Houston Supt. Mike Miles on Urban School District Reform

The Learning Curve Mike Miles

[00:00:00] Helen Baxendale: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Learning Curve. I’m Helen Baxendale, your guest co-host today. And I’m joined by Shaka Mitchell. Shaka. Nice to have you with us. Hey, Helen.

[00:00:33] Shaka Mitchell: It’s great to be here.

[00:00:34] Helen Baxendale: Shaka, will you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself? I know you’ve been a guest host once or twice before, but just for anyone who’s not had the privileges, your company before, could you tell us where you’re based and what you work on?

[00:00:45] Shaka Mitchell: Sure thing. So I am a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children. We are the nation’s voice for school choice, and I’m based in Nashville, Tennessee. And we really just spend every day thinking about how we can make sure all kids have meaningful access to the educational fit that meets their needs. That’s what we’re about.

[00:01:06] Helen Baxendale: Thanks, Shaka. It’s great to be with you. Let’s start, as we customarily do with our review of the, uh, stories of the week, and I came across one by a guy called Joseph Ti, who I believe is a, I think he’s a city of New York. Public policy professor, but it looks like he’s got a, a forthcoming book tracking the, uh, the history of charter schools and school choice, and is a little bit despondent, particularly about the support for the charter school movement, which he sees as kind of fracturing both on the left and on the right.

[00:01:41] Which I think as advocates for school choice broadly probably concerns us both. But you know, I’d be interested in your thoughts on this for those interested in the both the story and the book. The story I’m mentioning appears in education Next and starts off with an interesting kind of recounting of how the Democratic.

[00:01:59] Coalition and support for charter schooling has fractured over the years. And you know, the resurgence of sort of union dominance in the Democratic coalition is probably the leading reason for that. Interesting kind of race and class dynamics there where, you know, poorer democratic voters and black and brown democratic voters still tend to favor charter schools at a much higher rate.

[00:02:20] And then on the right we have the surge in. Private school choice policy vouchers and ESAs and so on, of which you are a major proponent chakka. That seems to have kind of taken, taken a certain amount of momentum away from charter school support. So interesting story I think from what I could tell.

[00:02:40] Pretty fair appraisal of what’s going on. But yeah, with love your take on that chakka and then also your hear about your story of the week.

[00:02:48] Shaka Mitchell: Well, as you mentioned, we spend a lot of time at a SC thinking about private choice programs, but we are also very supportive of public charter schools. I myself spent time at two charter management organizations and helped open a number of charter schools here in Nashville where I live.

[00:03:05] So, you know, I’ve definitely got a place in my heart, I would say for whatever choices are working. I think Viti seems to outline the issues really well. There is a lot more, I would say, dissension maybe among even supporters of school choice as to how charters should be approached and should there be more oversight, less oversight.

[00:03:27] Is the Democratic party being completely co-opted by the national teachers unions? These are very important questions and really will affect hundreds of thousands of kids across the country. I guess millions of kids now are enrolled in charter, so mm-hmm. I think we’ve gotta keep an eye on this.

[00:03:44] Helen Baxendale: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:03:46] What story were you looking at this week, Shaka?

[00:03:48] Shaka Mitchell: Sure. Well, I picked a story that comes from my state, from Tennessee. It’s a story out of Memphis, and it’s in Chalkbeat, Tennessee. You can read about it there, but unfortunately there are many parents of deaf students who say that the district is not doing enough to meet the needs of their students specifically.

[00:04:11] They don’t seem to even have enough personnel to do. What seems to me to be a pretty rudimentary thing, and that is teach sign language at the school. There are no full-time interpreters at some of these schools. These are schools where there’s a high concentration of deaf students and hard of hearing students, and so I think you’re seeing some real frustration among parents because these are Memphis and Shelby County schools.

[00:04:38] Major issues here, I think there are are likely some IDEA implications and it’s a reason I would say. You’re seeing a lot of states, Tennessee, being among them, actually turn to private choice programs because there are some specialized providers out there now, at least in Tennessee, families can get education savings accounts and can go specifically to a private school that has these specialized services.

[00:05:05] So we’ll keep an eye on this, I think, but it’s a real tragedy for the students who are affected.

[00:05:10] Helen Baxendale: Absolutely. And I think you’re right that families with with students who have these particular needs are often among the first and keenest to take up private school options when they come online. Four reasons, you know, not unlike those covered in this story.

[00:05:23] So important story. I’m glad you highlighted that for us, Shaka. Coming up after the break, we have a superintendent of the Houston Unified School District, Mike Miles.

[00:05:46] Mike Miles is the superintendent of the Houston Independent School District. Most recently, superintendent Miles served as founder and CEO of Third Future schools, while previously serving three years as the superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District, and six years as the superintendent of the Harrison School District in Colorado Springs Miles.

[00:06:05] Also served his country as an officer in the Army’s Elite Ranger Battalion and as a company commander, and then joined the US State Department as a Soviet analyst and member of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He then served as a diplomat to Poland and Russia at the end of the Cold War, finishing his service in the State Department as a special assistant to the ambassador to Russia before returning home to the United States.

[00:06:28] Miles, holds degrees from the US Military Academy at West Point, the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University. Superintendent Miles, you’ve dedicated your life and career to public service. First as a soldier, then as a diplomat, and for the past 30 years as a an educator and educational leader.

[00:06:45] Could you tell us a little bit about your family background and formative educational experiences and why you became so dedicated to public service in these various capacities?

[00:06:57] Mike Miles: I’m one of eight kids, mom’s, Japanese. My dad’s black. They’re both passed now. And uh, we grew up pretty poor when my dad was in the early part of his career with all these kids, and I had good teachers though education was the central part of our world.

[00:07:19] And my mom, even though my dad was in Vietnam a couple times, and then. Korea once, so he was absent a lot. The thing that she insisted on, even though she didn’t speak English well was we got to school. We got to school on time, and then when we got back it was always studying the three boys and one of my sisters at the kitchen table, and that’s place of business every day.

[00:07:45] So I’ve always been appreciative of the teachers that I’ve had. It changed my life, of course. And the trajectory, and that’s part of the reason why I do public service work. I mean, you mentioned I’ve been an army officer, been a diplomat. And an educator and the through line is public service. But there was an event in the Army too.

[00:08:09] Well, first I grew up in the time of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy. And my dad’s favorite phrase at that time was, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. And we seemed to have lost that a little bit, but in my world, in my my family’s world, you know, service in some capacity.

[00:08:31] I think of the eight of the seven brothers and sisters. So of the eight of us, seven of us have either been in the military or air force ourselves or are married to military people. So that was a big thing in in my family. As I got older, of course I was an an army officer. I was in a plane crash where everybody around me died, a training exercise, an army training exercise with the Ranger Battalion.

[00:09:00] Anyway, it was also a moment where I said to myself that I have to earn this. I don’t wanna say extra life, but you know, I have to earn the fact that I didn’t die with all the people around me. And so I’ve been a professional public servant. That’s what I do.

[00:09:17] Shaka Mitchell: Thanks, superintendent. Well, I wanna stick with this theme a little bit because it sounds like your profession now, in some ways is an outgrowth of both service, but also gratitude, as you mentioned for kind of this, this second chance we are recording this the day after Veteran’s Day.

[00:09:33] So belated Happy Veteran’s Day and thanks for your service. I’ve got a dear friend of mine is one of the battalion commanders with the fifth up at Fort Campbell. Cool. The rangers up there and you know, I know that his sense of service and faith, and now he’s also a father. I know that that informs a lot of how he engages with the men and vice versa.

[00:09:58] How he engages with the men informs a lot of what he does at home. How does some of your military experience inform your work as an educational leader? This operational leader in one of the biggest school districts in the country.

[00:10:11] Mike Miles: There, of course are through lines and intersections. Whenever you talk about leadership, leadership of a business, leadership of a school, leadership of a platoon of soldiers, there’s very similar things that contribute to success as a leader.

[00:10:29] And so I, I really am grateful that I went to a, a School for Leaders West Point, and I had, you know, in the leadership positions. Sometimes under tough circumstances and those principles of leadership that you learn and in practice, I think carry on. And I’m much older now and towards the, the end of my time in this profession, or at least as a superintendent and I, I am drawn on all those experiences of leadership.

[00:11:01] I’ll give you one example. There’s always a question of, in the Army, we call it mission in men. Now it’s mission in people, of course, because when I was at West Point in the Rangers, there were no, no women at that time. But there’s always this question of to what degree do you have to put the mission before some of the interests of your.

[00:11:22] Your staff, and obviously it’s never one or the other, right? It’s always a a combination, but there certainly are times when it’s not that you have to sacrifice the interests of people, but you have to understand what is the priority at the time, and maybe you don’t have enough money to give raises because you have to do this instructional thing for the kids, or maybe you don’t.

[00:11:50] Keep ineffective teachers because it’s not the best for the students. And you know, not removing ineffective teachers is, is hard on the people. Sydor that equation. But that’s a leadership question everybody faces. It’s not just educators.

[00:12:06] Helen Baxendale: That’s a, a very interesting insight. Picking up a little on the thread that Shaka was pulling on a, I’m interested to learn a little around how your diplomatic service has also informed your more recent incarnation as an educational leader.

[00:12:20] You, uh, were with the State Department for a number of years as a diplomat in Poland, in Russia at the end of the Cold War, which must have been a fascinating. Time and place to be and later a special assistant to the ambassador to Russia. Can you talk a little about those experiences and especially, you know, how did those experiences inform your sense of what K 12 education should be trying to transmit to young people today and, and the role of K 12 education in preserving and upholding free societies?

[00:12:50] Mike Miles: Yeah, so Helen, I detect an accent. Where’s that accent from? Australia. Yeah, so it’s relevant here because one of the things I’ve learned in the diplomatic core is the importance of perspective and understanding the history, but also the culture of different places. And so in education, we, we need to grow our perspective.

[00:13:18] Not only of our own history, but also the, to understand the perspectives of a world that’s ever more interconnected. Even if we, you know, even if there’s areas where we, we don’t think that interconnection is good. And so one of the things we try to do in Houston is to make sure that kids have various experiences, not necessarily international experiences, but experiences.

[00:13:42] For example, in the, what we call the NES Schools, new education system schools, 130 schools out of 273, the middle schoolers in that orbit, the seventh graders have to travel outta state. They are afforded the ability to travel outta state if they hit 92% attendance and we pay for that. Eighth graders travel outta country and we pay for that again if they hit 92% attendance rate.

[00:14:09] And the point of that is just to broaden one perspective, other things I’ve learned in the diplomatic Corps is that how to think about negotiations and how to start with a really good concept. How to bring that concept and idea to fruition when you have many different interest groups and some pushing back really, really hard because they don’t think it serves their interests.

[00:14:35] But in the end of the day, in the diplomatic court, the main, the, the main constituent you’re serving, of course, is the, the American public. And in education, the main constituents you’re serving are the students. So putting all those interests together. But also understanding at the end of the day who your main constituent is, is important.

[00:14:54] Shaka Mitchell: As Helen was asking that question, sort of setting it up and discussing your diplomatic experience, I thought, well, maybe that’s why he’s able to handle school boards so well because this is a man who’s already spent time going back and forth to Moscow during the Cold War. If you can manage through Khrushchev and Gorbachev, this is easy peasy.

[00:15:16] Mike Miles: Wow, you, you mentioned the right timeframe. I, you know, yeah. Well you’re a young person, but yeah, that was the time for me, that time period with Gorbachev and Yeltsin, so,

[00:15:26] Shaka Mitchell: yeah. Yes. Well, such an important time. Shifting to more recent years prior to being in Houston. You spent some time in Colorado Springs at the Harrison School District.

[00:15:37] A much smaller district by comparison. And so I wonder if you could just share a little bit about your work there, maybe some of the, the challenges that you face there. For instance, I know listeners would love to know, do challenges just increase with the scale and do they increase by the same factor, for instance?

[00:15:56] Or are there some things that you see in a, in a small school district that you’re just gonna see in every school district and vice versa?

[00:16:03] Mike Miles: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a great question. Here’s, here’s what I think about that. Every situation has its own challenges, and in many ways, when you’re too small, it presents a whole nother set of challenges.

[00:16:16] I, I think about rural areas and the challenges that are unique to rural areas. I mean, when you’re spread out across 2000 square miles, think about the transportation requirements, the parent engagement strategies that are different. The ability, you know, when, when you have a large district, I say to my colleagues all the time, you always have enough money to do the things you prioritize.

[00:16:42] I can’t say that in a rural area. ’cause even if you prioritize something, you may not have enough money to do it. We have in the large districts economies of scale and that certainly plays a role in prioritization, right? ’cause you have a, a little extra money. To prioritize things. So I think that’s one big difference.

[00:17:03] Scale in some cases matters, but it can be, you know, a negative in in other ways. The other thing though is this, every district, every school is a system. And systems work in similar ways in education profession. ’cause it’s, they’re built the same way. And that’s, we’re gonna talk about, I hope, how we broke the system here.

[00:17:26] And so a system can be scaled fairly easily if the system doesn’t change. So when I went from Harrison to Dallas, Harrison had 11,000 students. Dallas had 160,000 students. But I was able to successfully navigate that because I could see how the system works. And so it was just scaling the system. Yeah, but it was the same system.

[00:17:51] Helen Baxendale: Unpack that system for us a little bit. Mm-hmm. These superintendent, you, you, you’ve sort of anticipated the transition I was hoping to make with the question from Harrison to Dallas where, you know, having kind of, I guess, transitioned out of military life to a modest sized district, you were then having succeeded there, got the much.

[00:18:07] Bigger challenge, or at least the much bigger scale of, of Dallas. So yeah, turn those abstract observations into, into something a little specific for us around, you know, what is the system and how do you think of it, and how does scale kind of affect mm-hmm. You know, how you interact with that system.

[00:18:25] Mike Miles: So a system by definition is any organization with interconnected parts, that’s a system.

[00:18:32] It doesn’t have to be an organization. It could be a watch, you know, wristwatch, you know, it has some interconnected parts. And especially if you, if you’re old fashioned, like me and I, and I wear wristwatch, you know, with gears on it. Yes. You know, so anyway, if you think about some of those parts in Harrison, the smaller district, right?

[00:18:51] There’s an evaluation system. If you think of it in that way, or you can think of it like many people think of it as, okay, we have an evaluation instrument. We don’t really think hard about how it’s connected to compensation, and in most cases it’s not really tied to compensation, we don’t think maybe sometimes about how it should be connected to your leadership’s knowledge of that evaluation.

[00:19:18] We may not think about how that system, the evaluation system, should be tied to professional development or how you monitor and ensure the evaluation is carried out thoroughly or the professional development is carried out. So all those things I just mentioned. Leadership, understanding of instruction, the evaluation system, how often are you gonna monitor?

[00:19:39] How often do you observe? Is there a training that’s specifically tied to that? Is it all tied to compensation? That’s a system we looked at in Harrison, we had the pay for performance system. We focus on the quality of instruction. So I go to Dallas and I just. Do the same thing. We change the system to the one I just described, but just on a larger scale.

[00:20:03] So it was more important to change the underlying paradigm and see the connections. That’s the important part of scale. Otherwise, you’re just doing the same thing at a, just with more kids. So a textbook adoption, for example. The way most districts do it, even in a small district, you get committees together.

[00:20:24] You look at, especially the teachers that teach language arts and you say, okay, we’re gonna adopt a language arts textbook and every four or five years we adopt a new textbook. And in a small district you do. In a large district, it’s bigger, but it’s the same process. You get groups of people together and you, you get a textbook adoption.

[00:20:42] And then what? You pass it out to teachers and sometimes they use it, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they sit in the closet, sometimes they don’t. Those are things we do in the profession, not Houston. Those are the things we do in the profession because we don’t work systemically, and in that, when you don’t work systemically, it’s easy to just do the same thing, but just add more money and resources.

[00:21:06] Shaka Mitchell: In thinking about not doing the same thing, which is of course one of the challenges inherent in leadership, right? Is when to make the call and, you know, exercise, good judgment to go what might feel like off course for some folks, but might be. In fact, course correction, right? And, and necessary and overdue course correction.

[00:21:26] You sort of, not sort of, you have been a part of a major course correction now in Houston. So we’re gonna kind of bring our, our listeners and bring the audience to a little more current day. So in spring 2023, you are appointed superintendent of the Houston Independent School District. Not so much with, uh, ticker Tape Parade, but as part of a takeover from the Texas Education Agency.

[00:21:50] Could you talk a little bit about the circumstances that led to Texas making this decision to take over Houston, ISD, which again, for folks listening is the eighth largest district in the United States, nearly 185,000 students, is what we’ve got, I’m sure have more up to date numbers, but could you talk about some of those circumstances?

[00:22:11] Mike Miles: Texas Education agency, well, let me back up. There was a law passed in Texas allowing the Texas Education Agency TEA to take over districts. Once a school or multiple schools have multiple years, five years of an F rating. In Texas, we had the A through F accountability score. So F is not good, right? So A through F rating.

[00:22:39] And there was a couple schools, Wheatley was the main one. Wheatley High School that got five years of an F in a row. But that wasn’t the only reason. There were several other things, especially the lack of. Special education compliance, so, so like the district was breaking state and federal law with regard to special education or not complying with the law for special ed.

[00:23:05] It turns out there were financial problems, there were problems with the board fighting each other. There were 120 1D and F rated campuses. At a 273. So that’s a lot of dysfunction in a school district. So on June 1st, as you said, June 1st, 2023, the state appointed a board of managers, nine appointed members, board members.

[00:23:35] The elected board was sidelined, and the state also appointed me as the superintendent. So that’s the backdrop of why TEA took over the district.

[00:23:46] Helen Baxendale: Superintendent Miles, you talked very interestingly before around systems and the fact that systems, you know, if properly observed and constructed can be picked up and put down.

[00:23:56] But school systems famously contain people and people can be ornery. Difficult and not always necessarily willing to just, you know, fall into a new systematic structure. So I gather you’ve encountered a certain amount of that since you took over the Houston ISD, but also overcome a certain amount of that.

[00:24:18] I would love to hear a little bit about how your system and systemic way of thinking has intersected with the realities of a workforce.

[00:24:28] Mike Miles: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ll try to then, it’s a long answer, but I’m gonna give you the short version and it’s a right question. The context matters. We are at a time in an educational profession where we’ve run out of time.

[00:24:41] Actually, the kids have run outta time. We have two gaps growing. We have the traditional reading, writing, math, science gap, achievement gap, and that has not closed in 20 some years. Or narrowed significantly in 20 some years. So our kids are behind on proficiency all at the time where AI and technology is advancing so quickly and changing the workplace and workforce so quickly.

[00:25:06] What we’re doing now will impact our kids 10 years from now or what we don’t do now. So we have the year 2035 competencies gap. That’s information literacy, problem solving. Learning how to learn, learning to work in teams, learning to work with ai, all of those things are things that employers want from our graduates and we are not doing we American Public Education System, we’re not doing a good job with either gap.

[00:25:37] And so in Houston with 121 DNF campuses with many schools where the proficiency level is 20 or less. 20% of the kids can read at grade level in many schools. It’s changed now, but that is a cry for urgency. My team and I entered HISD with that context. So if you think back to the question about mission and people and you know, who’s your first constituents when you do negotiations?

[00:26:09] It’s the kids and we talk the talk in the profession, but we don’t always walk it. So my team and I and the board of managers said, look, we truly are gonna put kids first. They have no time. We have to work urgently and we have to do it without getting a whole bunch of committees together, because that would, you know, there’s no time.

[00:26:32] So we brought in what’s called wholescale systemic reform. That means doing a whole bunch of things, a bunch of reform initiatives all at one time. The evaluation system, for example, right? You can’t just do one part, which is what our profession does piecemeal. They will do the rubric for the evaluation system, the Charlotte Danielson rubric, and that’s what they’ll spend their time on.

[00:26:59] Then two years later, they might do a textbook adoption, and then they might think about. Rarely do they think about tying it to compensation, the evaluation. Then they’ll do principals training a different year. I mean, it’s just, and it’s not systemic. So we’re doing wholescale systemic reform. That’s making a difference.

[00:27:19] But back to the public, by definition, you know, well, people resist change. There’s, there’s something called status quo bias. And that exists everywhere. And that’s okay. That’s normal. And because we’re doing so much change all at once, it is also understandable that there’s a lot of different interest groups whose cheese was moved.

[00:27:43] Who are not getting the same money contracts support that they got before, especially if you’re gonna put the students first. And so there’s part of that pushback. And again, the question is how do you balance all that? And in the end, you really have to stay focused on the kids. And what their fortune is.

[00:28:08] And by the way, strategy, the Wholescale systemic reform has resulted in the largest achievement gains. Mm-hmm. On the start, the STAR exam is the state accountability test on the state accountability exams. In the history of the exam, we went from 121 DNF rated campuses to 16 in two years. No F camp. We had 56 when we started F campuses zero today at the start of the school year.

[00:28:40] But on the other end, we went from 93 A and B rated campuses to 197. More than doubling the number of A and B schools. So it wasn’t just a focus on the low performing schools. This is a systems process and that’s why you see gains across the board. In just two years, we are moving the needle on parent.

[00:29:04] Appreciation for what’s happening because at first, you know, most of the teachers, most of the principals didn’t want the intervention. Most of the community didn’t want the intervention, and now once they see that their kids are reading at grade level and the teachers see that they’re having success, we have way more favorable support from the teachers and the parents.

[00:29:28] To be fair, we’ve also removed. Teachers who were ineffective and many teachers who, who may have been effective but didn’t want to be part of a system that is moving the way we’re moving, that has a pay for performance system where we look at instruction all the time and give feedback all the time.

[00:29:48] Many of those teachers have left. So obviously we’re attracting teachers who believe in what we’re doing. We had only two vacancies at the start of the school year. Two teacher vacancies outta 10,500 teachers, where most of the areas you know, has a shortage of teachers or have a lot more vacancies. At the start of the school year, we only had two.

[00:30:12] So while we are removing teachers who are ineffective, that hasn’t stopped a whole bunch of people from applying. HISD.

[00:30:21] Shaka Mitchell: Yeah, those are some really remarkable statistics, I guess, and just indicators of what’s working. So congratulations, superintendent to, to you and your team. I think it’s really amazing.

[00:30:33] We love to hear it. Helen and I both spending our time thinking about just that, how we improve education for students. I also love that at times we hear things like, well, if you’re gonna try to eat the elephant, you’ve gotta take one bite at a time. But in some ways you’re, you’re really talking about, no, this is more like what happens when, you know six different people are touching a different part of the elephant.

[00:30:56] Sometimes it can’t. What you end up with is six different answers and approaches, and what you are doing is much more coherent. You’re trying to get your hands all around this thing and say, look, the pieces need to fit together. I’m mixing like 10 metaphors now. I apologize.

[00:31:10] Mike Miles: Yeah, that’s right. You’re absolutely right.

[00:31:13] You can’t build a plane while you’re flying. That’s, that is true, but you can do wholescale system reform. Quickly and get it to scale pretty quickly. So we started with 85 schools the first year that were undergoing this whole school systemic reform outta 273 last year. And this year we’re at 130 schools.

[00:31:36] And then we have another category called Special Focus schools. That’s another 17 schools. So that’s a big part of the district that underwent. Wholescale systemic reform. Meanwhile, we didn’t ignore the rest of the district instructionally. We had the same plan across the board. Principal pay for performance, rigorous evaluation system, high quality instruction in every classroom.

[00:31:59] That sort of thing is across the board. And we showed that you have to change paradigms. It’s like I was saying, from going from Harrison to Dallas, that the issue is not so much the individual reform initiatives. And you’re right, our, our profession is too engaged in piecemeal reform. We changed a whole bunch of paradigms.

[00:32:22] Concepts, and one was we created our own change model because you’re right, the profession is always go slow to go fast. We needed a different model because kids don’t have the time for us to do one thing at a time. And by the way, that hasn’t worked. I tell my colleagues all the time, do what works. Look, don’t, don’t listen to me.

[00:32:42] Don’t you know, don’t, don’t listen to anything. Just do what you think works then. But if it isn’t working, then maybe, maybe it should entertain some different ideas that there’s 25 paradigms We changed. But a couple of ’em that we changed was we teach at grade level. If there was A-T-N-T-P report that says, uh, you know, accelerate don’t remediate, and also that the opportunity myth from that report from TNTP from November, 2018, that 38% of black boys in elementary or middle school never receive grade level instruction.

[00:33:23] And so ours is just the opposite. A hundred percent receive. Grade level instruction a hundred percent of the time. But that means you have to scaffold well, and you have to differentiate. So that’s a paradigm we change. We change the paradigm about how instruction is the number one thing. It’s the biggest part of evaluation.

[00:33:41] It’s what we do every day. And just focusing on that one variable, high quality instruction. Has really moved the needle. We changed the paradigm about tying compensation to what we value. We are on a pay for performance system for principals, for teachers, and many other things that we, we’ve changed and we did it all at once.

[00:34:05] Shaka Mitchell: Yeah. Would that be the one thing that you would tell, and I’m be mindful of your time, but if you, you know, having worked in various high level positions, but all throughout organizations as well, if you were. To give a piece of advice, maybe it’s to a governor or state legislatures that are considering what do we do in our area, in our context to dramatically improve academic outcomes for America’s children and maybe speak to, especially in, in large cities.

[00:34:32] That’s where we know that’s not, that’s not the only place where we have problems, but that’s where you are right now in, in Houston. What would you tell them? Would you tell them, Hey, don’t go slow to go fast. Go fast to go fast or do what works? Yeah. What would be the advice you would kinda leave them with?

[00:34:47] Mike Miles: I would say a couple things. Number one, you know the, it’s like you have to go to the speed of trust, and I say go at the speed you must. That doesn’t mean you ignore trust. It doesn’t mean that. It means you put kids first and we don’t have time. The other couple things I would say is definitely all districts could really focus on the main variable quality of instruction. That is the key. I know districts set goals, like we want 3% increase in reading we want, and then we do progress monitoring throughout the year. Right on using NWA map test or something when really that’s good. That’s important to just gauge where you are.

[00:35:26] But more important, set some goals around quality of instruction. Make sure you can measure it. You know, make sure it’s calibrated and then go after it every day. That’s gonna get you the gains. But the last thing is, I think for legislative governors, board members, other influencers in the community, I think of ways that they could enable or support superintendents or districts that want to do wholescale systemic reform. What is it that they can do to, to give that board elected, board that superintendent more power to do these wide ranging reforms, because that’s what’s called for. And over the next several years, we’re gonna enter a wild West period.

[00:36:14] People have understood that public education isn’t working well for most kids and parents are gonna try to find ways to get their kid the best education possible. There’ll be more vouchers, and we have one in Texas. There’ll be more charter schools, there’ll be more online schools. There’ll be more kids dropping out of school.

[00:36:33] I mean, it’s, it’s gonna be a little bit wild and I think it’s incumbent upon all of us. To go bold or go home, but that will require a public that really is focused on kids, whatever, wherever your kid is, whether it’s charter, whether it’s private, whether it’s traditional, public, you know, there has to be the enabling conditions from the larger system, the board members, politicians, influencers that say, Hey, we’ve gotta enable bold, smart, effective reforms.

[00:37:08] That’s really helpful. Thanks, Helen.

[00:37:10] Helen Baxendale: Fantastic question. To close on, you were thinking along similar lines to me, Shakar and Superintendent Miles. Just let me thank you again for joining us. It’s been a fascinating conversation. A lot of rich insight here, and as someone who works in a large school system, not a district, but a charter organization, it’s been very valuable professional development.

[00:37:28] Thank you and congratulations again on the extraordinary work you have done and are doing.

[00:37:32] Mike Miles: Thank you. I appreciate it.

[00:37:36] Helen Baxendale: Well, that was a great interview, Shaka. I’ve been, uh, long curious to hear more about what’s been going on in the Houston school district. There’s been a lot of press coverage, maybe more heat than light in some cases, and so it was wonderful to hear from the man himself. Some very encouraging developments. I think.

[00:37:54] Shaka Mitchell: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is one of the biggest public school districts in the country, of course. And so I think hearing directly from the leader, especially when there is a turnaround story, that’s so important and so worth telling. Really glad we got to have this conversation.

[00:38:09] Helen Baxendale: Absolutely. It was great to have you with us too. Shaka, I, I hope we’ll get to guest co-host again sometime. Before you leave us, tell us about the tweet of the week.

[00:38:18] Shaka Mitchell: Yeah, so Tweet of the Week comes from our friend Neil McCluskey, and you can see it on X at Neil McCluskey. He tweets about a new book that’s out. It is co-edited by Neil and by James Schultz, and it’s called Fighting for the Freedom to Learn.

[00:38:36] Really, I’m excited that this book is out. The subtitle is examining the Nation’s Centuries Old School Choice Movement, and so I think they’re gonna cover a lot of ground there. It’s really designed to be this comprehensive history of the fight for educational freedom in the United States, so we’d encourage folks to check it out.

[00:38:55] Helen Baxendale: Absolutely a great stocking stuffer for your AFC Associates, I imagine, Shaka.

[00:39:00] Shaka Mitchell: That’s right. That’s right.

[00:39:01] Helen Baxendale: Well, thanks again for joining us. Next week we have another exciting guest, Paul Andrew Hutton, who is a distinguished professor of history at the University of New Mexico and author of the New York Times bestseller, the Undiscovered Country Triumph, tragedy, and the Shaping of The American West. Should be a great episode. Thanks for joining us.