HOUSTON—Before the 2023-24 school year, Houston Independent School District (ISD) was the victim of a state takeover by Texas Education Agency (TEA) Commissioner Mike Morath, an appointee of far-right Gov. Greg Abbott. Morath removed the democratically-elected school board of Houston ISD and imposed his own “board of managers.”
Morath also installed former student of late-billionaire Eli Broad’s Superintendent Academy, Mike Miles, who has been under fire for allegedly redirecting public funds to out-of-state charter schools.
Morath said this takeover was to address “failing schools,” but it was actually part of the right-wing agenda to advance the privatization of public schools and weaken the teachers’ unions. This same reactionary platform and strategy are being pushed by billionaires and corporate CEOs all over the country.
Diane Ravitch, author of Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools, has dug deep to uncover who the leaders of the nationwide public school privatization movement are and assembled a list that includes: Jeff Bezos, the Koch Brothers, the Walton Family, Bill Gates, Betsy DeVos, Michael Bloomberg, Laurene Powell Jobs, Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, and the Chamber of Commerce.
Since being appointed, Miles has instituted the so-called “New Education System,” which installs strict rules in schools that are primarily located in majority Black and brown areas of Houston ISD. The NES program involves teaching scripted lessons with timed ten-minute tests every day in four classes. Teachers have no control over the curriculum that they teach.
The Texas STAAR is a standardized test that students have to pass in grade levels throughout K-12 in many different subjects. Two testing companies, Cambium and Pearson, were hired by Texas to develop and administer the STAAR test. Cambium Assessment received $262 million covering the period from 2021 to 2024 from the state of Texas, and Pearson was handed $126 million. Together, the two contracts total $388 million.
Since students in high-poverty areas score lower on standardized tests on average compared to affluent areas, testing is used as “justification” to say that the public school is “failing.” The privatizers say that they are “helping to close the educational achievement gap” and that they are a part of “the new civil rights movement.”
However, reality tells a much different story. As Ravitch pointed out: When have civil rights movements or social justice movements ever been led by billionaires?
In the NES schools, libraries have been replaced with detention centers. Students are not receiving special services. Dual language instruction is being taken away. Friendly decorations, projects, and social-emotional learning are all gone because Miles says they are a “waste of time.”
“I’d rather have a high-quality teacher getting paid a lot than have a librarian doing what, checking out books?” he said. Miles has demeaned librarians, saying that they aren’t as valuable as instructors who teach to his preference of prioritizing standardized tests.
He has also instituted a merit pay system linked to standardized test score evaluation systems for principals and teachers. Jackie Anderson, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, called it “very demeaning.”
“Children come into schools with different backgrounds, different experiences, different levels of understanding, different levels of motivation, and pay-for-performance doesn’t take that into consideration,” she said. “It takes away from the heart and soul of learning for children, and that’s not fair.”
“No single test can measure what kids need to learn and be able to do to succeed in life,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said in her recent keynote address at her union’s 2024 national convention. “Projects, portfolios, and presentations tell us so much more. And they resonate with students. So, it is well past time to end high-stakes testing as the basis of federal education law,” she said.
When Miles was the superintendent of Dallas ISD, he took actions similar to those he’s now imposing in Houston. Teachers there are still suffering from the standardized test-based merit pay system he instituted, called the “Teacher Excellence Initiative (TEI).”
While the corporate disrupters refer to TEI as “data-driven,” teachers in Dallas refer to it as the “Teacher Exit Initiative” because it has caused so many good teachers to get fed up and leave Dallas for other surrounding districts.
In the middle of the 2023-24 school year, 150 Houston ISD principals left their campuses since Miles was appointed. Many have said working for him was like “being in prison.” The takeover has also resulted in a huge loss of teachers. In the first half of the last school year, 633 out of around 11,000 quit, which was double the number who quit the previous year in the same time frame. By the end of the school year, departures skyrocketed—a total of 4,700 teachers left Houston ISD.
At the state level, Republican Gov. Abbott has been pushing private school vouchers as another tactic in the assault on public education. He received $6 million from Pennsylvania pro-voucher billionaire Jeffrey Yass in December and another $4 million in April.
Meanwhile, former Trump Secretary of Education Betsy’s Devos’ American Federation of Children PAC pumped roughly $500,000 into each of the nine key Texas House races. A national pro-voucher PAC, the Club for Growth Action, as well as its affiliate, Super PAC School Freedom Fund, spent nearly $8 million on political ads targeting voucher opponent incumbents.
The right-wing’s campaign to seize control of school boards and force their “reforms” on students and parents is part of corporate America’s scheme to destroy public education. The goals of this privatization movement all over the United States are the same: disrupt public schools, cause educators to leave them, and weaken teachers’ unions.
The end game is to close “failing” public schools (especially in Black and brown communities) and then open up charter school replacements, generating massive profits for their private sector owners.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of its author.
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