Score One for Mike Miles

Oh, Jim, not you, too? Did Mike Miles wine you and dine you during the Christmas break, or were you delusional from the obvious flu you were spreading around at a public meeting?

The Board of Trustees meeting that you attended was an obvious attempt at circling the wagons to protect their mistake of a hiring choice. His missteps are far more egregious than what was shown in the audit. Mark my words, there will be no improvement in performance this year because of his questionable mandates on how teachers teach. Tell me how someone who was only in the classroom for four years is an expert on education? Tell me again how teachers are the problem. Our classrooms are microcosms of society in general. I've got kids whose parent/s are incarcerated. I've got kids being raised by grandparents. I've got hungry students. I've got students who live with thirteen people crammed into a two bedroom house. I've got kids with lice (not the ever present nits, but the active, big, honking live critters). I've got kids with ADHD and no medicine because mom couldn't make it to the clinic. I've got kids who never, ever, come to class with any supplies. And I'm in elementary!

What I do not have is books. Good, meaty books that engage the reader. I do not have supplies - paper, markers, dry erase markers, or pencils. I do not have chairs that don't pinch the booty because they're about 30 years old and cracked. I do not have a clean room because of the cuts to our janitorial staff, so unless I get in there early to sweep, it doesn't get done.

I'm not making excuses, I could not look my kids in their eyes and not do the best I can for them. Before you look at "reform" measures in the classroom, wouldn't it be a good idea to look at what is being done right and build on those strengths? Why come in and throw out the baby with the bathwater?

"First of all, I don't know what kind of rinky-dink operation allows one board member to gin up an audit of the chief executive."

Well, maybe a school district that was brought to the brink of bankruptcy by the last Broad crowd. Maybe board members who were told Miles was saving $1.5 million when he is already $5 million in the hole. Maybe because transparency is big on everyone's list and Miles lies constantly about everything.

I support an audit at random in this district which is known for corruption and malfeasance. What? Is the budget supposed to be hidden like it was when the Colonel Broad sat and refused to answer board members' requests when she helped blow the budget? Shutze, your lack of logic is astounding. This article is so full of holes, maybe you, instead of veteran teachers, needs a stick of dynamite. 

Jim, I want to be a Dallas Observer reporter. Oh, the one thing you can get is the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report. As required by law, every government branch has to do a CAFR every year. The real money is hidden in the CAFR.

Jim, if you want to go back to REAL reporting, I have a list for you to investigate:

1. Why are teachers ham-stringed by a policy that only allows for 15% failure rate? The result is only extra work for the teacher, since he/she has to now PROVE what all THEY did to *help* Johnny or Maria or Demarcus, when they failed to do homework, failed to come to class, failed to read the assignment, failed to bring a pencil--but by God, they have a cell phone. So, we have to pick the most failing, if you can get that. The rest, we are basically lying about. a gimme grade, fi there ever was one.

2.  Ask when Mile swill get his certification? We have to have it, so where is his? Ask about the new guy form Baltimore, also not certified in his area, except he knows how to blow through money on a credit card.

By the federal guidelines which measure each ninth grade's on-time completion rates, Dallas ISD has an 80% graduation rate. The junior TAKS scores were pass rates of 90%, 87%, 91%, and 97% in reading, math, science, and social studies respectively. These tests are required for graduation. The feds definition of failing schools is taken from tenth grade scores that do no count for graduation and kids know it and don't try very hard.

Dallas schools are not failing and Jim, your generation's high school completion rates as measured by these federal guidelines would have been 50%. Your generation's college attendance is in line with Dallas ISD's. What has changed is the inclusion of large numbers of special education and very limited English proficiency students who must follow the same guidelines as other grads. The critical mass of poverty at many Dallas schools is above 80%.   Stop

Jim, you say that DISD is an organization crying out for "deep painful revolutionary change" and that "veteran teachers are deeply entrenched with their jaws set bitterly against change."  WTF?  Have you been spending your idle days amid the ammonia fumes of your wife's chicken coops? Have you talked to any teachers - veteran or not? No teacher I've met wants to maintain the current status quo in DISD!  They wanted a superintendent who could lead them.  Lead them, not bludgeon them.
 
So what does this "revolutionary change" look like to you?  You do realize that in the last 20 years not one reform movement in a major urban district has succeeded?  That Miles is simply a re-tread of other failed efforts? Did you check that his old Harrison D2 district (much smaller and less impoverished) has shown NO improvement in student achievement in the last 6 years despite churning 30% of the teachers and running 25% of the high school families out of the district?

It's all about lack of resources for the kids who remain in the district after white-, black- and middle-class flight, Jim. That's it.

Reform society and you reform education...fat effing chance. Let's concentrate on what we can do: improve curriculum, provide needed social services, fund our school libraries so every kid has a text book...or readers in PreK through 3rd grade!  Kids have to learn to read before they can read to learn. Incremental positive change.  Clean and safe schools. No more "permanent substitute" teachers. DISD cannot even do THAT!

Teachers are being branded failures because they cannot take a 6th grader who reads at a 3rd grade level to a 7th grade level in one year.  You try it Jim, see how well it works out for you...oh, yeah...your pay, and even your job, will be dependent on whether you can get that kid to pass the 7th grade test.  And by the way, Jim, that kid is usually NOT a product of the DISD education system but a kid who has transferred into the system...and it only takes two or three kids like that to take an entire campus to an unacceptable rating.

What has to change is the way we evaluate students.  Spend the money to use nationally normed tests like the ITBS or ERBs.  Evaluate teachers on how far they move the needle on student achievement for each individual kid based on their incoming and outgoing stanines.  What you'll soon find is a system that encourages collaboration in furthering student achievement rather than remediation.  Do away with grades until high school.  The elite private schools do it.  The kids are told that the tests they take are the way that teachers are evaluated on how well they impart the lesson - and hat is true.  Guess what?  The kids then help their teachers "do better" by asking for clarification and increasing their classroom dialogue.  This, in turn, helps the kids learn to advocate for themselves and to become more self-sufficient.  There is not one whit of difference between a Hockaday math teacher and a DISD math teacher.  The teachers are interchangeable.  But put that Hockaday teacher in one of DISDs high poverty areas and they will have no more success in moving the needle on student achievement than the teacher they replaced.  In fact, I would posit that the kids would do worse since their former teacher would already have a greater understanding of the deficits and needs of the kids and the means to address them. 

Jim, you need to go back to the blackboard and write 100 time, "Teachers are not the problem and currently I am not part of the solution."

Miles marches in with the same arrogant tone he used in Harrison to leave their schools in the same mediocre shape he found them. He is given carte blanche in Dallas to destroy teacher morale when Dallas now has the lowest starting pay of any area district, teachers are required to stay an extra 5 hours a week in needless meetings, Allan King pulled all the money off campuses and now the media decides they know education.

Miles is a narcisistic fraud. He is a tone deaf emperor insulating himself with a bunch of high paid cronies who also are useless and you call teachers resistant to change. If this is the obscene direction this district is taking, teachers need to leave en masse. Leave it to JimS and Belo. Neither knows crap about the state of these classrooms, but apparently they glory in some higher moral ground. Think scores are low now? Just wait until Miles is finished.

At least when Belo bought Wilonsky it was done out in the open. Shame on you Jim.

Jim, we knew you had gone stupid when you wrote the glowing article about SIN. The ONLY people in Dallas who believed she did a good job are the friends, relatives & politcal allies she hired and protected. All the rest of us just tried to stay out of her way. She is an incompetent bully. Her only skill was threats, manipulation and lawsuits.

Here is a simple metric for you to follow concerning the quality of DISD education:

How many teaching positions are still unfilled?

Look at the last budget presentation. Miles and the board are well on their way to eliminating teachers with more than 6 years experience. As long as we keep replacing experience with inexperience, THE STUDENTS LOSE! What happened to "Recruit and retain the best teachers!" If we are recruiting the best teachers, why must we get rid of them when they hit the "5th year plateau?"

Miles is just another ass hired by the ass mongers to keep their friends employed and their pockets full of public cash.

Fortunately, I love teaching, I'm good at it, my students like me and keep coming back. But there aren't very many of us left.

The more I see of the DISD (over 40 years) I am coming away with the impression that it can do NOTHING right.  It embodys dysfunction at all levels.   Nothing short of gutting all levels of management (from the trustees down to the lowest administrator) seems like it would fix the DISD.   

Perhaps Miles should have done his homework on his predecessors.   With that long line of failures of superintendents past (like Dickens Christmas Story) I would not have wanted to touched this "tar baby".

I am not saying that he is competent by the statement above mind you.  It just seems like a bunch of moths drawn to a candle flame in which they get burned

Why did you not even take into consideration the number of jobs he did not "post" but still filled?  His $80K personal assistant that follows him around who only has to have a high school diploma, when degreed professionals do not come near that pay amount (for which he did not interview qualified internal candidates).  None of this seems out of place?  Nationwide hunts for talent that seems to stop in Colorado, Broad or TFA, and some still have the stench of malfeasance about them?

Witch hunt my eye!  The brooms are parked at 3700.

I know right away it was not an official audit by a Auditor.If Ms. Ray is audit manager she need to be fired she did not follow internal audit protocol nor language.The audit used words like charge vs findings,it included testimony and named Allen King .I also knew Ranger did not vote for Miles being hired Nutall called him out second meeting because she misunderstood something he said. I called on President Blackburn to not allow the minority members destroy another Superintendence and its their kids having hardest time in school. Again John Price's hands in everyone's business.

Hey Schutze, let go of the drama for a while and show us why you think Hispanic and black kids are not being taught to read  in Dallas? What are your metrics? We know the state list of bad schools came out last week, but that was based on last year's records, but beyond that, what proof do you have that our kids compared to Fort Worth or Houston or Atlanta or Baltimore are being dragged off to the ovens by veteran teachers? And some preacher man in South Dallas with his wisdom about schools failing communities instead of communities failing schools won't cut it. Having one too many dropouts can put a school on that list or having 3 too many kids fail a Geometry test you were never required to pass to get out of high school can do it. Comparing these "failures" to the Holocaust is way out of line. Your generation had a 50% dropout rate in high school and no one raised an eyebrow.

Gosh, Jim, you stepped in it again. We wondered why Belo had gone all soft during the Christmas break and decided to tie their political fortunes to Miles. But, you?So the traveling circus went around during Christmas break after dumping their most visible mistake-Sprague-and spread the rumor that the opposition to Miles was tied to Satan, err, John Wiley Price. So anyone who opposes Miles based on the overwhelming facts that he is a narcissistic high rolling fraud must be backed by JWP and they must be in favor of a black teacher jobs program.Because, hey, Miles isn't the King of Crony Hiring. I mean, he must have chosen this crook from Baltimore based on his outstanding achievements:http://www.burbankleader.com/topic/bs-md-ci-schools-credit-cards-20120810,0,4947459.story

Get rid of SIN, but haul Miles' crony buddy back in here. Make sense to you Schutze?. They are on a campaign of terrorizing teachers, so Jim, you want to come out of the closet on your Teacher Hating Because They are All Black, then expose yourself, bro.Miles wants to exchange them for new TFA kids who are all white and all ok. Problem is, research indicates that's not a good move. Need to have that nose checked.

I generally agree with you Schutze but there is more to this story than what has been reported. Miles is not the man his propaganda machine portrays him as. The only good to come out of this is that King is now the Internal Auditor. King won't fall for Miles' bullshit. 

You also put far too much stock in the state's accountability system. 

Wow - you fell for the snow job that there was NO malfeasance. How about that we are now gearing up for the pitch to exponentially increase the number of TFA hires because somehow there will be 1,000 teacher shortage.  Hmmm....treat your teachers like cr*p, fail to hire qualified teachers, fail to retain teachers,  and we  reward Charles Glover's former employer with a huge contract.

witch hunt/bad audit..  NOT mutually exclusive.  easily a witch hunt by those unable to recognize malfeasance with a map.  or a Malfeasance hunt by those with too few huevos or too many skeletons to make it stick.

Also, don't feel sorry for old Shirley. She was a bully. She had favorites and misused her authority for years. She skated on things that would have gotten anyone else fired immediately. She had that lawsuit from Gonzalez hanging over everyone's heads. "Say stuff, and I'll sue!" was her mantra.  So, she tried it again, I bet. Only this time, Miles is not having it. He has his own ethics issues. And besides, he just brought in a male version of her from Baltimore. A guy who misused his credit card and spent too much money on renovaitons.

Old Shirley will have a handsome retirement. 35 years, with her last three years averaged for calculations. She will make more in retirement than most teachers make teaching.

I also guess you missed the part where Miles refused to meet with the auditor, or how King resigned, rather than break policy. People are scattering from all over DISD; leaving in droves. They are voting with their feet. Whether it is a friend of JWP or not, education is last on the list of the trustees. When you have one trustee helping to promote charter schools at a pub in Oak Cliff, another buddy-buddy with the people who have had control of the city forever--who cares about test scores or audits?  This district is being imploded. And people are still maing money off of it.

 

You know nothing about school ratings. It is very EASY to make the unacceptable list. Just have too many Hispanics fail Science or too many blacks fail Math, and bingo! Bob's your uncle and you are low-performing.

Or, you can be low-performing because a bunch of Hurricane Katrina kids left your school after not adjusting--and never bothered to tell the old school where--if anywhere--they went. If enough of them are not found in time, they can blow your cohort for dropouts with black students. Actually, for some schools, three cohorts in a row.

If you want to know how screwed it is, look at the schools you mentioned. FIND the reason why they went low-performing. It can change from year to year. 10th graders fail in Math, the next year, all hands on deck for Math, but the other sub-group fails in English.

Overall, you will find that the 10th grade is what fails high schools. That was the year in TAKS--with kids who have been promoted out of 8th grade, EVEN IF they failed the TAKS test and had NO 9th grade test, suddenly find themselves being told to "do their best" on a test that does not affect them AT ALL. It wil not fail them, and it will not graduate them. But Texas uses the ONE test the kids don't give a crap about to report to the Feds.

Look at those 10th grade scores, then go look at them the NEXT YEAR in 11th grade. How did they improve so much, by as much as 15 points? Well, easy. Now they give a shit.

Only time will tell if any of the JWP comments/commands were recorded by feds.  It's amazing that someone could be under investigation and STILL try to have undue influence on people/process that are so very clearly outside his jurisdiction.

JIMSX: this is the only thing you've said about JWP, seemingly for weeks.  What gives?  Any scuttlebutt about what's going to go down and when it will go there?