PicoBlog

I’m in Dallas. I’m writing a blog about school reform in Houston. Weird. I know. So here we go.

Sometimes I write about school reform in Houston on my Facebook page, where most if not all of my readers are in Dallas. I am retired now, but I still carry a significant comet trail of regular Facebook readers left over from my very long career as a local newspaper columnist. I expect to lose most of them gradually over time as a result of funerals.

One of them still hanging on loyally is Barry Jacobs, an attorney, a smart guy and a person who thinks I’m full of it for my high opinion of Mike Miles, the current reform school superintendent in Houston.

Miles was superintendent in Dallas a decade ago. I say Miles was a big success here. Jacobs says he was a flop.

The only reason I take this up here is that the story about Miles being a flop in Dallas was a standard line of the teachers union in Dallas, which strongly opposed reform, and I see now that it has been picked up as part of the same playbook by the teachers union in Houston.

Some people sort of rant about it. Jacobs is not a ranter, but others are. They insist Miles was a dismal failure in Dallas.

That is not true. In fact, it’s utter absurd blatant BS. Miles was a major, major success here in Dallas.

There was one major divergence between Miles’ tenure in Dallas ten years ago and what has been going in Houston since the state took over the district last summer. In Houston, Miles is gradually moving his reform program into place for the entire school district of 190,000 students.

He was in Dallas three years – 2012 to 2015. Here, Miles was allowed only to put very limited demonstration programs into place at a handful of schools. The uptick in achievement and downtick in discipline problems at those schools was remarkable. But the success of his specific reforms can hardly be judged by the performance of the district at large.

And yet. And yet. Jacobs makes a fair point. Who was superintendent of schools in Dallas for those years? Mike Miles. Who was responsible for the performance of the school district? Mike Miles.

I base my own estimate of his tenure in Dallas on a number of indicators and academic studies, some of which I have talked about here on the blog, some of which I have not. The most definitive of those is a paper published this year called “The effects of comprehensive educator evaluation and pay reform on achievement,” carried about by three Ph.D. economists for the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The authors looked specifically and narrowly at a teacher merit pay program Miles carried out in Dallas. Their conclusion was that the Miles merit pay system was associated with significant improvements in student achievement.

Of course, that’s a fairly broad summary I’m giving you of what they really said. And there’s a reason I haven’t wanted to delve more deeply into detail in my debate with Jacobs about that particular paper. For example, the authors say this:

“More formally, let !!" # be the potential outcome at school i when the policy is in effect and let !!" $ be the potential outcome at school i when the policy is not in effect. For each year in the post-period, we know the realized outcomes at Dallas schools and need to estimate !!" $. The synthetic control method estimates this counterfactual by taking a weighted average of control school outcomes in each year, where these weights are constrained to be constant over time. Specifically, defining an indicator "! that is 1 for all Dallas schools and zero otherwise, the counterfactual outcome for year t is ∑ $! ∗ !!" 

What is that little E thing?

And I’ll be honest with you. I don’t believe either Jacobs or me is all that well equipped to go around weighing counterfactuals. At least not where these weights are constrained to be constant over time. I mean, sure, I could probably do it if you’d drop that part.

They said his reforms worked.

In evaluating Miles’ record in Dallas, Jacobs comes back every time to the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP, a program of the U.S. Department of Education. The NAEP, as most people call it, is often touted as the gold standard measurement of educational achievement, mainly because it is a national criterion-referenced test rather than state norm-referenced, which … sure, OK. I consider myself to be criterion-referenced, so I’m all for that.

Jacobs said in a comment on my Facebook recently, “DISD's NAEP scores started tanking essentially the day Miles walked in the door and have slipped every year since.”

First of all, that’s not true. Dallas’s district-wide math scores on NAEP took a significant jump upward during the Miles years. Jacobs is right about the reading scores, even though “tanked’ may be a bit inflammatory. I provide a table below.

NAEP

But here’s the other thing. There is serious debate even among the people who work on NAEP about how useful NAEP is in evaluating the performance of an entire school district. Student achievement is very powerfully influenced by demographic factors, especially poverty, and NAEP is fairly limited in its ability to collect that information.

There are consultants out there, on the other hand, who specialize in doing exactly that. They collect the demographic data along with other information about changes in school district policy, curriculum, funding – everything that can have significant impact on student outcomes – to come out with an equation for what’s really going on with teaching and the kids. I tend to look at the executive summaries and charts, because I’m afraid if I delve deeper I may run onto those … you know … E things.

One consulting group that took a close look at the Miles years in Dallas is called Education Resource Group or ERG. I’m sorry, I can’t just cut and paste their whole report here, because of some …ah … publishing issues. I hope I’m not going to get sued for quoting from their data. Jacobs is perfectly welcome to say I made it all up. I didn’t. Other people who know the data will come to my defense.

The ERG study shows that in three short years the Dallas school system under Miles rocketed from the 35th to the 81st percentile among Texas school districts according to “an aggregated formula of various student performance metrics, adjusted for poverty.” E things.

ERG found that DISD under Miles far exceeded comparable districts in the state including Houston. College readiness among black and Hispanic students soared. The overall graduation rate went from 80 to 87 percent. Kindergarten readiness jumped more than ten points from 38 to 51 percent.

In a public statement, ERG said: “Dallas ISD showed more improvement in academic outcomes between 2011 and 2015 than any other large urban district in Texas. We called this the ‘Dallas Miracle.’”

Gregg Fleisher, Chief Academic Officer of the National Math and Science Initiative, said: “We know of no other large urban district in the country that has even half the results Dallas has with respect to the percentage of their minority students passing AP math and science exams.”

So dramatic were the achievements accomplished under Miles in Dallas that the state created new laws offering generous subsidies to school districts that adopted similar policies. The Commit Partnership reports that 52 percent of Texas school districts have now adopted the Miles merit pay reforms.

Houston before Miles was an outlier, leaving millions on the table rather than adopt teacher merit pay policies. Those policies are staunchly opposed by the unions, whose marching motto should be, “No Merit, No Way!”

You know, you have to ask yourself this at some point: in a school system full of poor kids who can’t read, why would an organization representing teachers be so adamantly opposed to change? What exactly do they think they’re defending? The Miles reforms include major hikes in pay and less classroom time for teachers.

If you can figure it out, please let me know. And tell Barry Jacobs, too, up here in Dallas, will you? And tell him I don’t want to see him disappear from my Facebook page no matter what he says about me. Empty pews give me the willies.

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