This is a good time to reflect on the difficulty of finding truth in the battle over school reform in Dallas, because at this moment I don't seem to be able to get through the front door. I am standing on the parking lot at James Madison High School on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in South Dallas, trying to get into a community meeting organized by school board member Bernadette Nutall to rally support for Marian Willard, principal of Madison. It's a cool breezy evening in March.
Apparently Willard is on a list of some 50 principals slated for replacement under the school reform campaign of the new superintendent, Mike Miles. Nutall is mad at Miles and doesn't want Willard removed. This rally is, among other things, an orchestrated media event to show how beloved Willard is and what a great job she's doing. My feelings are hurt since I'm supposed to be in the media, and I can't even get in the door. But there's a fight in the parking lot, right in front of the door.
One fighter slips off quickly when half a dozen school district cops materialize. The cops and some male school employees form a bear-baiting ring around the remaining combatant, a big male student who is waving fists, making little bluff-runs, retreating, trying to break out of the ring. The cops and faculty don't want to grapple, so they goad and herd from safe distances. They don't look bored exactly, but you can tell they've been down this road before.
Mark Graham
Dallas ISD Superintendent Mike Miles.
Mark Graham
Former DISD principal Donna Johnson.
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A dozen male students and a couple girls who had been walking away from the school have regrouped now in the parking lot to watch. The kid sees his public looking at him, and he starts John Wayne-ing a little more. The cops back off a pace. TV crews are about to show up. What to do with this?
The front door flies open and a long willowy figure appears, silhouetted in the aura of bright light spilling from the hallway. It's school trustee Nutall. She scopes the scene in a split-second. Her normally bulletproof composure explodes. She shouts angrily at the cops: "This does not need to be in front of the cameras! Y'all need to move this out of here!"
The cops exchange "do-it" looks, then make a serious run at the kid. It's enough to scare him away from the door. Like seasoned horse-trainers, the police dance the young man backward around a corner and out of view. One cop hangs back, menacing onlookers not to follow. Whatever happens to that kid, I do not hear a thing.
Half an hour later about 120 people are seated in the high school auditorium. They cheer and applaud as Nutall introduces speaker after speaker to sing praises of Principal Willard. (Willard declined to comment for this story.)
One speaker familiar to the crowd here tonight is Wilbur Williams, retired principal at Pearl C. Anderson Middle School. He's an orator. He tells the crowd: "I asked one of the people who work at this school, 'When's the last time you had a fight at this school?'" He affects an expression of puzzled bewilderment. "He said, 'I don't know.'"
From the audience, Juanita Wallace, head of the Dallas branch of the NAACP, shouts the response. "They don't have them."
Williams takes it up emphatically: "They don't have them!"
And there you have it. No fights at James Madison High School! So the one half an hour ago at the front door must have been a history-making first.
Something about the fight over school reform makes people on all sides say crazy stuff. It's about children, and children always make people crazy. It's about jobs and money. But perhaps even more crazy-making, school reform is also about a bitter half-century fight for racial justice in Dallas, the city that made Little Rock look reasonable. In that long war, one of the toughest struggles was to force the opening up of lucrative administrative jobs to black candidates. Call it fairness, call it political patronage, call it what you like: Those jobs are dearly coveted and tightly held by the people who have them now, and their removal will not be quiet.
That said, by the time this story appears, most of the real behind-the-scenes fighting will have been resolved. While partisans of all stripes have been duking it out for the cameras, most of the people slated for removal have been quietly negotiating severance packages, according to very reliable sources. To some extent, the public acrimony has served as pressure to sweeten some of those deals.
Another factor not visible to the public, according to sources outside the administration, is that a few of the principals to be replaced are not under the gun for reasons having anything to do with academics or the reform program. In two or three cases, principals have been targets of investigation by the district's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), which looks into how money is handled and other forms of misfeasance.
All of which skirts a fundamental question: Why would black and Hispanic leaders not be on the other side of the battlements, shoulder-to-shoulder with Mike Miles fighting to close the egregious ethnic student achievement gap in the Dallas school system? Pointing to that gap, Miles says, "We have to ask ourselves, is it OK?" So is it? Is the achievement gap a fair trade-off for the jobs? Did anybody ask the kids?
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