Dallas ISD trustees will receive the results of an independent investigation into Superintendent Mike Miles’ handling of a contract award this week.
Former U.S. Attorney Paul Coggins, who is leading the investigation, said the plan is to deliver a written report to trustees on Friday. He provided no details about his findings.
Board President Eric Cowan said that after trustees have had time to read the report, they’ll determine an appropriate time to meet.
A 72-hour notice is required for trustees to hold a regular or called meeting. However, an emergency meeting can be called with at least two hours notification to deal with unforeseen matters.
The investigation is looking into whether Miles tried to influence the outcome of a service contract award and whether he interfered with a district investigation into his actions.
A resignation letter from former operations chief Kevin Smelker has also become part of the investigation. An early draft of the resignation letter written by consultant Lisa LeMaster and sent to Miles and Smelker was highly critical of the school board, with explicit criticism of trustee Elizabeth Jones.
LeMaster’s draft, obtained by The Dallas Morning News through an open records request, was sent in an email dated June 16. Until the day before, she was under contract to provide communications consulting work for the school district under a three-month, $24,530 no-bid contract.
She has said that she was “off the books” when she helped Smelker and worked from an original draft from him. Last week, she could not remember when she received his original draft or how she got it.
Smelker’s final resignation letter, dated June 20, borrows extensively from the letter written by LeMaster.
The outside of Mike Miles' North Dallas home, which you can now buy. (Candy Evans/CandysDirt.com)
Dallas ISD Superintendent Mike Miles, whose wife and son moved back to Colorado last month, has listed his North Dallas home for sale for $799,000.
Miles and his wife, Karen, purchased the four-bedroom, three-and-a-half bathroom home near Forest Lane and Midway Road a year ago. The home was recently put up for sale, but it’s not listed online, according to Candy Evans of CandysDirt.com.
Miles is moving into an apartment closer to Dallas ISD’s administration building on Ross Avenue. His home on Hockaday Drive is a mile from W.T. White High School and a few blocks from the all-girls Hockaday School.
Miles and his wife never sold their Colorado Springs, Colo., home, and his wife and son have moved back into it.
You may have read the piece I wrote a couple of months ago about Thabit Pulak. The Richardson High School senior figured out how to use some pretty common household objects to create an effective way to filter arsenic from drinking water. Which is a huge deal in much of the world. He’d already picked up awards from major science fairs. The photo is of him holding his filter. (Read the whole story here.)
He sent me an email today noting another accomplishment. A $25,000 scholarship from the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a non-profit dedicated to encouraging smart students. The award announcement includes this:
Thabit’s work should ultimately bring the cost of arsenic water filters and arsenic water tests to an affordable level in third-world countries affected by arsenic-contaminated water groundwater. People will be able to afford these filtration units, and finally drink arsenic-free water. The quality of life for these people will drastically increase, as this will effectively eradicated arsenic-induced diseases like arsenicosis, which ends up in a bodily invasive cancer.
The day after Lisa LeMaster’s no-bid, $24,530 contract with the Dallas Independent School District ended in June, she wrote a resignation letter for one of Superintendent Mike Miles cabinet members, according to an email obtained by The Dallas Morning News
The letter from the communications consultant included high praise for Miles and a blistering critique of his bosses, the board of trustees. The harshest criticism focused on trustee Elizabeth Jones. Much of the criticisms in LeMaster’s draft appear in the final resignation letter by operations chief Kevin Smelker, the email shows. However, the final letter didn’t name Jones.
The email is now part of an independent investigation by former U.S. Attorney Paul Coggins. The investigation, which is due next week, is looking into whether Miles interfered with the awarding of a contract award. However, Coggins has been also reviewing work done by LeMaster.
The draft was attached to an email that LeMaster sent to Miles and Smelker on June 16 — the day after her contract with DISD ended. The subject line said “tough on Jones letter.”
“This is your punishment for making me watch the meetings from last August and last week. A new letter….that is very tough on Jones. Take a look and let me know what you think,” LeMaster wrote in the email obtained Friday through an open records request.
That draft portrayed Jones’ questions during board meetings as “relentless and ridiculous,” “laden with a prosecutorial attitude,” and “vitriolic and unbelievably uninformed.”
LeMaster was not available to comment Friday afternoon but said she would respond soon.
LeMaster told The News last week that she was “off the books” when she helped Smelker with his resignation letter. She said she toned it down. But there is no indication she did, according to information received by The News.
LeMaster has said that most of her communication with Miles and Smelker was through private email. In the seven minutes after she sent the draft letter to them, she tried to recall it three times, records show. The email became public record because she accidentally sent it to Miles’ Dallas ISD email address. There is no indication Miles responded to LeMaster on his DISD account.
She has refused to say what role, if any, Miles played in crafting Smelker’s letter. She has referred those questions to Miles, whom the board prohibited from speaking to the news media about the investigation.
Smelker turned in the final version of the resignation letter to Miles on June 20. In it, Smelker said, “It saddens me to say that I have never encountered more unsupportive, unprofessional board members than some of the select ones which I have worked under for the past year.”
LeMaster received a $24,530 contract in February to help Dallas ISD when it was operating without a communications chief. Contracts over $25,000 require bids. She led a 90-minute media relations training with cabinet members and crafted a 12-page communications department reorganization plan.
Separate emails obtained by The News show that Miles met LeMaster in December through Rene Martinez, a North Texas director for the League of United Latin American Citizens. The day after Christmas, Martinez emailed Miles and told him to contact LeMaster, who could help with communications. The email came a few days after former DISD communications chief Jennifer Sprague agreed to resign.
“Lisa Lemaster can also help you find a respected and competent replacement for Sprague,” Martinez said in the email. “Using Lisa … she can help you with Communications.”
Later that day, Miles and LeMaster exchanged emails and set up a date to meet in person. Private investigators, who are working with Coggins, asked Martinez about his connections with LeMaster.
I had mixed feelings when I read it. Two of my children’s best elementary school teachers were veteran educators. They knew how to reach kids. On the other hand, I’ve seen veterans who are pretty resistant to change. And I have seen data about some schools that show veteran teachers really don’t make much difference on rates of achievement.
So, I’m throwing this issue out for discussion. I know some may hate charters and Teach for America. But what if fresh, sometimes young teachers can build energy in a school in only for a few years?
Update at 11:19 a.m.:TEA has just announced it will create the Office of Complaints, Investigations and School Accountability, as suggested in today’s state audit.
Original post: As Jeff just noted, the State Auditor issued a damning report today on the Texas Education Agency’s failure to thoroughly investigate cheating allegations in El Paso ISD.
The report concludes: “After the Agency concluded in 2010 that the allegations of cheating could not be substantiated, two independent investigations confirmed that widespread systemic cheating had, in fact, occurred.”
Among the problems with TEA’s investigations, the auditor found:
The Agency did not travel to El Paso or attempt to interview individuals with knowledge of the cheating schemes, including EPISD staff, an elected official who had filed a written complaint, parents, or students.
The Agency conducted only a desk review and relied primarily on self-reported information submitted by EPISD.
In other words, TEA’s “investigation” took place largely from desks in Austin. This isn’t the first time, either.
Josh Benton and I first wrote in 2004 about highly suspicious scores on TAKS tests. After we reported on statistically improbable gains at many schools, TEA hired a Caveon, a Utah-based test security firm, to analyze TAKS scores. Caveon flagged hundreds of schools for more review. Here’s what Josh wrote in 2007:
TEA investigated the 700 schools. But in more than 90 percent of cases, the investigation consisted solely of sending school officials a questionnaire about their test-security policies. If schools did not provide information that indicated improprieties, they were cleared.
…The News, with the assistance of prominent scholars in the cheating-detection field, performed its own statistical analysis on TAKS scores for 2005 and 2006 and found significant cheating at a number of cleared schools on the Caveon list. The most spectacular was Jesse Jackson Academy, where entire grades of students gave long rows of identical wrong answers.
TEA shut down Jesse Jackson Academy in 2008. It did so based on widespread financial problems — not problems with test integrity.
Meanwhile, TEA has made some test score information off-limits to the public. The News reviewed erasure-analysis reports and strings of multiple-choice answers from TAKS. Since then, the TEA has declared those to be exempt under the Texas Open Records Act.
TEA has a new commissioner, Michael Williams, who was not involved with the El Paso ISD or prior TAKS investigations by TEA.
He told the El Paso Times: “This is a new agency, this is a new leadership team and this leadership team understands the importance of aggressively ferreting out and identifying the truth.”
The El Paso Times uncovered a pervasive cheating scandal in 2010 in the El Paso school district. The scandal led eventually to the state taking over the district to clean up the mess. State education commissioner Michael Williams commissioned an internal investigation to see why the Texas Education Agency didn’t catch the problem earlier. The agency gave the Times an advance copy of the report. The Times reports that the results aren’t pretty:
The Texas Education Agency lacks the ability to detect cheating on school accountability measures, and instead relies on school districts to police themselves, the State Auditor’s Office said in a report to be released today.
Williams blamed his predecessor, Robert Scott, who stepped down in 2012:
“This was an entire organizational breakdown and I think, quite frankly, it started at the top of the organization,” Williams said in an interview with the Times. “It started with the old leadership team, who failed this agency, failed the people of the city of El Paso and failed this state.”
It’s not like the TEA didn’t get plenty of warning. Back in 2007, the DMN’s Holly K. Hacker and Joshua Benton produced an award-winning series that uncovered cheating on the TAKS test. One story started like this:
In 1975, a social scientist named Donald Campbell came up with the idea that would eventually be called Campbell’s Law. He wrote like an academic, but you could boil the concept down to this:
The higher the stakes, the more likely people are to cheat.
It makes intuitive sense. The Dallas Morning News’ analysis of TAKS scores found that cheating is almost twice as common on the 11th-grade test – which is required for graduation – as on the 10th-grade test.
But experts say that Texas has missed the lesson of Campbell’s Law. Over the past two decades, the state’s tests have become the dominant force in Texas education. But they say the state’s test-security system – the rules and tools officials use to prevent cheating – hasn’t kept up with the increasing importance the TAKS test now has in students’ and educators’ lives.
The state legislature changed up graduation requirements in HB5. And it’s really going to affect students starting next year. In fact, a lot of the details of the system have yet to be decided by the State Board of Education. But Education Commissioner Michael Williams says there’s no need to wait for a few incoming seniors:
While the majority of seniors this year will continue to graduate under the existing Minimum High School Program (MHSP), Recommended High School Program (RHSP), and Distinguished Achievement Program (DAP), a small group of students may meet the requirements for the new Foundation High School Program and choose to graduate under that program. However, the requirements for the endorsements and performance acknowledgments have not yet been determined by the State Board of Education (SBOE). Consequently, a student who chooses to graduate under the Foundation High School Program in 2013-2014 will earn a foundation diploma only and will not have the option to earn an endorsement, the distinguished level of achievement, or a performance acknowledgment.
The advantage? Maybe the possibility of taking advantage of the greater flexibility under the new plan. Meaning a student would not have to meet the requirements of the “four by four” and could take some other electives instead of the fourth math and science courses and would get to pick more options for the fourth English credit. That link includes an attachment with a chart showing all the possible options.
This isn’t really the final word on the subject. The commissioner intends to set the rules for all of this in the near future. But the rule-setting procedure allows for public comment. So it will be at least several weeks before the final decisions will be made. Long after classes started for incoming seniors.
Whose responsibility is it to get this information to the appropriate students? The commissioner’s letter does not say. I’m guessing that high school counselors are looking at this and feeling their heads exploding.
Other district business, the kind that isn’t exempt under the Texas Open Meetings Act, must take place where the public can observe. But a Garland couple said they didn’t get that chance Wednesday.
Dorothy Zimmermann said she and her husband, Paul, arrived at the Omni while trustees met privately in a fifth-floor room to interview candidates. The Zimmermanns go to DCCCD meetings a lot. They’d seen the posted agenda (below) for Wednesday. They showed up late, but they wanted to wait outside the room until trustees reconvened in open session. Maybe, Zimmermann said, trustees would share their general impression of the candidates, or say how many they’d interviewed.
Here’s where the stories diverge. Zimmermann said a DCCCD security officer told her and Paul there was nothing else going on, and they could leave. Later, according to Zimmermann, a hotel security officer said they had to leave the hotel. So they paid the $12 parking fee and left.
Ann Hatch, a district spokeswoman, said the DCCCD officer did not ask them to leave. And that the hotel security officer said the Zimmermanns were welcome to wait downstairs in the lobby.
“I’m sure if they’d asked somebody to let them know when executive session was over, we could have made some arrangements,” Hatch said.
Zimmermann said the district should have done a better job accommodating the public, even if the public was just her and her husband. “There were no chairs for the public. There was nothing provided for the public, period,” she said.
Usually trustees meet at DCCCD headquarters on South Lamar Street, just a mile from the Omni. The meetings take place in an auditorium. When trustees meet in closed session, they go to a different room, and members of the public can stay in the auditorium until trustees return.
Trustees met off-site to give job candidates more privacy. It’s not unusual — Dallas ISD trustees interviewed superintendent candidates at the same Omni last year.
The bill isn’t final, but DCCCD officials estimate it cost $5,600 for two days of meeting space, parking, catering and Wi-Fi at the Omni.
Zimmermann’s take? “They could have had it on any (DCCCD) campus, with free parking.”
the more I think the mayor is right. DISD’s trustees should either decide to fire Miles or keep him.
Sure, they need to wait for the report from Paul Coggins to see if Miles has made a Nixon-like offense that warrants a quick dismissal. But if they don’t see that, they need to either let the man do his job or get rid of him for whatever other reason they seem to think justifies a dismissal.
Of course, if trustees vote to keep him, which I hope they would do barring a Nixon-type offense, trustees still must oversee his work. That is their job. That is why we elect them to their posts. But there is a difference between overseeing a superintendent and making it very difficult for a superintendent to pursue his or her goals.
I don’t know if Rawlings is right about the resistance to Miles being “personality-driven.” It could be, but I think the larger resistance stems from the reforms the superintendent is pursuing, such as stronger school leadership and new ways of evaluating educators.
But the motivation may not make any difference. The fact is, we either need to let Miles go forward this year with his agenda or get rid of him. If the board thinks he is the right person for the job, say so. If not, get someone else.
