength of the community, and the right supports, to really turn around an urban district. And to do it in a way that supports wholescale systemic reform as we move forward.

We can’t do the whole district at one time. It’s like building a plane while you’re flying it. But what you can do is do a subset of schools, reform those completely, turn them around completely, and then expand that subset — those proof points — to the larger district. So the vision for HISD, for me, is to prepare kids for the year 2035 by reforming, wholescale, 150 of the 273 schools. I’m allowing that some schools are doing well. The system is working for them. Even though almost every system here can be improved. There’s no need for certain schools to have wholescale reform. But for chronically failing schools, the schools that are D and F and low-C schools, we can turn those around.

Lisa Falkenberg 
Can you define this wholescale reform?

Mike Miles  
Just stop me if it gets too geeky or too long-winded.

Lisa Falkenberg  
It might help if it is just in terms of Houston. How would you define it? How could you apply it here specifically?

Mike Miles
Yeah. So let me just define wholescale reform first and then I can apply it to Houston. The challenge in our profession is that we do things piecemeal. If we understand that it’s a system — and a system is interrelated parts — you quickly see that changing one piece of that system that’s interrelated usually has a minimal effect on the entire system. Or, if this part of the system changes, every other part is impacted — and either has to change, or the system pulls this one part back to its former position.

Using another analogy, it’s like Blockbuster and Netflix in 1998. Reed Hastings goes to Blockbuster and says, “look, I want to be a subsidiary arm because of this online thing is what we’re working on. I want it to be that portion of your business going forward.” Blockbuster said “no,” because they said, “we were already innovating. We’re making changes.” DVDs had just come out in 1997. So we’re going to make wholescale reform, their version of wholescale reform around DVDs. But what Blockbuster didn’t understand is that those are piecemeal. That’s not really changing the underlying system of delivery for movies. Twelve years later, Blockbuster is out of business and we know the story about Netflix.

Education is the same way. We tried to do piecemeal pieces. We do one thing at a time. We do curriculum change. We do professional development change. We do some modest evaluation change. We do some modest online training, after-school tutoring. These are piecemeal reforms to a system that’s already broken. It’s not going to change the outcomes. HISD will not close the achievement gap  — or prepare kids for the year 2035 — doing what they’ve always done. It’s not a program that’s going to help. There’s no way to do it. I don’t even need to be on the ground to say that. I know enough about this system. I know enough about the data and about urban districts to say that. We need wholescale reform.

Wholescale reform means the underlying principles have to change, things like how we staff buildings. Instead of staffing the normal way, what we have to do is have a staffing model that honors the changes to the workforce, which is more work-life balance, more mobility, higher pay, but also ensures that every kid has 185 student-teacher contact days of high-quality instruction, which means that you have to have teacher-apprentices. It also means you have to have learning coaches and people ready to step into the classroom. It also means that you have lesson plans already prepared for the teacher and have the copies made. You have to have the PowerPoint, the answer key, all ready to go. That’s a fundamentally different way of staffing. 

Lisa Gray  
So would those things will be done centrally, preparing the lessons, rather than having the teachers do them? 

Mike Miles  
Yes, they will be in the Houston case. We won’t do it the wholescale (way) because you can’t do it with all 273 schools. We’ll do a subset. And in that subset of schools the answer is yes. Teachers will have the option of not using those but in my experience, they love it. We will also ensure that we have a really strong curriculum, the ones that cite to science of reading, etc. so that kids get the best curricular that’s tied to these lesson plans. That’s one aspect.

Another aspect is the evaluation-compensation system. The compensation will be really tied to a hospital model in how the teachers have to operate. What that means is: Think about a surgeon. Surgeons don’t prepare the room. Surgeons don’t prep the materials, the equipment. They don’t clean up afterwards. They are just hired to do what they’re really good at and what costs a lot of money. The surgery. Teachers need to be high-quality instructors — effective instructors. That’s what they should get paid for and they should get paid way more than they get paid right now.

So for the 30 schools, for example, we’re going to pay an average salary of $85,000 base plus a $10,000 signing bonus this first year they’ve worked at a high-priority school. That’s a $95,000 average salary. And we’re going to move the entire district that way over time. I can’t do it the first year, but I can do 30 schools that way and move those schools to where the teachers are truly treated like professionals. The tradeoff is they’re going to have to work hard between 7:45 and 4:15. Six hours in front of kids, be really great instructors and be held accountable for results. 

Leah Binkovitz  
Can you go over that one more time? You’re saying 30 of the highest-named schools, teachers there will get an $85,000 base and a $10,000 signing bonus. Did I understand that right? For just 30 schools.

Mike Miles 
Correct.

Leah Binkovitz
But compensation elsewhere wouldn’t be?

Mike Miles  
The compensation elsewhere would be sort of be what it is today. 

Lisa Gray  
With an eye toward moving there? 

Mike Miles 
Yes, an eye towards moving there. We should have, today, an average salary of $80,000. Not only that, we should have a starting salary of about $73,000-$74,000. That’s what we should have today. I have to look at the finances a little bit more closely and restructure things, but using the same dollars we have today — if we had a more effective way of using our resources — we could be paying an average salary of $80,000 today. At Third Future Schools, for example, we pay $15,000 more than the average in certain districts, and we’re in seven or eight different cities now. And we’re able to do that because of a lean central office and the way the model works.

Leah Binkovitz  
Is another way that you’re able to do that, that you’re also using these apprentices and these learning coaches to fill some of that time? I assume they’re getting paid less. How does that work?

Mike Miles 
Yeah, thanks for asking. Learning coaches and teacher apprentices will be paid less. Once they move into a classroom, they get paid that rate. It’s a hospital model, right? I can show you graphs and charts. But it’s a hospital model, right? It’s differentiated pay. Just like in a hospital, a surgeon gets more than an anesthesiologist, who gets more than a general practitioner etc. But the larger point is higher salaries. Because that’s what professionals should get over time. The days of the salary schedule have to be gone. We can’t do that overnight. That’s why the salary schedule will be there for most of the schools next year.

Lisa Gray 
So that’s the salary schedule where you’re bumped up automatically, year after year?

Mike Miles 
Yes you get a step, and you get paid for years of college credit.

Lisa Falkenberg 
So how does merit play into this? You go into a starting salary, you go into one of these 30 schools and then the results are really great.

Mike Miles  
Yes, and. This first year we’re going to do principal eval. We can’t do teacher pay-for-performance or teacher evaluation without principals first because it’s unfair to teachers if they have a principal who doesn’t know what they’re doing. The second year, we’re going to start the teacher evaluation and that’ll be a pay-for-performance model. So, eventually, we’ll have two models. One is the hospital model. The hospital model is a differentiated-compensation scale. So sixth grade reading teachers make more than sixth grade math teachers. But the average is still pretty high. All the other schools beyond these — what I call “the new education system schools,” the high-priority schools — 30 this year, then we expand to maybe 50 or 60 the following year — all the other schools will be on a pay-for-performance model. So the evaluation does count. Even in the hospital model and even though the salaries are high, that $85,000, it’s an incentive-pay system. So, depending on your evaluation, you’ll get an additional percentage of your base salary as a bonus. Then every two years, your base salary goes up tied to the average of the two years bonus that you receive. I know it’s complicated without going through all the details, but that’s that model pay for performance. 

Lisa Falkenberg  
So does this mean you’re going to pay for this with central office positions or how are you going to pay for it?

Mike Miles 
Yeah. So part of it is central office positions, but part of it is just a structure that’s done in a different way. For example, if you look at several school — and I’ve looked at their positions in the school, right? And this has happened at Third Future Schools too. We just have so many fewer employees in a school. It’s the teacher. It’s the apprentices, the principal and the APs. Yet, we still have to have special education teachers, and, in some cases, English-language development interventionists. But apart from that, there’s not a lot of other people running around. There’s absolutely no consultants.

Lisa Gray  
The security staff? You’ve got the janitors, the cafeteria ladies?

Mike Miles  
Yeah, those are centralized. I’ll give you one specific example. When we took over Ector College Prep in Odessa. The year before, they had eight office managers doing different things. We have today, three and a half. So take five times $60,000, if you count benefits, or even $50,000, which is kind of normal pay. You’re talking about $250,000 right there that you can put into salaries to teachers. And it’s things like that — where people have all these additional people running around, coaching teachers, consultants coaching teachers, everybody coaching teachers except the principal. The sad part is sometimes those office managers end up teaching classes because of the shortage. And that’s why we have learning coaches and teacher apprentices. Third Future Schools have not had one vacancy all year. It’s not that people don’t get sick or go on maternity leave. It’s because teacher apprentices step right in. Remember the paradigm is high-quality instruction 185 days, meaning every day. We don’t have 185 days yet, but we’re going to grow the number of days over time.

Lisa Gray 
So then you don’t need subs?

Mike Miles 
No subs.

Lisa Falkenberg 
What is your feeling on — it feels like squishy stuff sometimes but it is really important — the librarians, the nurses, counselors and wraparound services?

Mike Miles  
A couple of things there. The question always comes up: What is the outcome you’re looking for? And have you identified it? One of our schools, when we applied for a school, a turnaround school, they criticized our application because we didn’t have any SEL coordinators in the school. And I had just asked, well, what does SEL mean? What’s the outcome you’re looking for? And they couldn’t answer it. It’s like OK, so you have three SEL coordinators in this one school and you want us to replicate that — but you don’t know what it is that you are replicating.

Lisa Falkenberg  
They didn’t know what the acronym meant?

Mike Miles 
No, they didn’t know what the outcome was. 

Lisa Falkenberg  
What does the acronym mean?

Mike Miles 
Social emotional learning. I forget sometimes, throwing out these terms. Anyway, social emotional learning. Which is important, but the question is, OK, how do you how do you deliver that? How do you get that? So you have three SEL coordinators, but I don’t have three SEL coordinators. So I’m putting that money into good-quality teachers. So you know, what’s the benefit-cost ratio? I can’t tell you because you don’t know what your outcome is. After-school tutoring. We don’t do after-school tutoring because tutoring is not the best use of the money. The best use of money is to make sure you have great first instruction, reading instruction. And for tutoring, we’ve spent $1.6 billion dollars in this country and we’ve got no bang for our buck.

Yes, we can all point to one school, one group of kids, that did well for $1.6 billion. So I’m going to answer your question now. Conceptually though, the answer is, you’ve got to know what your outcomes are first. So, wraparound services. The outcomes for wraparound services have to be identified. It can’t just be that more kids are being fed although that that is a metric you could point to. But you have fewer suicide threats, for example. Or you have students getting better at being more present in class, attending better, because they receive services. Or kids are not acting out violently because they have had counseling with somebody providing these services. How are you going to measure it? Measure it, but don’t just say you know, we need this or that.

So, Houston has one bright spot. They’ve grown their wraparound services. HISD has grown their wraparound services over the last couple years. I think the manner in which they’ve done it, I have to find out more, but it always bothers me when an outside group is doing the job that we’re supposed to be doing. So I’ll find out more about that but let me just state that I think it’s been improving. I have to find out more about that and see if we can either expand that, replicate it, but provide those wraparound services for kids. One thing that I’m going to do on top of that is create six sunrise centers — that’s what I’m calling them. These are co-located centers with places in the district that are already doing wraparound services. We’re going to co-locate if we can or at least collaborate. I’m going to try to provide $2 million to each of these centers without providing a gift of public funds. But we will do it in a proper, legal way. It’s also a message to the community that we want to work with you for wraparound services. Wraparound services can’t just be a school thing. We’ll hand them the more severe social emotional learning cases, or mental health cases, that are not already handled in the schools with special education, their counselors and social workers. So it’s in addition to.

Lisa Falkenberg 
Is the plan though to take some resources for wraparound services that are campus-based away?

Mike Miles 
I’m going to look at what outcome there is. So we’re not just going to keep throwing things at schools without any outcome. But there’s no need to take too much away unless it’s just not working. We can add to that with these sunrise centers. And like I said, I think the program is having some success. So I have to investigate that.

Lisa Falkenberg 
I’m a big fan of CIS (Communities in Schools) and a lot of what they do is not just, you know, somebody’s threatening to blow up the school we need to get counseling. These guys are tired of this story but I’m going to tell it. There was this one set of twins who never came to school on the same day. Somebody from C.I.S. finally goes to the house and figures out they have one pair of shoes: Provide two pairs, they’re there. Few problems in education are that simply solved, right? But it took the effort to go figure out, is there a solution here? Anyway, I’m a little worried about if we’re going to just look at outcomes. It’s not always the most severe outcome. Sometimes it’s actually preventing a situation where the kid gets to the point where he’s making a threat or he’s really in a crisis situation.

Mike Miles  
We waste a lot of money, time and effort when we don’t measure it and when we don’t hold anybody accountable for it. We have to stop saying, my kids feel better or my kids are happy readers. I don’t know what that means.

Leah Binkovitz  
What I thought was interesting was that part of the teacher evaluation program in Dallas did include surveys from students and that feedback really mattered how they felt about their teacher. And so I’m just curious now to hear you say well, I don’t know what to do with a happy reader. Doesn’t that experience of the students still matter qualitatively?

Mike Miles  
The questions on the student surveys are taken from surveys that are research-based. The way that the questions are phrased would give you a good indication of how the kids are feeling about their education. What survey results more likely identify effective teaching and effective teachers? I didn’t create those surveys, but they’re around. Something like happy readers, that’s not a really good survey question, right? If you want to assess reading, don’t take a survey, do an assessment. But when you want to assess how well you engage, the teacher engages you, then you can do two things: you can look at the quality of instruction but you can also do a survey on that.

Leah Binkovitz  
I guess in terms of what wraparound helps support — and this is to Lisa’s point — you can use research-informed surveys on belonging, feelings of safety and those are things that are not about assessing their ability to read but that still matter to schools.

Mike Miles  
Yeah, no question. That’s why we have climate surveys as part of what is going on. And we have to ask the right questions about wraparound. But again, I just think there’s a lot of waste and ineffectiveness when there’s no outcome that can be measured and no accountability.

Lisa Gray  
What are the main things you want to measure? What are the things that you’ll be looking at as the most important metrics?

Mike Miles  
The real question is, “what is the charge for the district, right?” And “what is it that we’re trying to do?” Number one, there’s three specific charges that TEA has given me. One is — and I think you all have reported on it — that you can’t have a school with multiple years D or F. That’s number one. Number two is special education and all the things that are related to that. Because we’re not in compliance. And then number three is an improved governance system. So those are three specific charges. But my charge is bigger than that. And that is, we have to prepare all kids for the year 2035, world and workplace. That means, yes, we have to teach them how to read, write and do math. Yes, and we need to help them with year 2035 competencies: learning how to learn, problem solving, critical thinking, information literacy, communications and how to deal with AI. That’s what we need to teach kids also.

So we have two things when it comes to achievement. One is the traditional achievement subject but the other, year 2035 competencies. If that’s what we want, then what I’ll be looking for and what I will be measuring is the quality of instruction that every schoolchild has. The quality of instruction of special education teachers. I’ll be looking at achievement data, progress monitoring achievement data, and also achievement data related to at least some metrics related to year 2035 competencies. So for example, in Third Future Schools, we have art of thinking class. Art of thinking includes information literacy, problem solving and critical thinking. We have an assessment, third grade through eighth grade, twice a year for that. So we don’t want to say that kids can think critically without measuring it in some way. So we’ll be looking at those metrics soon.

Lisa Gray 
Is that a home-brewed assessment?

Mike Miles  
Yeah.

Lisa Gray  
OK.

Mike Miles 
Hopefully someday it won’t be, the more and more schools get involved.

Lisa Falkenberg 
Is it similar to the global assessment? I can’t remember the name right now.

Raj Mankad  
PISA.

Mike Miles 
No, PISA is still usually testing reading, writing, math and science. But this is homegrown because it’s critical thinking. It’s information literacy. It’s communications and problem solving. I’m also going to be looking at career tech. In Dallas we increased the number of industry-approved certifications, I don’t know, fivefold or sixfold. We need to do that here. We need to do it better than what we did in Dallas. We need to look closely at the types of careers that kids can be exposed to, not just the Microsoft Word certification thing you guys have reported on. So those are some of the metrics I’ll be looking closely at.

Lisa Falkenberg  
How will you be evaluating principals in the first year? What’s a good principal?

Mike Miles 
There’ll be four areas in this first year. Two of those areas have a couple of components. Thirty-five percent is based on student achievement, student achievement as determined by DIBELS and the NWEA or STAAR assessment results. Thirty percent is based on the quality of instruction. Quality instruction as measured by independent spot observations of teacher instruction.

Leah Binkovitz  
And those are done by?

Mike Miles 
An independent group at the feeder pattern level. Fifteen percent is based on the action plan. They all have to put an action plan together with clear indicators of success. Measurable. Those get evaluated at the end of the year. And 20 percent is based, this year, on special education. Half of that is compliance and half of that is students with special needs achievement growth, as measured by NWEA map assessments. So the other half is components. How well the IEPs are written. How well the IEPs are progress monitored and how well they identify students at the beginning, the child find. So that’s, that’s part of it. You can see that now the principals are directly involved in special education components and achievement instead of probably now, none. No involvement. And that’s one of the reasons why you don’t get much improvement in special education because nobody’s monitoring, nobody’s held accountable for it.

Lisa Falkenberg 
Do you have any concern about over-identification?

Mike Miles 
Yes, I do. I don’t think that’s a problem right now in Houston.

Lisa Falkenberg 
No, it’s not. But I just wonder if that will be seen as: if a child is struggling, you get them designated and then the pressure is off to a certain degree.

Mike Miles  
Well, it won’t be because they’ll be evaluated. I’d say the pressure will be back on. But your point is still well-taken. In our profession, depending on where you are, there are schools that have 25 percent special ed population, and it’s probably not disability like the traditional disability, it’s probably because they haven’t been taught well to read. The rigor is low, so year after year after year of not getting good quality instruction, now that kid is “slow,” because they cannot read well or they can’t do math at all because they haven’t been taught. I think that happens a lot. I think of our special ed instruction as a profession. I’ll know when I get to Houston and actually see the instruction. But as a profession, our special education instruction is very poor, not rigorous, usually dumbed down. And kids don’t reach their potential if they’re identified as SPED.

Lisa Falkenberg  
One of the weird benefits of Houston having more autonomy at a campus-level, “Wild West” it’s sometimes called, is that we haven’t become a district that bought this whole anti-phonics thing hook, line and sinker. Phonics is still being taught in a lot of the campuses. I wonder though, in your assessment, what kind of job Houston does at teaching, reading and in the curriculum that we choose to do that through? 

Mike Miles 
I need a little bit more time to get more information, but it seems like half the schools are using science of reading curriculum and half are not. I was told there’s like 50-some different curricula for ELA, because there’s 273 schools and they’re all autonomous. There’s not 50-some good curricula out there for science of reading. So that means some people are not. I’ve also been told that even in the priority schools where they’ve been offered a good curriculum, that there are boxes of curricula sitting in closets of rooms. So the real key is not just identifying the right curriculum, it’s also implementation. Without any accountability, there’s no effective implementation. You have early adopters and you have some real go-getters and people who really want to do the right thing. But then it’s just human nature. Other priorities take priority if there’s no accountability. That’s why you can do all the professional development you want. If the teachers are not monitored and coached and supported regularly, the curriculum doesn’t get the instruction, the professional development, and the curriculum does not get implemented.

Lisa Falkenberg  
I can talk to you all day about reading. I find it so fascinating, the debates that we’re having. But asking some questions that the people who read this newspaper would have: some are very concerned that you’re going to come here and just turn this into a big charter school system. What would be your response to that?

Mike Miles 
No, I’m not going to do that. Hopefully you don’t tire my always going back to first principles or concepts, but the principle here is this: It’s not the type of school. It’s the type of system that matters. So there are good charter schools and bad charter schools. You know, I’ve been in the charter world now for six or seven years. There are good traditional public schools and there are bad traditional public schools, or ineffective ones. Same with private schools, it doesn’t matter. The question is, what is the system that they’re operating in?

I’ll give you a good example. The salary schedule was the defunct model, the defunct system of compensation always. It may have worked for an industrial age maybe. But it doesn’t work today. You will never be able to get the high salaries I’m talking about on a salary schedule. It also doesn’t tie to the effectiveness of the organization. You cannot maximize your effectiveness if what you value is disconnected from how you pay people. That is just like a general principle of effective organization. You should compensate people for what you value. So identify what you value and pay them for it. But no, in our profession, we don’t do that. Even charter schools don’t do that. Why? Charter schools don’t have to do it, but they do it anyway. And it’s defunct. It’s a type of system. It’s not that the type of school that matters. So to answer your question: We don’t need to do that. I’m not saying we won’t ever do that. But I have the charts that prove that schools that we have changed this system so that they’re effective and kids are getting what they need. I don’t need charter schools to do that.

Lisa Falkenberg  
When Mike Morath came it seemed like he had a very ambitious and holistic idea. He’s not the one implementing it. Do you see yourself starting in day one, a feeder pattern? I mean, kindergarten, pre-K. That’s going to take a long time to see change. If it is holistic, OK. But then how are you going to affect the older kids? 

Lisa Gray 
The kids who aren’t reading well, by let’s say, fourth grade, struggling, and they’re in 11th, are you going to see a change? 

Mike Miles  
Yeah. So we’re going to do 30 priority schools, right? We’re going to do wholescale reforms. Part of that is how we conduct reading. That’s one small part. But if a kid is taught to read through science of reading, they can learn to read. There’s clear research that you can learn to read at any age. So, as you probably heard the podcast “Sold a Story” and you probably know about the 50- or 53-year-old who learned to read at that age and was just so delighted that the rest of his life, he could read. So, should we give up on our high school kids? No. What we need to do is make sure that the kids who need it are afforded the opportunity, to even then, learn how to read through a science of reading process: decoding and language comprehension. That’s what our kids need. We will use an online program to try to catch them up. The challenge when you’re that old is that it can be embarrassing to start back like you’re 7 years old. So there are programs out there that are tied to science of reading that are individualized, where a kid can work on his own or use headsets or things like that to really help them read. But I think we do kids a big disservice if we give up on them. So we’ve got to figure out a way to do that.

Lisa Falkenberg 
So then, holistically, from the early grades and in these 30 schools, you would just emphasize a phonics-based curriculum and then obviously identify kids who do have issues, who do have dyslexia, getting them the services they need?

Mike Miles  
Yes. And the reason why we’re going to think about feeder patterns is because it is built on each other and the kids go from one school to the next. Let’s take Wheatley for example, right. There’s a big discussion about Wheatley. Even if we were to really support Wheatley and then turn it around, who’s talking about McReynolds Middle School? I mean, what’s the data from McReynolds Middle School, which feeds into Wheatley? They have achievement gaps of around 50-some points. They had proficiency around 20. Would McReynolds eighth graders then go to Wheatley the next year? And then what? We’re back at square one? There has to be a system. It can’t just be these one-offs. You can’t just improve one school. You have to do the feeder pattern. So it’s things like that that we need to be doing. So that long-term we get the gains, not just address this fire and then hit this fire and that one.

Lisa Falkenberg 
This is our first time meeting. You seem very confident. You seem like you’ve got this figured out. Is that how you are inside? Or is there any part of you thinking, this is a really big experiment and kids’ lives are on the line?

Mike Miles  
So this is who I am — and I don’t have any illusions, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been through the fire. And even in my other careers, I’ve been through several crises and so I don’t ever panic. I’m solutions-and-outcomes oriented. So I don’t have any illusions about how hard this is. But this is not an experiment. This this is not an exploration. This is a journey, but I know where the destination is. And it comes from years of experience. Again, I’m not all that. I know that it takes a lot of different skills, but I have a track record of doing it, turning around schools, understanding what makes great principals, what makes great teachers and applying that and getting the outcomes. Two months ago the National Bureau of Economic Research put out two papers. You can look it up. One on the achievement results based on pay-for-performance in Dallas. The other on ACE (Accelerated Campus Excellence), moving the high-performing teachers with the lowest-performing kids, which I created. Commit had already done a lot of research on it. And we already knew that it worked well. And so it gives me a little bit more confidence because there’s clear outcomes for the programs we put in place.

Lisa Falkenberg 
How do you make sure what you do in Houston is sustained? It must be frustrating to look at Dallas and say, well, we had something there and they’re not funding it to the same level.

Lisa Gray 
Especially since, you know, the clock is ticking. You’re here and that’s a great basis.

Mike Miles
These are good questions. In Dallas, they did hold on to ACE and the pay-for-performance. But you’re also right, it’s not exactly how I put it in. They did water down a bit. But Dallas is now one of the highest performing districts in Texas. And Dallas is performing better than Houston. When it wasn’t, it was far behind when I got there. So now we’ve got to reverse that. We’re going to beat Dallas. That’s a metric that hopefully you’ll appreciate.

Leah Binkovitz  
On the latest rating, wasn’t Houston 88? But you’re saying, well, they’re not rated?

Mike Miles 
Yes, exactly. You have to look at all the achievement data and the trend as well. Anyway, it does concern me. It’s been a topic of conversation among several people. Let’s say we implement everything we implemented well and get success. What’s to prevent an elected board from coming in and turning it around? And, honestly, I have to answer: Not much, at this point. But maybe in the next five years, we can do something that actually will work. So I’ve got to go back to the concept again. Here’s the underlying principle of what we’re talking about: what we’re talking about is a governance system — an American public education system — that doesn’t work well. It’s a two-legged stool. You know, it has power and influence in two legs. It has the elected board, and it has a superintendent. That’s it. That’s a two-legged system of power and influence. And that doesn’t work anywhere, in all of history. So what’s to prevent this from not working, is a great question because it doesn’t work. It’s systemic. So even that has to be changed systemically.

So what we’ve arrived at Third Future Schools, and maybe something to think about for Houston, three years from now, four years from now – is a three-legged stool. By the way, right now — because of this intervention — it is a three-legged stool. You have a board, you have a superintendent, and you have TEA that can keep the board in check. Third Future Schools created a checks and balances governance system: a board, a CEO, and a council. And the council has two roles only. One role is to remove a board member who goes rogue or isn’t in the best interest of the network. That’s a lot of power in the council. Four out of five members have to vote to do this. It’s never happened, but that’s in the bylaws. The second thing they can do is spend up to five percent of the budget on innovation as they see it so that the new status quo doesn’t become status quo. Because at some point, every system creates a model which works well. And then at some point, it is standard, right? It needs to innovate.

Anyway, is it possible that the Legislature, after four years of success — let’s say, with a good working relationship between Board of Managers, CEO and the TEA as a monitor of the board — that the Legislature passes a rule that says if you’ve been taken over by the state, that for the next eight years you’d have a council or TEA or a combination of groups that oversees the board to make sure that things keep going? Only eight years, but still, that’s better. And then maybe things do have a way of becoming culture.

Lisa Falkenberg  
So would the board have any real power here? Or is it going to be just you running things and these people are handpicked to kind of go along with what you want?

Mike Miles  
The board will have real power. But the difference is, and this is my hope. I didn’t pick them and I only just met them. The difference is they will allow me to do the operations. They will do their job, which is policy and overall strategy, and legal things, like they have to approve the budget. But they will allow me to do the operations as long as I’m not doing anything crazy or illegal.

Lisa Falkenberg  
Why didn’t democracy work here? You know, it feels odd to support, we do want you to do well, but at the same time it feels odd to support a non-democratic solution when this is an independent school district and Texas is about local governance.

Mike Miles 
I think that’s a larger philosophical question, because I’m not sure democracy didn’t work. The Legislature is part of democracy and they’re making the rules and I don’t know enough about how they came to their decision to really say democracy didn’t work. Just as an American citizen, I would say this: We need to change how we operate schools. Part of that is governance. Part of that is on us — superintendents and principals and instructional leaders — to change how we do business. This is part of that change, from a governance perspective. I will focus on the change from an operational perspective.

Lisa Falkenberg 
Do you feel sometimes if you do well here, that you can really change the world? That people would finally wake up and say, it’s never been done on that scale before?

Mike Miles
I don’t know if I think in terms like that, but I do think in terms of helping the American public education system realize that it needs to change their current system. Houston could have a big impact in that way. Third Future Schools is joining us on a small scale. They’re going to grow. They’re operating using different principles, but they’re are a small-scale organization, whereas Houston is one of the larger urban districts. If we do this well and we actually help a whole bunch of kids get outcomes — and help teachers get better pay and be seen more as professionals — I think we could do a lot of good.

Lisa Falkenberg
How are you going to get the trust of this community? Is that a priority for you and, if so, how are you going to go about it?

Mike Miles  
Yes, it is a priority. I think the sense-making has to start, number one. And then two, the onus is on me to persuade people that we’re doing right by kids. I may have already said it, but whenever there’s a change — and people know there’s going to be a change — regardless of whether it’s me or anybody else, right? This is an intervention. It’s designed for change, you know, with personnel. Whenever there’s a change, there’s going to be fear in the absence of information, and unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot of information about what’s going to happen. OK. TEA knew what the takeover — or the intervention — would be, but they didn’t know what the Board of Managers and I would actually do. So, in the absence of information, there’s even more fear, right? Because people go to their worst fears in the absence of information. So that’s what I’m facing, right? It’s all understandable. There’s no information or very little information. It’s change. So, lots of fear.

The onus is on me to mitigate fear and bring people to their best hopes. There’s only two reactions — usually, right? — with change: Either go to your best hopes, or you perseverate on your worst fears. So I’m going to try to bring people to their best hopes and I’ve got to do that by talking to people, by meeting them, by listening — but also understanding and persuading, sense-making.

Leah Binkovitz  
Do you think that you did that well in Dallas and did you learn any lessons from that experience?

Mike Miles 
Listen and persuade? Yeah. I think I did. I could have done more. I could have with certain parties. Let the noise just go. And again, what I learned was that noise is natural. And noise is not ill-intended. There’s a truth somebody has, and they’re not having that truth addressed. Either with information or with action. So my job is to try to hear that. What is actually being said? It doesn’t mean that you have to change your decisions all the time, because it’s not a true democracy. In other words, not every parent gets a vote on what we’re going to do and then we do what the majority wants. That doesn’t work either. So I think that’s what I have to do. And I have to do it in short order. Because the other challenge we have is, we can’t lose this year. It’s not like a regular superintendency right away. We’re not going to do a 90-day listening tour and then after six months and six more months, put out a strategic plan. That’s a year gone. Our kids don’t have that kind of time. That’s what this intervention doesn’t have: this sort of time. I think that the elected board wants to come back as soon as possible. And I don’t work that way anyway.

Lisa Falkenberg  
How long do you think you’ll be here? 

Lisa Gray 
How will you know when you’re done?

Mike Miles  
Because we’re going to have clear metrics around it.

Lisa Gray  
What’s the endpoint?

Mike Miles 
It’s the specific metrics are not just the TEA buckets, which those are clear. They’re much more detailed than that. I can give them to you at some point. We’ll know when we’re done that way, but really I think it’ll be five or six years. I think we have to make progress this very first year. We’ve got to get rid of this myth that it takes five or six for one school to turn around. We’ve been able to do it at Third Future Schools in one year. So we can’t do 273 schools at one time, but we can make good progress on 30 schools and then grow that. I think five or six years is probably what it will take. So, I’m here for that.

Lisa Gray  
So, this year, you’re evaluating the principals at those schools? Or will you be like bringing a new slate in?

Mike Miles 
No, no. The people with contracts, we will honor that. It doesn’t feel right, we haven’t even evaluated them and we haven’t even trained them, or supported them. It would be wrong, I think, to get rid of principals this summer. I didn’t do that in Dallas either but we will evaluate during the year and then we will make some determinations. 

Lisa Gray 
But you believe that change will be visible in this first year without having changed any of the personnel?

Mike Miles  
Having said that, I don’t want to misspeak. We’re not going to fire any principal during the course of this summer. However, in 30 priority schools, we’re going to place some principals there, and the other principals will find jobs at the same pay as they have today.

Lisa Falkenberg 
So, in the coming school year, you don’t foresee firing any principals?

Mike Miles  
No, I can’t. I don’t. I mean, unless there’s some something egregious going on.

Lisa Gray  
So, maybe shifting into a different job?

Leah Binkovitz 
Yeah, so like a principal job but equal pay to what they have.

Mike Miles 
Yes, for the principals.

Lisa Falkenberg 
So for the structure: Are you planning on going back to a more regional structure? Sort of like what we had under Terry Grier, but it was more, there were different regions. And the person leading that region had a lot of power. Now, in the past few several years, it has shifted back to being more central.

Mike Miles 
Conceptually, first, it’s a system right now that has locked in the achievement gap and the way resources are allocated. So the chance of re-prioritizing resources is really hard here right now and that’s because it’s an autonomous system without any accountability. So when you have an autonomous system without any accountability, and you have elected board members who favor different schools, it’s hard to re-prioritize resources in a significant way. And it’s also hard to hold anybody accountable. So conceptually, we need to raise accountability. We have to earn the autonomy. That doesn’t mean we have to get rid of autonomy, but we certainly have to move to a system where we have earned autonomy rather than full autonomy. And that means a certain amount of centralization, especially for the failing schools.

And on curriculum, you’ve mentioned a more centralized approach. Yes, and. For the schools that earn autonomy, they can have the curriculum they want to have. You can’t earn full autonomy. There’s four levels of autonomy, and some halfway points. Can’t run full autonomy if you don’t have a science of reading curriculum. You can have less than that. But this year, because we’re going to be evaluating the systems of every school this year, the schools that are A, B, and high C schools (ones over 75 percent) and the magnet schools, most of those will be able to have autonomy that they enjoy today. There are a couple of things we’re going to do system-wide like the principal eval, right? But a teacher won’t feel much different except that they’ll be observed a little bit more. That’s about it. For special ed, we’re going to have to do something system-wide. Except that for most schools, it will seem like just way more support. So that’s how we do this in phases rather than trying to do everything at once. 

Lisa Falkenberg  
Do you see yourself returning to more of a regional governance?

Mike Miles 
Yeah. So like area superintendents? Yes. The answer we have, what I call it, is division superintendents — so four divisions.

Lisa Falkenberg  
This district is hemorrhaging students, as you know. That’s got to be scary. They are not all from low-performing schools. Some are from high-performing schools. What is your message for families at schools that are doing well? Should they anticipate a reallocation of resources?

Mike Miles  
Yeah, thanks for asking. No, we’re not going to be doing a lot of reallocation of resources from schools. New monies, yeah — and savings, yes. So as we downsize central office, for example, we’re going to use that money to place into those priority schools. So that way the magnet schools and the high schools that are doing well, they’ll generally have the same amount of money.

One thing that we’re going to look hard at — and you’re the first to hear this — is that we’re going to look at the budget prior to the end of June, which by law, we have to pass, and I know that the House administration had three big areas where they wanted the board to approve. One was like the small-school subsidy, a high school subsidy and then one called “hold harmless on enrollment.” It’s too late in the year to change too much. So the only thing we probably will change is we’re going to stop the enrollment waiver, the hold harmless on enrollment. In other words, for three years the schools have enjoyed the same enrollment they had three years ago. It’s time for them to have gotten used to that. That’s the story every year: they’ve got to get used to it. It’s time. Especially since we have some budget issues, financial issues, coming up. Instead of waiting another year just for that, they don’t have the kids. If you had 500 kids, you’re getting paid for 500 kids. You have 450 kids, when are we going to stop that?

Lisa Falkenberg
Does that mean school closures?

Mike Miles 
Not this year. It’s, again, too early for that. Because it’s June already. I don’t want to disrupt communities that are already planning on this school being open. So not this year. But down the road, most likely.

Lisa Falkenberg  
What does “year” mean? Do you mean school year or calendar year? 

Mike Miles  
School year. Not this coming school year. I took over a school mid-year. That was crazy. I would never do that again. So no, we’re not closing schools mid-June.

Lisa Falkenberg
So I’m trying to make sure I understand. So the effect of a hold-harmless is that you’re not being penalized, basically financially, for losing students. So if you’re taking that away, then they will be penalized, they’ll have less money. How are they going to function if you’re keeping the lights on?

Leah Binkovitz  
Won’t that be many of the high-priority schools?

Mike Miles  
We’ll make sure we have an adequate and good education in every school even if it only has 137 kids. So we’ll do that. But what I’m talking about is if you only have 400 kids or 450 kids, you need fewer teachers. And there are lots of schools running around with more teachers than they need because they’d been held harmless on enrollment. Or you need one less office manager or you need one less program or one less consultant. And they’re not doing the discipline of that. So yeah, it’s not going to be happy news. But it’s not going to be that dramatic. They have the people they have to operate their schools. They just have more people than are needed and there’s no accountability for that because you’re getting free money. So you have to be disciplined about it. Right now, have any of those programs or any of those extra people gotten us a better result? No. So let’s enforce some discipline. Let’s save some money. It’s either that or two years from now — not this year but the next year — I have to do twice as many cuts. And now what do I have to do?

Lisa Falkenberg 
What is your view of community support? There are superintendents that really think it takes a village. They go and recruit. And Houston has a lot of philanthropists and a lot of great programs, the Houston Endowment. Then there are some who say, you know, this is for us to do within our organization because we have more control that way and quality is better to monitor. What do you think about that? Are you going to go apply for grants at the Houston Endowment? Are you going to try to get community support since funding is not exactly flowing in for the state?

Mike Miles  
I think there is always a role for philanthropy, but conceptually, first Houston ISD has to be able to run an effective district with the money it is getting from the state and taxes. It’s like a charter network. It’s good, get extra money, then we can do extra things for kids. The core thing, we can’t rely on philanthropy if it dries up. Having said that, that’s the concept. I’ll always take extra money that helps do other things. For example, at Third Future Schools, we will send eighth graders out of country. Last year they went to Costa Rica. Seventh graders will go to Washington D.C. That money comes from philanthropy. If we don’t get it, it won’t be great for kids but at least it won’t hurt instruction. Let’s use philanthropy for extra things and do some things that consultancies are good at, like analyzing best transportation routes, right? We should be able to do that. But sometimes there are experts out there. They cost a little bit more money. We can use philanthropic dollars to do some of that.   

Lisa Falkenberg 
So you don’t foresee yourself cutting back on transportation services for the magnet system?  

Mike Miles  
Right now, we’re not changing anything transportation-wise because I haven’t been able to study it. And again, it’s too short a runway. School starts soon. We have transportation in summer school and nutrition services. But I’ve read some of your stories and having a kid on a bus for two hours doesn’t make any sense. I’m sorry. It’s not cost-effective. It’s not good for the kid. So if we had to change that aspect, we will. But I need way more information before I can say when — or even if — we’ve got to change that.  

Lisa Falkenberg 
Generally, do you see any really great things happening here in Houston ISD that you’d like to preserve or that you want people to know that you value? I toured HSPVA a couple of weeks ago and it’s like, this is amazing! It bothers me it coexists in the same place as you know, Wheatley or McReynolds. So, we love those things, we celebrate them, but we have to have more of a balance of opportunity. I wonder what you think about that?  

Mike Miles  
I love the fact that there are some really good schools here. Part of the autonomy has been a blessing too, right? Because communities should have the school that they want. If they want to focus on the arts, then that’s a good thing. And you have a number of that. So, are there a number of good things you can point to? Yeah. There’s a number of really good schools. I think the highest performing elementary school in the country is here. So those are good things and we should try to preserve that. But your second part is also true. It’s a tale of two districts right now. There are some really good schools and then there’s an overwhelming number of kids who are not getting the education they need. And that is worrisome to me. And I have a charge to change that. The challenge will be preserving this while making sure we improve all the other schools. That’s a challenge and I’m committed to try to seek a way to do that. What I’m not going to do, though, is lock in the achievement gap. By the way, the data suggests from NAEP that our white students are well behind the white students in the nation. That’s not good in an environment that’s getting more and more competitive. So all that means is we can’t ignore our good schools. We also have to look at how we can make them improve even more.  

Lisa Falkenberg 
What is the secret sauce for overcoming poverty? Many people won’t even discuss educational reform until they talk about poverty. Well, there’s poverty and it’s a huge challenge, and we know this. It seems like you’ve figured out a way to overcome it.  

Mike Miles  
I haven’t. But I think the secret sauce is a good education. Call me old-fashioned, but I have my own life story but also the stories of my kids in Third Future Schools, my students. We serve underserved kids. Well-meaning people often want to dumb it down and cut slack on poverty. Real quick: I grew up one of eight kids. Poor in Colorado Springs. My dad was in the Army. My mom, Japanese. My dad’s Black. My mom didn’t speak any English. My dad was in Korea and Vietnam. And we were poor. And poverty means different things to different people. But for me, it meant you know, you get often just one meal a day and that meal was oatmeal. And sometimes you get two meals a day and that means two bowls of oatmeal. That’s how poor we were. I had speech problems. I couldn’t speak well. I couldn’t pronounce my words and I got lucky. Because instead of saying, this poor kid shouldn’t miss his recess and he’s come from a poor family, two teachers took me by the hand during phonics class, and during one recess every day I went to them and I got phonemic awareness and pronunciation of diphthongs. I didn’t know it at that time. Maybe they didn’t even know. I got science of reading training as a kid. But the bigger point is they didn’t say, “oh, he’s he’s from a poor family. You know, cut him some slack. Why are you pushing him? His mom doesn’t speak English, what did you expect?” They didn’t do that. And I overcame poverty because of my teachers.

My dad used to say, being born in a garage doesn’t make you a car. And I didn’t understand what he meant at the time, but I understand now. You can escape your conditions, your surroundings. You can change your stars. I am still a believer that education is the number one thing we can do for groups of kids, not individual kids, but for groups of kids to change their trajectory. So I haven’t figured out poverty but I have figured out that we as a society sometimes, well-intentioned, hold kids back. And we don’t push them enough. And we got to do it in gentle ways right now. But, but we do need to push them. 

Lisa Falkenberg  
But the biggest challenge is, you can have the most wonderful, skilled teacher in the world, but she only has the child during the day. During the rest they’re at home. Maybe there’s no one there to make sure they do their homework. Maybe they’re going to bed at midnight and they’re sleeping all day. Maybe they don’t have enough to eat. You still have to overcome that for a lot of these children.   

Mike Miles  
There’s no question that it does take a village. So what we need to do, or continue to do, is for example, these 30 schools open their doors at 6:30 and close at 6:00, right? Because then you handle a lot of latchkey kids, but you also make it easier for parents to get to work. Because you can drop them off at 6:30 and they have that safe place to be, in a place where they’re going to be cared for. We have to also ensure that parents are doing their part. There’s a big discussion about attendance in our profession right now. I think somewhere in Virginia, they are going to hold superintendents accountable for attendance rates. And I understand that, to a certain extent, that we have a role to play. But I also want to tell parents, you know, you have one job with your kid in the morning and that’s get your kid to school. And that’s on you. And a kid who is absent time and time again. You know, yes, we need to do our part and call home, send around a person. Do child protective services. There will be what we can do, but in the end of the day, I cannot drag a kid to school when that kid is absent 50 days because the parent allows it to be so. So what does that have to do with poverty? It’s not directly related but it’s related to our own responsibilities. My mom didn’t speak English. She had seven other kids. She took me and she made sure I got to school every day. Even with one bowl of oatmeal, I still went. And it was the most important thing to this poor family to get their kid to school so I could learn.

Lisa Falkenberg 
Are you talking about some kind of criminal accountability for parents?  

Mike Miles 
I’m not saying that. I’m saying that we have a responsibility in the school to educate kids well. We need to make sure that we take care of them. We need to feed them. We need to open schools early. We need to feed them dinner if we have to, but at the same time, let’s not treat kids as broken just because they’re poor. They’re not broken. They’re poor. They need a meal, but they can still learn and let’s not dumb it down so that kids can’t reach their potential. I don’t know where I would be if someone had dumbed it down and said “you know what? He’s one of eight kids. He’s a poor, Black kid, so ya know, leave him alone.” That’s not what I needed. I needed people who are skilled at teaching. And they taught me how to speak, and as a result, I’ve been able to go to West Point, Columbia, Berkeley, some of the best colleges in the nation and do the things that I’ve been able to do.

Leah Binkovitz  
I have a lot of follow-up questions for that. One small one: So you talked about teachers needing time to teach and that should be their focus. So who’s manning the children when schools open early and stay open late. Is that new positions?

Mike Miles 
Yeah. So in the way it’s working right now is that the teachers have one duty, and that is morning or after-school duty because they have to monitor the kids. So it’s 45 minutes in the morning or 45 minutes in the afternoon, for one teacher, one time a week. That’s what the duty schedule is. There are no other duties for the new education system schools.

Leah Binkovitz  
And then I was really intrigued by the example. You mentioned superintendents being evaluated based on attendance. What outcomes should superintendents evaluated on? You have all these programs for principals and teachers. What would a program for a superintendent look like?

Mike Miles  
Achievement results. Quality of instruction. The same thing that the principals are evaluated on, in a slightly different way and also some other metrics. So, if we can’t get achievement results, you should fire me. OK. That’s what I should be evaluated on mostly. There are other things. I have to have a vision. I have to move the district towards that vision. I have to articulate that responsibly. I have to make sure that we have community support for that vision. So I have other metrics too. But in the end of the day, we have some clear metrics for principals and division superintendents, and we need the superintendent to be just as accountable as they are around it. So yeah, accountability.

Lisa Falkenberg  
You keep dropping these little kernels. All these things you’re going to do. Is there anything you haven’t told us that’s rather big or surprising?

Mike Miles
We have 11 priority work areas. So I’ve talked about most of them. One thing we haven’t talked about is the security of our schools. That’s one of our primary work areas. There’s a TEA audit that all schools had to go through. We need to do another facilities audit based on security. And then we need to prioritize those needs and do the tier one priority facility needs this year. I’m not going to be able to do all at one time and some of the facilities need that much work. 

Lisa Falkenberg
What kinds of things? Is this just for security or for facilities in general? 

Mike Miles 
For facilities in general. But for security, for example, we need one point of entry to the extent that we can. We need one point of entry and, to the degree that we can, we need to have two vestibules, both of which are locked and buzzed in. We need better cameras in our facilities. We need some places where we need to close off the entrance with a better door system where it’ll buzz an alarm. Those sorts of things are things we really need to do for all of our schools. If parents don’t feel safe about the school, it’s going to cause more absences.

Raj Mankad
So, in the 30 schools, are they all in one feeder pattern? Are they sprinkled around? Is there a list you can share?

Mike Miles
I can’t share at this point. We’re going to use the feeder pattern concept plus some other schools.

Raj Mankad
When we asked about librarians you kind of stepped back to talk about principals and addressed some other aspects of the question. But surely there’s an outcome, is there some sort of outcome that librarians produce? In those 30 schools will they still have librarians?

Mike Miles
In those 30 schools they will probably not have librarians. 

Lisa Falkenberg
Why is that?  

Mike Miles  
Because we’re looking at the outcomes that we want for those 30 schools and I don’t know what outcome. 

Lisa Gray  
You’d rather have a teacher.   

Mike Miles  
Yeah, I’d rather have a high-quality teacher getting paid a lot, than have a librarian doing what, checking out books?  

Leah Binkovitz  
Oh, they do so much work at my daughter’s school. I mean, they’re with them once a week doing all kinds of education.  

Mike Miles  
So they’re acting like teachers.

Lisa Falkenberg  
Yeah, they’re doing their job, right? They’ve read the book. They can shepherd the kids toward the right books. They know the kids. They can inspire kids to read.

Mike Miles 
A teacher can do that, too.

Lisa Falkenberg  
And you think he or she’s got the time? You’re going to make sure they have the time?

Lisa Gray  
So they’ll have more planning period time and things like that?

Mike Miles  
They’ll have their lessons made for them. So they’ll have still planning periods.

Lisa Falkenberg  
And so just to clarify on that one. You said they’ll have it there. They can use it, but if they choose to use their own lesson they’re able to do that? Because some people will scream. Do you intend to change the formula? The per-pupil funding that HISD funds education?

Mike Miles  
As long as it’s tied to the TEKS, the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills. That’s fine. But trust me, I’ve been down this road with my own schools. Ninety-five to 98 percent of all teachers are going to use the materials given to them, because they’re good. They’re clear. It’s already planned out. The answer keys are there. What’s not to like about it? You know, even the really strong teachers know that they’re being paid to instruct well, not to find curriculum. And so they’re gonna use it. Yes. Not at first. I would bet that after seeing what we can do for the priority schools, and the salaries that can happen, if you change how you staff and how you do business. The principals are going to want the formula changed. The other thing that’s happening right now, and I’ll tell you, even though you know I need to tell the principals. The central office is taking too much money out of the per-pupil operating revenue and giving it to the rest of the schools. Principals are operating with less money than they should have.

Lisa Falkenberg  
So what are they doing with it? 

Mike Miles  
The central office is expanding while the number of kids is declining. Was it your story today? 27,000-28,000 kids lost over the last six years? Meanwhile, I don’t think you had this in there, but the central office number of people and expenditures have gone up. There are 793 people in that chief academic office. That’s a lot of people.

Lisa Falkenberg
How many of those positions do you think you’ll eliminate?

Mike Miles 
I don’t know for sure, because I’ve got to talk to the department chairs who are there right now and I have to figure out the number of vacancies. But the answer probably is going to be a couple of hundred this summer. But again, I would need footnotes on that because I have to talk to people. 

Lisa Falkenberg  
What do you want teachers, parents, children who are filled with anxiety right now to know about you and about what you plan to do with this district?

Mike Miles
So the first thing is: I’m reliable. I’m a good listener. And I’m extremely funny. [Editorial board members laugh.] That’s a line out of The Terminator. Can you imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger delivering that line?

Lisa Falkenberg
Is that your way of saying you’re not reliable?

Mike Miles  
What I want to say is, you’re going to hear a lot of movie references over time. Because movies help me make sense of things and capture the sentiment of the moment. That’s all about that. But to answer your question more seriously, what do they need to know about me? I’m very focused on helping kids. I’m a public servant. You can tell from my background this way. I have plenty of opportunities to do other things. I chose public service. I’ve chosen underserved kids my whole education career and that’s my mission. So kids of Houston: That’s what I want to do. I want to serve them and I want to really help them get the best education possible. That’s number one.

Number two: I really like teachers. I respect them. I revere them, you don’t get that from all the noise and stuff. But in the end of the day, I want them to have high salaries and I want them to have good professional development. I want them to succeed. I want them to [feel] good about helping kids. I don’t want them to get outcomes for kids because that’s what makes teachers happy, when they’re succeeding with kids. So, for teachers: I really respect what they have to do. I’ve been a teacher. I already told you some of my favorite people in all the world have been my teachers. Story for another day will be some of the other teachers that have helped me. 

Lisa Falkenberg  
What do you want the people filled with anxiety right to know about you? All they know is you’ve been sent by a Republican governor who’s also trying to pass vouchers and you know, in other ways undermine the public education system. I’m not asking you to comment on that. But this is a Democratic city that’s having a lot of local control eroded in our elections and such. OK. So you’re the guy that Abbott and Morath are sending. They’re going to have certain impressions of you. I wonder what you want them to know that you think is not getting across?

Mike Miles  
I’m just an educator. I’m not a politician. I’m going to do what makes sense for the kids of Houston ISD. I have a Board of Managers that I have to work with and that I want to work with. There’s nobody else I’m accountable for. I’m accountable for the kids. To the kids of Houston, number one. My boss is the Board of Managers. That’s it. There’s nobody else around. I will take input from a team. I will work closely with the leadership team. I will get input from teachers and principals, but we’re going to do things that make sense for the kids of HISD. Everything else is really not my area.

Leah Binkovitz 
We’ve had interventions before with high-priority schools, things like that. Why haven’t they worked?

Mike Miles  
It hasn’t worked because of implementation and because it’s not wholescale. That’s why. So implementation for anything, even in a bad system or in a traditional status quo system, is really important. If it’s not monitored, and supported and coached on the field, you don’t get good implementation. So you can say these are priority schools. You can say these are new teachers or reconstituted schools, and then nothing happens, because there’s no implementation.

Leah Binkovitz  
And then the other question was, not only what happens after you leave, but I know that sometimes when in Dallas, it was the case that schools would improve and then the extra resources sort of dry up.

Mike Miles  
That was never in the concept paper to be done like that. As you can probably guess, I write concept papers for every single initiative and I did that here. It has to make sense conceptually and systemically. It was not supposed to be that way. They should not have done that. And that was like predictable. If you just take away your good teachers or don’t give them any incentives so they leave to another school then, of course, you’re not gonna have the same outcome.

Lisa Falkenberg 
Do you think paying more will just lead to higher quality?

Mike Miles  
Yes. And no. The yes part is highly effective teachers are also motivated by salary. And so if we pay more, we advertise, we’re gonna get a stronger pool. But the pay itself is not enough, right? It has to be working in the system with others who want to do some challenging things. You have to have the right culture and mindset and grit. And that is what you also have to hire for. So we’re not just going to pay people or just take anybody who applies. We’ll pay people well, but we’re going to interview well, and get the people who have the right mindset and grit and also past record of achievement.

Lisa Falkenberg 
The best teachers: What do they have that others don’t?

Mike Miles 
They have good mindset, culture, grit, and they can instruct like champions.

Lisa Falkenberg  
I was at the Hoover Institute recently and one person I was sitting at the table with said, you don’t even have to like kids to be a great teacher. And I was arguing with him about it. And he said, you don’t dislike them, but you don’t have to be like, “Oh! I love children” to be a great teacher. 

Mike Miles 
I agree with that. I mean, if you don’t like kids, I don’t think you can survive. They can. And you shouldn’t be around them. It will be revealed. In fact, at Third Future Schools, we say all the time, you know, you have to love our kids. You have to want to teach our kids, our underserved kids. I don’t think you have to be the gushy-hugger kind of thing. I’m an Army Ranger. First got into education, I was like, “what the heck? These nurturers and all that!” That was a long time ago.

Lisa Falkenberg
Because they know. They can smell it. I want to make sure I understand. Mike Morath is the person you report to?

Mike Miles  
No. I report to the Board of Managers. 

Lisa Gray 
And the Board reports to him?  

Mike Miles  
Well, the Board doesn’t report. But, he has some oversight. But from my understanding there’s no reporting requirement. There’s nothing like that. And I’m going to do what I do. I’m the superintendent. I know what my responsibilities are.

Lisa Falkenberg  
But they can’t fire you, can they? 

Mike Miles 
Yes, they can. I have a contract with the Board. Not with Mike Morath. 

Lisa Falkenberg  
Not with TEA?   

Mike Miles  
Not with TEA. Don’t get me wrong, I respect the commissioner. He, of all the commissioners and all the people, knows the most about education that I can tell. He also knows a lot of what I’ve done to great detail and he has given me advice over the years on education things. I hope he doesn’t mind this story, but he called me once a year ago or two years ago and said, can I just talk to you for an hour about curriculum because I need to geek out? He used that phrase. I respect him a lot, but I write the plans. It’s my plan. My team’s plan. It’s the Board that going to revise it, tweak it, whatever. But it’s us that’s doing it. He’s not going to be doing that.

Lisa Falkenberg
Have you been assured that the governor will not be interfering? What do you anticipate the governor’s role will be? 

Mike Miles 
I have had no conversations about the governor with Mike Morath. Not the governor. The governor does this thing. I’m going to do my thing. I won’t do anything illegal. So I will follow whatever the Legislature does, but I’ve got enough work to do. I’ve had no conversations. I’ve got nothing to do with the governor. 

Lisa Falkenberg  
Well, we are excited that you’re here and we’ll be watching, with bated breath, to see what happens. This is great. Just the fact that we care about it. And it’s all so fascinating.

Mike Miles 
And your questions are fascinating.

Originally transcribed by https://otter.ai