Back in April, the Texas Education Agency took control over the public school districts in Houston and Austin, deep-sixing their superintendents and elected school boards. State officials claimed they just had to step in to fix long-lasting problems in both districts.
Many families suspected the state seizure of the Houston Independent School District was an attempt to force the state government’s rightwing priorities on a district that’s 62 percent Hispanic and 22 percent Black, in a city and county (Harris County) that’s a Democratic pain in the ass for Gov. Greg Abbott. In June, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said in a statement that the takeover process “has been flawed and anti-democratic from the very beginning […] with little or no input from parents, teachers, or local community leaders.”
Houston ISD’s new superintendent, Mike Miles, announced his goal was to transition the district’s schools to using a “New Education System” (NES) modeled on that used by a network of charter schools he founded, as the Texas Observer explains:
It requires teachers to teach from a scripted curriculum. The district will decide campus schedules, staffing, and budgets. Students who are considered disruptive are pulled out of the classroom to attend via Zoom.
84 of the district’s 274 campuses “volunteered” to opt into the NES right away, and the remaining schools in the district will apparently have themselves volunteered into it in coming years, if they know what’s good for them.
Last week, the Houston Chronicle (paywalled) revealed Miles’s plans for at least 28 of those schools this fall. When classes start later this month, the 28 schools will no longer have any librarians, and their libraries will be converted into “teams centers”
where students who misbehave in the classroom will be sent to watch the lesson virtually and others can work alone or in groups for differentiated instruction.
The book collections will remain on the shelves at the schools with no librarians, according to the district, with students able to take them home through an honor system or access them during before and after school hours.
The new policy marks a big departure from the priorities outlined by the previous HISD administration led by former superintendent Millard House II, who aimed to put a librarian or media specialist at every campus in the district under his five-year strategic plan and invested millions of dollars in pandemic relief funding to purchase new library books.
But books, as everyone knows, just cause trouble and serve as conduits for the Woke Mind Virus, while librarians are pretty much all lesbian radical Marxists, so using the empty libraries as reeducation teams centers is simply a better plan.
The librarians and media specialists being removed from the will have the option of working at libraries in schools that are not yet Of The NES Body. “I think we’re short librarians, so I'm sure they’ll be able to find a position,” Miles explained, although we assume that as the New Education Regime expands, there’ll be less need for libraries, librarians, or troublesome nonconforming hu-mons.
Miles explained to the Chronicle that there was a perfectly good pile of management buzzwords for why librarians will be unnecessary in NES schools:
Miles said the staffing model for NES and NES-aligned schools does not include a librarian because the district must prioritize resources to meet specific outcomes, including closing the achievement gap, raising student proficiency and preparing kids for their future. His administration is raising teacher salaries and providing incentive bonuses to teachers and administrators at the campuses targeted for reform.
“Right now, we are going to try to raise achievement, we’re going to try to have high-quality instruction, so the focus is on those teachers who can do that,” he said. “If you have to prioritize resources, then you want to get a teacher who can deliver the science of reading versus a librarian.”
He wants to be forward-looking, to move fast and break things, and if old-fashioned modalities like browsing in the library, learning to love reading, and encountering new ideas have to be broken, well then librarians will just have to get with the times and streamline their operational functionalities for excellence, now won’t they?
Brooke King, a middle-school librarian in a different Houston-area district and the chair of the Texas Association of School Librarians, said the plan would be a bad move, but then that’s what you’d expect a fossil to say when confronted with the Brave New Education.
[King] said she loves finding the perfect book for students, especially those who claim to be non-readers. She hosts a lunchtime book club for students and collaborates with teachers to integrate technology into their lessons or help them find resources for certain topics.
Last year, for example, King helped a teacher find a graphic novel series for a class full of English language learners.
“The kids devoured it in like two days – and these are brand new English readers,” she said. “I had to start looking outside of my library to find them enough books to read.”
Well that sentimental nonsense didn’t list a single quantifiable output metric at all, now did it? How can these fuzzy-headed librarians think they’ll close the achievement gap without constantly drilling the students until they can pass standardized tests? It’s not like “love of learning” can be measured, so it’s useless, the end.
[Texas Monthly / Texas Observer / Houston Chronicle / NPR]
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I never would have guessed that Pink Floyd song was ACTUALLY a charter school business model.
"It requires teachers to teach from a scripted curriculum. "
The disrespect is explosive. Why not just put on a filmstrip and call it a day?