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Kids are born knowing how to do this. Do they really need special instruction and encouragement in it from the school board?

Two stories in yesterday's Dallas Morning News were bookends for the debate on school rigor. In one, three Dallas school board members launched a campaign against too much testing, saying it's mean to the kids. In the other, the head of the biggest company by far in Dallas and one of the biggest in the world, Exxon-Mobil, said 200,000 good jobs are going unfilled because American students are too dumb to do them.

Did I just say "too dumb?" Do excuse me. Rex Tillerson, chairman and chief executive of Exxon-Mobil, never used that phrase in addressing the quarterly meeting of the Business Roundtable recently and never would. He said instead that too many schools are "producing a defective product."

So take your pick. Which would you rather have your kid be? Too dumb? Or a defective product? Man, if those are the only choices, I'm thinking I could handle too dumb a little better than the other. At least it's human.

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Wikipedia

The year 2007, when we voted to put a toll road in the flood zone along the Trinity River, was also when flat hair and thick makeup were big. Remember?

Last night's Trinity River toll road debate in Oak Cliff was a barnburner. A crowd of 450-plus broke into repeated emotional applause for City Council member Scott Griggs, who delivered a series of speeches attacking the road that were a cross between Winston Churchill and Tom Cruise -- powerful to the point of being positively electrifying.

Also loudly applauded were urban planner Patrick Kennedy -- since when does an urban planner get foot-stomps and cheers? - and architect Robert Meckfessel (or an architect, for that matter?). Both men delivered clear coherent rebuttals to the very foggy arguments of the pro-toll road side.

See also: Tearing Down I-345

On that side, the pros, former council member Craig Holcomb was shaky-voiced and cranky, sneering at the crowd for preferring, he said, emotion to facts. Former City Manager Mary Suhm was mainly silent. North Central Texas Council of Governments Transportation Director Michael Morris did the best job of the three at keeping his cool, but eventually even he became so rattled that he announced for the first time ever he was reducing the cost of the toll road from $1.8 billion to "less than a billion." The sense of some in the room was that if they had been able to keep the meeting going longer they might have been able to bring Morris' cost estimate down to $9.99.

See also: Former Trinity Toll Road Defenders

For all that it was a really substantive exchange on both sides, and I'm going to get into some detail about it in a column for next week. Meanwhile, yesterday before the meeting I was thinking about something I knew would come up in the debate. And it did. We heard again the assertion that the voters have voted for the road twice and the matter was laid to rest in the road's favor in the 2007 referendum.

And that is true. The last time voters endorsed this project was in 2007, when they voted 53 to 47 percent in favor of building an expressway between flood control levees on the banks of the river in an area subject to flooding on a twice annual basis. That is, voters voted not to build the new expressway outside the floodway where it wouldn't flood.

So, 2007? How has that year held up generally against the test of time? Hard to gauge, because it's sort of caught just on the knife-edge between a time too close for real perspective and a time too far back for clear memory. I got to wondering if there were any benchmarks we might use that would help us put a value on 2007 -- you know, what we were thinking back then and what we know now.

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Wikipedia

Amazing how out of date this 7-year-old picture is of the supporters of the Trinity toll road. They're all wearing Tommy Hilfiger now.

When a panel discussion of the proposed Trinity toll road begins this evening at 6:30 pm at Rosemont Elementary, something will be quite different about it compared with the same kind of events during the run-up to an anti-Trinity road referendum seven years ago. Everything.

Seven years ago the supporters of the road were a lockstep army that included all of the establishment media and pretty much the entire elected and business leadership of the city. They painted any and all opponents as heretics, loons and embezzlers, saving their special venom for City Council member Angela Hunt, who organized the referendum. She was accused of being a ... referendum organizer. How she escaped being burned at the stake we still do not know.

Now it's almost as if we could have a conversation. Just take a look at The Dallas Morning News. Yesterday Brandon Formby had a piece in the paper providing a balanced and informative portrait of the issues. In recent months Formby has given readers key information about the search for funding for the unbuilt 16-year-old project -- insights readers wouldn't have had without his work. Rudy Bush on the paper's editorial has been tough on efforts by the mayor to do a last minute rescue of the project's failing political prospects.

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Wikipedia

Taking a brief break this morning from expected regular Three Stooges coverage of DISD, we bring you news of actual education taking place.

Sometimes we reporters who write about the schools get so busy reporting on whether school board members have been engaging in fisticuffs with the staff and why the cops had to hustle a board member out of a school, we lose sight of the boring peripheral questions like whether the children are learning anything. A couple of people recently asked me to go back and look at a story that has been up on the Dallas Independent School District's web page for a full month, and ...

Wow. That's amazing. Had you heard about this? Oh, maybe not, because I don't think any of us in the reporting business told you about it. According to a private outfit called the National Math + Science Initiative (NMSI), DISD leads the nation in advanced placement scores for minority students.

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Mark Graham

Make jokes if you wish, but southern Dallas is going to miss Dwaine Caraway when he terms out on City Council.

The Dallas Morning News editorial page subscribes to the belief that our mayor accomplishes a great good when he calls attention to disparities between the city's white and not-white hemispheres. I assume the paper also would give itself credit for doing the same with its years-old editorial page campaign, which they call "Bridging the Gap," and for which I have my own name, "Hey, Did You Hear About the Gap?"

I'm all for people hearing about it. I can even make myself shut my own mouth, sometimes, when I'm tempted to say, "How could anyone in Dallas not know about the gap?"

But here we are, many years into calling attention to the gap, and I don't see much measurable change on the ground that can be fairly attributed either to "Bridging the Gap" or to the mayor's initiative, which he calls "Grow South."

So, wait? Did I just say nothing has changed? Did I just say South Dallas, as I usually still call it, is still cut off from the prosperity of North Dallas by a racial Berlin Wall? No. I don't believe anybody who was familiar with South Dallas 20 years ago, as I was, can drive it today and fail to see real positive change.

I didn't say nothing has changed. What I would offer instead is that the major changes I do see on the ground have precious little to do Grow South or Bridging the Gap -- both admirable efforts at reaching in from beyond to do good works -- and a lot more to do with the efforts of South Dallas' own leadership, and maybe it would profit us to ponder that possibility.

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Wikipedia

Guests arriving for the Commenters Holiday Feast at Chateau Schutzingdon-Chittyding

At the very warmest and most satisfying moment in Thanksgiving Day dinner yesterday, when all was right with the world and I felt truly thankful for my good fortune, a thought struck my skull like a hammer against a church bell.

"What about the commenters?"

On Thanksgiving Day, Hanukkah, Christmas, the end of Ramadan, we abandon our blogs without a thought and gather happily at the hearth with loved ones, but where do the commenters go? Who tells their old stories and sings their old songs with them? Mavdog, RTGolden1, The Credible Hulk, Myrna, ThePosterFormerlyKnownasPaul: Does anyone prepare a feast for them?

I shook it off and enjoyed the rest of a long afternoon in the comfort of family, but when I lay my head on the pillow and prepared to fall asleep last night the thought revisited me like a vengeful spirit: "How can you slumber," the spirit asked, "not knowing where the commenters spent this chilly day and what they did without the blog?"

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Trustee Bernadette Nutall, the arbiter of blackness.

Dallas Schools yesterday released copies of the complaints against school system trustee Bernadette Nutall that have spurred an ongoing external investigation of her conduct. The complaints include a reference to something I reported here a week ago having to do with Nutall socking somebody.

See also: Nutall Probe Will Include Abuse of DISD Staff

I hope, if anyone intends to make something out of this, they've got a lot more than this. In the complaint (see below) a school district executive who was herself the target of an investigation tells the superintendent of schools she heard a rumor that Nutall once hit somebody and was worried about getting popped herself by Nutall. I can see that as the subject of a legitimate nightmare, but I'm not sure I would have included it in a written complaint.

Nutall, for the record, told me last week that she has never had a physical altercation with anybody at the school district.

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Wikipedia

Did you ever wonder why Tiny Tim's the one who's always laughing?

Let me make sure I've got this right. The Dallas City Council, local grocery chains and the Texas Retailers Association go at it for two years about a plastic bag ban. Last March at the end of a long, agonizing process, the council passes a deeply compromised ordinance that doesn't ban plastic bags but does put a 5-cent tax on all bags, plastic or paper.

The grocery stores ain't happy with the outcome. They try to end-run the city with an appeal to the Texas attorney general.
The AG sends them back a very mixed message. He says the bag tax is probably illegal, but his opinion is not binding on Dallas. But he also says a total ban would be legal.

See also: Retailers turn to Greg Abbott

City Council member and anti-bagger Dwaine Caraway says if the grocers sue the city on the bag tax he'll go for a total ban. So the grocers agree to take what they've got and promise not to sue anybody over it.

Love it, hate it, whatever you think, this is over. The ref counted to ten 10 held up Caraway's glove. On January 1 of next year, the new law goes into effect.

More than anybody else, the guy most identified with the grocers in all this was Gary Huddleston, media spokesman for the Kroger Co. in the Southwest. He was the main spear-carrier for the grocers and other retailers. So you know what you do when the fight is over and you lost, right? The ring is empty. The crowds have left the hall. This one's in the history books.

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Daniel Fishel

Two moments caught my ear last week when Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings addressed a well-heeled, smoothly coiffed crowd about the latest effort to get a new highway built along the river through downtown. He's hiring a panel of experts to help redesign the road, months before a final federal ruling up or down on the existing design.

Huh? Yeah, that's a tough one to crack. We'll come back to that here in a second.

The gathering was in a fake-rustic barbecue restaurant in a kind of restaurant theme park where people try out national franchising concepts. So just in sitting down we're already a couple steps removed from reality.

Rawlings said at one point: "I want to thank the Dallas Citizens Council, the Dallas Regional Chamber, the Real Estate Council, Downtown Dallas Inc., the Trinity Commons Foundation, the Stemmons Business Corridor and anonymous individuals who have helped us fund this initiative."

When he said it, I gazed around the room and saw 100 or so beautifully coiffed heads, connected, I was sure, to 200 or so cute shoes tucked beneath the tables. I thought, "It's true, he's right, they're all here, probably including everyone's favorite Dallas band name, The Anonymous Individuals. What a hoe-down (as in farm implement)."

Then the mayor read from a handout describing the résumés of several experts already hired to come in and help redesign the final design for the Trinity toll road just before the final design is finalized. I promise I am going to explain this in a minute.

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It's possible that HUD has only fought its way deeper into the wet paper sack.

Couple weeks ago just before leaving town on vacation, I told you the city of Dallas won big and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Affairs lost big in a settlement of the 5-year-old HUD complaint against the city for racial discrimination. Wouldn't you know, court papers were filed the day after I left town, making the win-lose picture a lot less black and white. So this is catch-up on that.

See also: Dallas Won. HUD lost. Oops

And here is an important hint: remember that Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings went out of his way after the settlement to offer near-blubbery thanks and praise to newly sworn HUD Secretary Julian Castro, up until recently the mayor of San Antonio, for his help getting Dallas off the hook.

Castro's only significant experience with HUD, before becoming head of it, was as the target of a HUD complaint for misspending HUD neighborhood stabilization money in 2012 . Maybe it's unsurprising that he came into office somewhat more favorably disposed toward accused mayors than toward HUD's own enforcement lawyers.

At any rate it's safe to say the Castro/Rawlings deal getting Dallas out of HUD's gun-sights was far more political than it was legal. An indication of that can be found buried in events leading up to the settlement: lawyers at HUD -- people who had spent four to five years preparing the case against Dallas -- caught wind of the fact that Castro was going to throw them under the bus. They discussed that fact with people here friendly to their cause, whom I cannot name. They were not happy.

If this had come down according to the lawyers, Dallas would still have a HUD bull's eye on its back. Instead, as is illustrated so clearly in Rawlings' remarks about Castro's help, Dallas was rescued by the political side of the HUD house. A win for Dallas any way you slice it? That's what I thought before I left. Now I'm less sure we can call this fight quite yet.

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