DISD THE MOVIE

The plot twists, the players, the money, the drama ...

Look past the news of the day and you’ll find a story worthy of the big screen. It’s an entertaining tragedy — unless you’re a taxpayer, parent or child in the district’s schools.

Only nine people control a $1.8 billion budget that impacts 157,000 schoolchildren — and the economic future of Dallas.

The Mikes

Like any good movie, the Dallas ISD story begins with a simple premise: Once upon a time, trustees of all races work together to save the district’s children from an educational nightmare.

As in any good movie, though, there is plenty of conflict and drama along the way.

As the story proceeds, DISD hires a superintendent with great ideas for reform but seemingly no personal skills. Some trustees fund election campaigns to defeat fellow trustees. Two trustees bash a third trustee on an accidentally recorded phone call. A group of seemingly powerful Dallas politicians botches a coup designed to replace the board of trustees.

The “good guys” (self-described “reformers” in this story) haven’t always been good. The “bad guys” (in this story, those not sold on “reform”) have some good reasons for being bad.

And let’s not forget the ever-present issue of race and discrimination always lurking in the background of every scene.

“We are the worst public enemy to black children in Dallas?” District 9 Dallas ISD trustee Bernadette Nutall asks rhetorically about a column written by a local journalist. “That was hurtful.

“African-American board members have always been willing to work across the table, but the problem is when we don’t do what you say [to] do, how you say [to] do it, we’re the problem,” Nutall says.

The African-American DISD trustees “are always the ones that have to do the olive branch,” she says, “and you want us to come and be like, ‘Yes,

Massa, I need to think whatever you say [to] think.’ ”

So sit back, try to relax, and grab some popcorn and a bottle of Advil. The cliffhanger: Will there be a happy ending?

SET THE SCENE: A board divided Dan Micciche is expected to sail into office this May, beginning his seventh year on the Dallas ISD school board. The current board president, who represents East Dallas’ District 3, hadn’t drawn a challenger as of Feb. 15, the day before filing ended and the day this magazine went to press.

Micciche is one of the school board trustees who identifies as an education reformer. It’s a staunch identity for some and nebulous for others. But five of the nine trustees, a simple voting majority, tend to aggressively push policies and funnel funds into programs that research has shown to be effective in educating children — especially those who live in poverty, as nearly 90 percent of DISD children do.

The other four trustees proceed with more caution. Even though the board votes unanimously almost 80 percent of the time, the minority cohort is more likely to question sweeping policy changes. Some center on fiscal responsibility or disagreements about best practices.

But much of it comes down to trust. As hundreds of thousands of dollars pour into campaign coffers, PACs and nonprofits, all in the name of progress, it stirs the suspicions of those who see it as wealthy white men’s attempt to take over public education.

ESTABLISHING SHOT: What is education reform?

No one agrees on the definition, not even the people who identify as reformers (visit advocatemag. com for varying perspectives), but here in Dallas, reformers champion data-driven academic policies, such as quality pre-K for everyone, and are willing to move quickly to change the status quo. One sharp political divide is over reformers’ successful push to use student test scores and frequent evaluations to identify and reward effective teachers. Other, more risk-averse trustees value experienced teachers and community support rather than top-down mandates and standardized test results.

FADE-IN: Empowered without an election

“Without a single vote cast, onethird of the board was sworn in.” That’s how Melissa Higginbotham describes the event that birthed Dallas Kids First, a political action committee that formed in 2011. That spring, the Dallas ISD board election was canceled because only three people filed to run for the three open seats.

Around the same time, the Dallas Chamber of Commerce was discussing how to attract big companies to the city. One of the reasons Dallas was being passed over for the suburbs was the reputation of its public schools. The chamber’s education PAC, Educate Dallas, emerged to deal with this problem by tackling school board races.

A few months prior, Mike Morath — who, within five years, would ascend to Texas’ highest education position — met businessman Todd Williams over lunch. An hour turned into four as the two conversed about their passion for public education.

They shared a lot in common. Both were products of public schools — Williams from DISD’s Bryan Adams High School in ’78 and Morath from Garland High School in ’95. Both had experienced business success — Williams as a Goldman Sachs partner and Morath as a software entrepreneur. Williams had retired, and Morath had sold his company for millions.

And both, with time and money on their hands, were considering running for the Dallas school board. They left lunch agreeing that Morath would run, and Williams would create an organization to connect the dots about what is and isn’t working in public schools.

Morath was one of the three unopposed DISD candidates that May, the same month that former Pizza Hut CEO Mike Rawlings was elected mayor of Dallas. Rawlings joined the chamber’s new strategy of focusing on public education and named Williams his education advisor. Out of that came the Commit! Partnership. For five years, this organization has used data and research to identify best practices that will support Dallas County students “from cradle to career.”

It was a “constellation of forces that ended up being at the right place at the right time,” one reformer recalls. At that point, the Dallas business community had disengaged from public schools because their children no longer attended them.

Williams regularly walks into rooms full of Dallas executives to give Commit presentations and asks how many people attended public school. Hands shoot up. When he asks how many send their children to public school, hands are sparse.

“My fear is in 20 years, my replacement goes into a room and nobody can raise their hand. God help our city,” Williams says. “I knew that I had to talk to them in a language that they spoke, and that was data.”

He joined the board of Uplift Education, the largest charter network in Texas and even opened his own charter school, Williams Prep, in 2007. After years on the board, he concluded that “we can grow Uplift 25 percent a year, and it will take us 25 years to have the impact Dallas ISD could make.”

“The solution is traditional public schools, and that’s how I spend my time,” he says. But to people who distrust him, he says, “I think they just look at me and see the surface. They see a rich white North Dallas guy who worked at Goldman Sachs.”

CUT TO: The voicemail incident

Dallas Kids First started endorsing candidates in 2012. Their biggest statement was supporting newcomer Dan Micciche in his challenge of incumbent Bruce Parrot for the Far East Dallas seat. Micciche raised more money than any other board candidate in history that spring with nearly $90,000, much of it coming from the two new education PACs.

The seemingly sleepy race was in southern Dallas, where incumbent Bernadette Nutall was defending her seat against then 20-year-old Damarcus Offord. Nutall, in her first term, had voted months before the election to close 11 Dallas ISD schools. The decision earned her praise from the Dallas Morning News editorial board, who noted that “Nutall, in particular, showed courage” because “five [schools] were in South Dallas, an area she represents.”

Both of Dallas’ new education PACs endorsed Nutall. Another Morning News editorial that January named her alongside Morath and Trustee Edwin Flores as “a bloc that appreciates the value of education reforms.”

Nutall traveled with Todd Williams to L.A., Indianapolis and Cincinnati to study nonprofits after which Commit would be modeled. When Dallas Kids First discovered that only three of every 100 black boys who started in Dallas ISD graduated high school college-ready, Nutall and Morath toured southern Dallas churches to preach the urgency of the problem.

Then came the “voicemail incident.” Two months after Nutall was re-elected in 2012, Morath failed to hang up after leaving her a voicemail. The ensuing, recorded conversation between him and former trustee Nancy Bingham “dealt with [Nutall] as a board member and questioned whether she reads board documents,” according to a Dallas Morning News story.

The two trustees discussed the situation, worked it out and were moving on, the story said. But that story was the last time Morath and Nutall were described as having “a good relationship.”

ZOOM IN: The vote to reject free money

Superintendent Mike Miles came from Colorado in April 2012 with the reputation of being “a reformer, an innovator and someone not afraid to shake the status quo.” His vision was to pay teachers according to their performance, demand higher graduation rates and college entrance exam scores, and form a leadership academy to create a pool of principals to replace those who couldn’t cut it.

Less than two months after she voted to hire him, Nutall told Miles she would vote against his plan. In an article headlining their “testy exchange,” Miles told Nutall she should “resign yourself to the fact that there’s a new superintendent … You asked me to put together a plan to move the district forward. I’ve done that.”

Miles gave the southern sector trustees a force to galvanize against. A year after Miles arrived, Observer columnist Jim Schutze accused Nutall and Trustee Lew Blackburn of being “at war with Superin- es to the table. We’re not experimenting by doing something bad to somebody. We’re trying to address the needs that have long gone unaddressed.”

Why would a trustee who “representshigh schools that send thousands of young people straight to prisonunable to read or write and without a prayer for decent life” decline such an offer, Schutze asked in a subsequent column. Now an opinion writer, Schutze spent decades reporting on Dallas and wrote a book, “The Accommodation,” which describes the handshake deals between Dallas’ black pastors and white business leaders as schools were desegregated.

“The elected leadership of southern Dallas is a remnant of the old ghetto over-class of segregation days,” Schutze wrote. “Because the civil rights movement never shook this town very hard, that leadership class, dominated by separatist clergy, still holds sway.”

ACTION: Board member is tossed out of school

REFORM-MINDED PACS have funneled $500,000 into trustee campaigns since 2012. They supported these five trustees in their most recent bid for office.

tendent Mike Miles over school reform.” Schutze had obtained letters and emails from DISD executives complaining about Nutall’s threats that if they removed certain southern Dallas principals, “the community will come after you.”

She later rejected a plan to infuse schools in southern Dallas with $20 million. More than half of the money would come from SMU and nonprofits to pay for things like more teachers and better preschool programs. Nutall was upset that the community wasn’t consulted.

“What this board is doing is dumping something on South Dallas. You continue to disrespect and be dismissive of the southern sector of Dallas,” Nutall said before the vote. “What I’m asking you to do is not to come into South Dallas and just experiment with our children.”

The plan passed, and other board members expressed surprise that Nutall opposed free money that would improve schools in her district. Micciche conceded that it was an experiment, but said “we’re experimenting by bringing extra resourc-

Back in 2013, Schutze wrote, “The real enemies of these children are not white. They are black.” He reiterated this in a column last August following a vote in which Nutall, Blackburn and Trustee Joyce Foreman voted against a proposal that could have funneled up to $55 million into southern Dallas schools, mostly from taxes paid by northern Dallas residents.

Nutall, still reeling over Schutze’s accusations, agrees with him on at least one thing: “The civil rights movement never shook this town very hard.”

“Dallas never had a movement,” Nutall says. “Sometimes in movements, it creates cleansing. It creates people coming together. It creates the uncomfortable time to talk about the issues under the table, to understand, and then out of that can come great solutions.”

Because it never happened in Dallas, she says, “that history is still played out in the board table today. At the end of the day, all of what’s going on in history ends up to one word: control.”

The 2014 “home rule” effort epitomized the business community’s attempt to control Dallas, Nutall believes. She’s not alone in this belief. The proposal was Morath’s idea to circumvent what he saw as school board dysfunction. Instead of less than 10 percent of voters electing representatives, he envisioned a system where some trustees would be appointed and any could be ejected if students were failing. Home rule was backed by many of the same people involved in education reform PACs.

“There is a group of people who feel they know what’s best versus it being a collaborative effort,” Nutall says.

One of her opponents in the upcoming May election, Ed Turner, calls home rule the moment he was “baptized in politics.” A graduate of the “great James Madison High School,” Turner had returned to his neighborhood as a community organizer and worked against home rule.

“The way it came about was kind-of rushed, and people in our community do not appreciate anything that seems top-down. Things have to be grassroots,” Turner says.

Another of Nutall’s opponents this May, Justin Henry, was among the first reformers who block-walked for Micciche during the 2012 election. Henry considered Morath a friend. But the first time he heard about home rule was when he read the newspaper.

“The ripples it put out through our community, that one part of Dallas was trying to dictate what was best for us ... The trustee of District 2 still does not talk to the trustee of District 9,” Henry says of Morath and Nutall. “And the only thing that separates them is the Santa Fe Trail.”

Home rule was the turning point in the reform effort. Even supporters who believed in the merits of what it could do for schoolchildren regard it as a disaster and a reversal of progress.

The effort also had political consequences for reformers. While signatures were being collected for the home-rule petition, reformers were trying to flip a seat in southern Dallas. But the $105,000 in campaign funds to Nutall’s opponent — which came mostly from northern Dallas zip codes, including $15,000 from Morath — couldn’t secure their candidate’s win.

Things got worse a few months later when, on Miles’ orders, security guards wrangled Nutall out of Billy Dade Middle School in her district. The superintendent was at the school for a staff meeting after a personnel shake-up. When Nutall showed up uninvited, he accused her of trespassing and interfering.

“You can’t throw an African-American woman out of an African-American school in South Dallas,” Henry says. “There’s nothing you’re going to get out of that that’s going to further our goals of getting opportunities for the schools, for the kids.”

Nutall doesn’t see her role on the board as a creator of policy. DISD has stacks of policies that aren’t followed or funded, she says, and she questions the point of adding to it. She believes her job is to advocate for schools in her district by ensuring that they have the resources policy calls for.

This is a common criticism of Nutall — that her heavy-handed tactics in schools overstep her bounds as a board member. In the Dade situation, however, even her critics believed Miles had gone too far.

In 2015, Nutall ran for re-election and

“I think they just look at me and see the surface. They see a rich white North Dallas guy who worked at Goldman Sachs.”

The Price Of Admission

A single Dallas ISD board candidate raised $246,722 last year — the highest amount for a race in DISD history. Yet only 12 percent of registered voters headed to the polls. With 11,302 ballots cast for the winning candidate, that translates to $21.83 per vote.

By comparison, all three trustee candidates ran unopposed in 2011. After that, two education PACs formed, collectively spending nearly $500,000 on board races over the next five years.

again faced Offord. This time, reformers endorsed and financed Offord, hoping to unseat their friend-turned-foe. It didn’t work.

AERIAL SHOT: The trustee whose kids go to private school

“We are working against monolithic efforts to dismantle DISD under the guise of ‘reform,’ and those leading these efforts have power and money and are doing so for their personal gain. …Their work on a special interest agenda is hurting our children, particularly children