Work together
HISD and TEA must be honest partners if they want to help students.
The Washington Post called it a “wild night.”
“Embarrassment” would be more accurate.
Frustrated parents and community members tried to make their case against a recent charter takeover plan at the Houston Independent School District board meeting on Tuesday. So HISD Board of Trustees President Rhonda Skillern-Jones responded by shutting down the whole meeting. Two people were dragged out by police officers. Videos of Jenny Espeseth, who said she has children in first and fifth grades in HISD, being pulled across the floor by her arms were broadcast over social media. She said police told her they intended to file a report, then released her, as reported by Chronicle reporters Jacob Carpenter and Shelby Webb.
The meeting eventually reconvened and then ended without a vote, and HISD now says it plans to miss the April 30 deadline for approving partnerships for 10 failing schools. A state takeover by the Texas Education Agency suddenly looks like a real option.
Good. Better to deal with the Texas Education Agency than lock 6,000 students into a poorly conceived charter plan.
The now-dumped leading proposal involved a takeover by Energized For STEM Academy Inc., a charter organization run by NAACP Houston Branch President James Douglas and former Houston ISD trustee Paula Harris — two individuals whose actions and decision-making have been questioned in their prior roles as public servants. Harris has faced criticism involving alleged favoritism in awarding contracts to a friend. Douglas has faced allegations of a faulty management style.
The overall charter organization appeared too small (only 1,000 students) and without a strong enough track record (one of its middle schools was rated “improvement required” by the state in 2014 and 2016) to promise improvement. And neither HISD nor Energized For STEM Academy released a detailed proposal for turning around the schools.
But it is hard to imagine a scenario where things would have gone well for HISD given the state mandate to fix the schools.
Turning around failing campuses is difficult even in the best circumstances. The partnership process was also vexed by a truncated timeline. It’s no surprise that a charter with questionable credentials emerged as the top contender for this job when others were justifiably scared away.
Maybe HISD would have operated better under different rules, but that’s not what the TEA laid out for them.
The state education agency and TEA Commissioner Mike Morath gave our local school board specific instructions for dealing with the 10 failing schools — find an outside partner, shut them down or face a state takeover — but little assistance along the way.
Surely, Morath would not just rubber stamp any HISD proposal to turn over these 10 schools. He has to have some criteria in mind for the charter system. But there has been no helpful public guidance as to its characteristics, its size or its track record of excellence. Those who watched the melee that erupted during the meeting last night were seeing the total failure to properly manage, adequately fund and support an urban school district.
HISD has at best a spotty record of management and bears responsibility for letting these schools fail for too long. Yet the state’s response of sink or swim and disruption for disruption’s sake has once again demonstrated itself to do more harm than good.
If the TEA wants to prove itself an honest partner in improving HISD’s schools, it will cooperate with the board to craft a solution. This will mean going beyond the April 30 deadline and perhaps waiting until the end of the next school year before implementation. It will mean engaging parents, students and stakeholders. It may take longer, but at the very least it won’t involve police dragging parents out of board meetings. And, hopefully, it might actually work.