My efforts during the 2008-09 academic term to try to establish the academic and organizational framework for a true reform effort failed spectacularly.

That reality is as much my fault as anyone else’s. I came to this town in 1983 as publisher of The Katy Times. I also ran an aggressive public policy research organization in Harris County for about decade and worked there even longer.

During the 28 years (this month) that I have lived in Katy, I always placed a higher value on the integrity of my research and the independence that requires than maintaining friendships with people in the community.

The consequence of that decision of 28 years is that I bruised a lot of feelings on almost every side of every issue. Since the number of people that I have greatly agitated with my independence far, far outnumbers the few enduring friends I have, it was probably unrealistic to believe that I was a good vehicle to try to organize such a reform effort. There were simply too many fights with too many potential allies for too long. I wouldn’t change those fights, but I simply, apparently, cannot change the consequences of them.

From the day that I walked onto the campus of Wesley Elementary School in Houston I.S.D. in 1991 and led a revolution with Gayle Fallon of the Houston Federation of Teachers against the administration of that district, public education research has really been my only true and continuing professional passion. There have been other issues. However, all paled in comparison to public education accountability.

I recall a meeting that I had with Leonard Merrell after he was named superintendent but before he took the reigns officially.

I warned him then that public education was on a spending trajectory and management trajectory that could not be supported forever. I warned him that Texas was 10 years to 15 years away from an absolute taxpayer revolt because God would not make enough money to allow schools districts to endlessly spend like drunken sailors. There would be a day of reckoning within 10 to 15 years.

My position then was that he had a unique opportunity to begin the process of redesigning the delivery of secondary education. It made no sense then and it makes no sense now, I warned, to spending tens of millions of dollars to building mega high schools for every 3,000 human butts between the ages of freshman and senior in high school. (At least exclusively.)

It made no sense to spend millions of dollars on physical facilities (in effect a production plant where the product is graduates)and operate that production plant from basically 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. for the core mission.

It was my position then that regardless of how “efficient” in traditional terms one could make the internal runnings of a high school, the inherent, systemic inefficiency could not be overcome as demand grew and expenses rose.

My plea to him then was that he form a real, functioning community based group that looked at expanding the delivery of secondary education that included the traditional with new approaches.

The goal that I asked him to consider was transitional but would lead to the movement of a minimum standard that no less than 25% of the core subject instruction of secondary classes in Katy I.S.D. would be delivered past the traditional time the schools remain open. To be certain, the 25% goal was the transitional goal to be achieved within a period of 5-7 years with a more aggresive effort based upon proven results to follow.

When I asked Merrell to consider this analytical process, I instinctively knew as I left the meeting that he was far too much of a traditional bureaucrat to even think about going down that path. His tenure proved that too be true.

During the last several years, there’s most likely not one individual in the United States not affiliated with the major funds that big groups provide who has used the public information laws to obtain more raw data on public education than I have.

The strategy that I called for as Merrell came on board in Katy I.S.D. was needed then; it is behond desperately needed now.

However, with Cambridge Strategery Katy I.S.D. plows fast forward into the past.

What all my research proves is exactly what parents are reluctant to admit here in Katy.

The organization and delivery of secondary curriculum in Katy, throughout Texas, and throughout the nation is so grossly inefficient that the prospects for reform grow dimmer every day of every year.

The academic trend of the obliteration of any meaningful form of ability grouping (outside the AP courses) that was on the horizon 15 or so years ago is now omnipresent.

My research has proved beyond any empirical doubt that even the honors classes throughout Katy are now being impacted and the regular classes are becoming academic versions of helter-skelter.

We build high schools for about 3,000 students that gives us “X” number of production units (classrooms) to use per day.

Organizationally, we consume those classrooms first with obligatory demands that I won’t enumerate. We create goofy schedules in the guise of academic strength (all math teachers take the same conference period every day for instance)thus removing “X” number of those classrooms from the production line for one subject 12-15% of the day depending upon the schedule. Then, we do that for every core subject every day. We take a finite number of rooms available to us from about 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. and we eliminate significant chunks of those classrooms from utility every day.

Then, when we are ready to create core subject classrooms we subtract out some of the honors classes and treat the rest like we are using a machine to pour gunnite in a swimming pool. Only this time, what we are pouring is not concrete, it is kids with academic skills of such disparity that too many classroom teachers are given virtually impossible instructional tasks.

My study on the Algebra II classrooms in Katy I.S.D. documented with certitude the fact of this condition that is NOT restricted to just math.

So here we are in 2010 on the eve of another bond issue to keep marching down the path that public education has been marching down for the past 25 years (at least).

You have a school board comprised of good people who have chosen a path acqiescence and surrender to its administrators. Armed with Phd’s and EdD’s, these group- think academic philosophers freed from any meaningful oversight by a school board that revels in its conscious and lazy ignorance keep marching you where they want to take you.

Here are two facts.

1. Katy I.S.D. is producing high school graduates that are smarter and better prepared academically than in anytime in its history. So too, are Klein, Alief, Humble, Houston I.S.D. and on and on. The very best of our best students are doing extremely well.

2. Katy I.S.D. is a sleeping time bomb of pervasive mediocrity that has encroached into the classrooms over the past 10 years at an alarming rate. The State’s accountability system won’t tell you that because it is based upon academic corruption. It is a system that is designed to let the Houston’s I.S.D.’s of Texas ‘crow’ that some 75% or so its campuses are recognized or exemplary – a pathological lie from the TEA that is so sociopathic in nature, that even they probably believe it. A system that allows HISD to ‘launder’ high levels of functional illiteracy into the upper levels of accountability will do wonders for genuinely good school districts such as Katy.

Katy is a dramatically different school district than it was when Hugh Hayes passed the administrative torch to Leonard Merrell.

As Merrell begat Frailey, the district is now embarked in the final phase of determining its future.

Frailey does not have the luxury of time that Merrell had.

Merrell blew it because he was comfortable in the status quo of public education bureaucracy.

Frailey’s decision to proceed with the ‘big dog’ Cambridge Strategery tells me that he’s no different.

So, here comes Cambridge Strategery to justify to the Board what it has already preordained to do. So here comes Cambridge Strategery to tell parents and taxpayers what they want to hear:

Mirror, mirror on the wall.
Who is the grandest of them all?

Says Cambridge Strategery’s mirror:

Why you are!

It’s amazing what a $60,000 mirror will tell you when you want to hear it.

We all need to be sure that we understand the game plan here: building a giant football stadium takes precedence over everything else–except maybe the creation of a United Nations high school at the east end of the district.

Forget academic excellence for our children. Forget well paid teachers. Forget improving curriculum design that includes traditional studies.

When Leonard Merrell was hired (over my NO vote), the first thing he did was waste everyone’s time doing a “strategic plan.” Doing a “strategic plan” is de rigueur for superintendents who want to look like they know what they’re doing. The District spent who knows how much money to do that, and all of us involved (board members, yes people, but only ONE teacher that I insisted they include) spent months playing games with the facilitator to come up with mindless “plans” that no one had any intention of implementing.

In the end, The Katy Plan, as it was called, was voted on by the Board and approved 7-0, (which made it legal and compelling on the superintendent to follow). It was then paraded around like it meant something.

I worked really hard to include some things I thought should be in The Katy Plan. The most important one was that the school district had to implement ability grouping in grades 3 through 12 by 1998. Ability grouping existed in KISD until 1992 when another superintendent, Hugh Hayes, just removed it without asking anyone, including the School Board. Of course, after I left the board, no one monitored what Superintendent Merrell did, and so there was no follow through on pledges made in the soon forgotten Katy Plan. (Ability grouping makes a HUGE difference in the quality of instruction for average and above average students.)

If one asks current Board President, Joe Adams, (who also attended all those Katy Plan meetings) about the Katy Plan when he triennially runs for office, he can’t seem to remember what it was or what it said. Never mind that it was incumbent on him to make sure the plan was implemented and dereliction of duty for the superintendent NOT to implement what the board legally voted on TO implement!

Now we have another superintendent who wants to do some strategic planning. Like all other overpaid superintendents, he is unable to do that planning by himself, so he has to hire consultants. The company that he’s gotten the Board to hire, Cambridge Strategic Services, is run by former school administrators, I’m guessing. After all, when these fellows take school districts to the cleaners with their salaries and retire with less than a full salary, they have to think of other ways to sustain their lifestyle.

Suggesting that this is all about “strategic planning” is a ruse. The bottom line, if one goes to their web site, is that these folks help inept superintendents run a bond initiative. That’s why we’re paying $59,000+ and expenses for travel, lodging and food, and perhaps funding for employees to go to workshops elsewhere.

Go to their web site (if they haven’t pulled it down by the time you read this) and check out the fine print. It’s all there. (http://www.cambridgestrategics.com)

As George Bush once said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.” A “strategic services” consultant will let them do that.