In five years, the Houston ISD will increase the percentage of students who meet or exceed the state standards in STAAR testing by 15 points — if the HISD Board of Managers adopts some really ambitions numbers in its goals settings.
This would be something that no other urban district has ever done before, Superintendent Mike Miles told the board in a special workshop held Thursday night. He asterisked this even more by saying he’s not sure that they can do it but one thing he said he is sure of, is that without employing his New Education System curriculum, there’s no way any of this will happen. And to make it happen Miles’ recommendation is to start out slowly with 1 or 2 percentage points gains in the first year and ramp up later on.
Of equal concern was whether these strategies will end up closing the achievement gap between the highest scoring students and those from low-income and minority backgrounds. And should the projected goals for those groups be raised by 20 percentage points instead of 15. Board Member Angela Lemond Flowers said attention should be paid to minority students at high performing schools, as well as the NES and NES-Aligned schools.
In the four-hour public meeting, attended by almost no one, there were two aspects of the workshop that might surprise frequent onlookers. One is that the board is taking setting its goals very seriously, spending a lot of time to parse sentences as they struggled over precise wording of what their mission would be.
Even more surprisingly, given that up to now their public face has been to march in contented lockstep, is that they disagreed and some took minor shots at each other’s statements. While none of this reached the epic scales of years past with some of the elected boards, it still was an encouraging sign for critics hoping for a few more signs of different viewpoints.
For instance, Board President Audrey Momanaee requested more information on what had happened in past years to raise third grade scores while board member Flowers said the hows and whys didn’t matter as much as going forward. “If they can’t get [the reasons for the gains] are you comfortable in moving forward? Maybe there’s not going to be a way to find out. So do we need it?” For his part, board member Ric Campo seemed to adopt a let’s-move-on-with-it posture in general.
An unbelievably positive Ashly Paz, the board’s veteran coach of mission statements and goals, led the members through their paces, only occasionally reminding them that while “You can do what you want,” but such and such would be a bad idea.
She impressed upon them that whatever they decided in terms of goals (set for students) and constraints (which cover adult behavior to meet those goals) — would be “set in stone” and they should approach them that way and not think about fiddling with what they come up with a year from now.
She also cautioned them that the wording they selected for the “shared vision” should be based on community surveys not what one or two people on the board think, adding that “it would be inappropriate” to include items that were not collected from the surveys. “It’s important that the vision be the community’s vision and not the vision of an individual or a specific group [on the board].”
Four speakers addressed the board before it began its workshop, asking among other things that bilingual education remain a priority, that libraries be restored in the NES schools and that they rethink the qualities they are looking for in good teachers.
Parent Shelley Gonzales talked to the board about the tentative language it is using about teachers in its constraints section, arguing that she’s not sure what their use of the word “strong” means.”Just filling slots isn’t good enough, They need to be filled with people who are competent and experienced,” she said.
“All of the teacher evaluation and principal evaluation things that recently came out, I’m hearing from the teachers and principals where my children go, that is causing an insane amount of stress and anxiety. They’re trying to hold onto their jobs and also looking for how they can get out of this job as fast as possible.”
After board members debated about the use of words like “citizen” and “successful” the tentative (at this stage) vision statement they produced after more than an hour of discussion read:
“Equipping our students with the knowledge and skills that will allow them to be critical thinker, leaders and contributing members of our community who have choice-filled lives in a globally competitive environment.”
Immediately after Momanaee read that off, some board members started picking at it until Flowers suggested sending it back to the coaching group for polish, now that they’d determined the major points of what they wanted to say, and then finalize it later.
“The idea that we’re shooting in the dark or that this is data that we need to really think about is to me, we’re losing the broader picture,” Campo said in the somewhat convoluted comparison that followed. “We’re not seeing the forest for the trees. If we keep looking at the tree, looking at the leaves and and deciding what happened to the leaves this year, last year or ten years ago, then we’re not going to get the forest down.”
What the group was most surprised at was that in the community group surveys done to help them craft a vision, “only” 41.6 percent wanted them replaced by a return to an elected board.
Saying he thought it would be much higher, Campo then sounded a clarion call, that probably won’t win over too many of the critics the board already has. “But, we are going to get through the exit criteria, building systemic change and a foundation that cannot be torn down in the future by elected officials who decide to throw it away.”
There will be a follow-up workshop in November where the board will consider the constraints it wants to put in place.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
