When the State Brings Its Own Binder

Some mornings I sit out on the porch and think about borrowed things. Borrowed cups of sugar, borrowed time, borrowed trust. Out here in Chamberlain's Bend, borrowing is practically a civic institution. You borrow Earl's post-hole digger, you return it sharp and you bring something for his wife. That's not a transaction. That's civilization.

Texas, I'm told, has a different philosophy.

Since 2020, the Texas Education Agency has taken over eight local school districts. The official word is that these districts were failing, and by the state's own measure, they were, five straight years of low test scores and the state walks in with its own managers, its own superintendent picks, its own plan. Four new takeovers just this spring. Austin's on the list now too. They're not borrowing anything. They're moving into the pantry, replacing the cook, and handing out menus nobody in the neighborhood ordered.

Now, I don't want to be unfair. The schools they took over were struggling. Real struggling, not just low-scores-on-a-Tuesday struggling. Kids weren't getting what they needed. Something had to give. I'll grant them that much, and I'll grant it sincerely.

But here's where my porch-thinking gets going.

The approach they're running, it comes mostly through a fellow named Mike Miles and his network of managers. Scripted lessons. Repetitive testing. Principals fired. Some schools handed over to charter operators. In Houston, they pulled out the librarians and, according to one elected board member, turned some of those library spaces into what she called detention rooms. Mental health staff got cut. Local rules about hiring and grievances got suspended. A teacher who was also a union president stood up to protest the curriculum changes and got fired for it. A superintendent from the Miles operation testified in favor of that firing and said, plain as anything, "We do not allow our staff to make decisions about curriculum."

Well. I sat with that one a while.

This reminds me of the Great St. Olaf's Altar Guild Schism of ought-nine. For those who've never encountered an altar guild, it's a group of women who handle the church linens and the flower arrangements, and the politics are conducted entirely over coffee cake with authority earned through decades of quiet service. Old Hilda Thorson had been arranging the lilies since the Nixon administration. She could make a gladiolus look penitent.

Then a new pastor's wife arrived from Minneapolis. She had a binder. Full of diagrams. She bypassed Hilda entirely and presented her vision for what she called "streamlined and accountable" floral arrangements.

Hilda looked at the binder for a long moment and said, "My dear, the lilies do not read diagrams."

The meeting ran three hours. The lilies ended up arranged exactly as they always had been. The coffee cake, however, was ruined beyond recovery. The pastor and his wife transferred within the year. The lilies, I'm told, have never been better.

The Texas situation is that binder, but with the force of law behind it.

Here's the thing about measuring a school, or a lily, or a pie, or really anything that involves human beings trying to do right by each other. You can measure what's easy to measure. Height of the lily. Score on the test. And the Texas numbers do show improvement on that front, fewer schools rated F, scores trending up in some places. That's real. I'm not going to wave it away.

But if you judge a lily only by its height and not its scent, you might get a taller lily. You will not get a garden.

My grandmother made apple pies that were, without exaggeration, a spiritual experience. She never once measured anything. Pinch of this, dash of that, forty years of knowing what the dough needed before the dough knew it itself. You could not have written her recipe down. You certainly could not have standardized it. The thing that made those pies what they were was exactly the thing that couldn't be put in a binder.

I'm not saying the state of Texas has bad intentions. I genuinely don't think they do. I think they looked at children not getting educated and decided something had to be done, and they are doing something. That part I respect.

What I keep coming back to is what gets lost when the binder is all that matters. The librarian who knew which kid needed which book. The principal who understood that this particular neighborhood needed this particular approach. The teacher who stayed late not because a script told her to but because she knew the kid. Those things don't show up on a rating. They don't fit in a column. They are, in fact, almost impossible to prove are happening. And so when the binder arrives, they tend to be the first things that go.

Aunt Vi, who has been wrong about nothing since the Carter administration, to hear her tell it, has a saying. "You can fix a fence without knowing your neighbor, but you can't fix a community that way."

She's right, as usual, and I find it irritating, as usual.

The borrowed cup of sugar works because it assumes you'll be neighbors again tomorrow. The whole transaction runs on the expectation of continuity, of relationship, of something that outlasts the sugar. When you stop borrowing and start taking, you get a cleaner pantry and a lonelier street.

Texas may well raise its test scores. I hope it does. I hope every kid in every one of those districts gets what they need and then some.

I just wonder who's going to arrange the lilies when Hilda's gone, and whether the person who replaced her will have any idea what they're looking at.

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