Attend the board meeting on Thursday, June 22nd, at 5:30 pm at HISD, 4400 W 18th St. Can you help fill the board room with mothers, fathers, children, teachers, and taxpayers to quietly bear witness to the shameful dismantling of public education and democracy.

The hostile takeover of HISD continues. June 22nd is the voting board of managers meeting to vote on the budget and other matters. Miles is calling all of the shots. The board is just window dressing.  Share the petition at houstoncvpe.org opposing the state takeover. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

Click here for step-by-step instructions to speak, and sign up by Wednesday, June 21, at noon. Everyone should show up on Thursday by 5:30 pm to stand up against this horrible plan. Even if it does not affect you personally…yet. 

Community Voices for Public Education
http://www.houstoncvpe.org/

Community Voices for Public Education · United States
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To speak, you must sign up by Wednesday at noon.  Here is the link to sign up- click on e-comments to sign up.): https://houstonisd.legistar.com/Calendar.aspxClick here for step-by-step instructions to sign up to speak: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ye5vrE7wSwE_1wfAoUTSEVEFo7VloyAv7EUQpQaFv-w/edit

Miles' "New Education Schools" is not new. Reconstitutions were a disaster in Dallas under Miles and were a disaster in Houston under Grier and other superintendents. 

Agenda items include the following: The agenda packet is at https://houstonisd.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=PA&ID=1106062&GUID=D0D0FBBD-B54B-4ED0-BC6B-442B633DE251 

Agenda Item 2 (p 23) is the Budget. If you want to talk about the budget and the fact that the public does not know what F. Mike Miles is doing with it, sign up for agenda item 2. The budget approval seems to be a checkbox while he moves money around as he wishes without any public input. If you are confused, the budget was listed as agenda item 19 last week.  

Why is debt service up 10%? That usually only happens with a bond and the last one was way back in 2012. He is firing about 300 wraparound specialists and a whole bunch of other folks. They are centrally funded but work in schools with children every day. Miles is pulling a mean-spirited PR move when he calls them Office Bloat. He has also hired a lot of people and is promoting everything as cost savings without presentation documents or any transparency to the public.  

Agenda Item 3 (p 27) suspends board policy regarding having magnets in the NES schools. (This was previously agenda item 24.)Who needs the rule of law when Miles is in town? To parents concerned about cuts to fine arts, band and bilingual programs, Mike’s says “I think we're going to be able to accommodate most of the programs that are already existing." Translation: Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t. We’ll let you know. This might have been adopted at first reading last Thursday since Miles changed board policy unilaterally so that policy changes are adopted after the first reading and not the second.

Agenda items 21-23 (pages 178) are about suspending board policy for employment practices. Many of the suspended policies will make it easier for HISD to remove and replace successful and beloved teachers; to turn teachers into widgets to be moved on a chess board as Miles sees fit. 

Agenda items 22-23 (pages 182-190) teacher appraisals and principal appraisals in that order. F. Mike Miles is suspending board policy to implement his own Rube Goldberg teacher and principal evaluation system. 

Here is one of the many changes. Principals will be judged and evaluated on student outcomes (STAAR). In addition, if the principal evaluates a great teacher’s classroom instruction well but their STAAR scores are low, the principal will get in trouble and will be dinged on their rating and vice versa. This incentivizes NES principals to evaluate teachers entirely on predicted student performance and not on the quality of instruction or the capacity to motivate and inspire. Children are more than a test score.