The top four individual donors to the PACs, all white, contributed more than half the quarter-million dollars. They are, in order of their generosity, Ken Barth, a technology magnate; Harlan Crow, the international real estate magnate sometimes associated with conservative politics; Daniel Muzquiz, a venture capitalist; and Container Store founder and serial entrepreneur Garrett Boone, sometimes associated with liberal politics.
Why do they give a damn? None of them is involved in school district contracting. They certainly don't fit the demographic mold.
Jay Barker
DISD board member Mike Morath says it's just human nature to care about kids.
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Of the 150,000-plus students in the Dallas Independent School District, according to state records, 87.1 percent are economically disadvantaged, 4.6 percent are white, 25 percent are black, 68.2 percent are Hispanic and only 14 percent of those who graduate from high school are ready for college in both English language arts and mathematics.
The two PACs, together with a new communitywide volunteer effort called Commit!, are part of a citywide reform movement loosely affiliated with a national movement sometimes described as "collaborative impact," aimed at coordinating and streamlining disparate do-good efforts to improve education.
The core of it is called "cradle to graduation," a concept that calls for diverse philanthropic entities to integrate and stage their resources in order to focus on student success from birth until college admission.
But that begs the question of why. A year after the district had to call off its board elections because no one gave enough of a damn to run, why do 11 of the city's most affluent ZIP codes suddenly cough up a quarter-million bucks to influence school board decisions?
School board member Michael Morath, a champion of the reform movement, goes straight for the most idealistic explanation: "We as a species would not have survived if we didn't fundamentally care about our young collectively. It is part of human nature that we do actively love children. You can say it's wired into us, you can say it's God-given, but it's there. Otherwise we would have died a long time ago."
So we are asked to believe that a bunch of wealthy white people woke up in the middle of the night and decided to start pouring their money into the Dallas public schools out of the goodness of their hearts?
Yes. On the one hand, it sounds preposterous. On the other hand, what if it were true? What if it were even half true? A quarter true?
The very suggestion of affluent white people wanting to do the right thing by urban public schools pushes a very angry button in the veteran education warriors — the high-seniority activists who have learned over the years to mistrust just such assertions.
Black community activist Joyce Foreman gets along great with white people most of the time. Quick-witted and business-sophisticated, she bridged gaps, formed alliances and earned credibility with white suburban colleagues as a member of the board of directors of Dallas Area Rapid Transit from 2002 to 2008.
But two big buttons got pushed for her earlier this year when DISD trustees, including Nutall, voted to close those schools in her community. At the same moment, Uplift Education, a charter school organization in Dallas, blundered into a brief but colorful zoning dispute over a school site Uplift had purchased in a neighborhood of bars. It didn't help that someone at City Hall surreptitiously slipped into a City Council agenda a measure to allow Uplift to use tax-exempt bonds to build more schools, in one of those not-quite-tricky-enough moves that always winds up making everybody crazy.
For Foreman, it was game on. She saw a pincer movement to shut down DISD schools and give the money instead to charters so they could snap up more real estate and skim easy-to-teach top students out of the district, leaving the truly challenged students behind to rot.
I asked her why anybody would want to do that.
"To continue to have an illiterate workforce that will work for menial pay," she said, "and who will not question the system."
That's a remarkably dark accusation. Foreman believes there are people in this city who would deform the minds of children in order to keep them in peonage.
"I believe that there are good people of all races," Foreman says. "Don't get me wrong. But if you just start looking at these do-gooders, who are all Park Cities people, wanting to come back here and just shower all of this good on DISD, it just baffles me."
The idea that rich white people would work deliberately to diminish the lives of black children — would pretend to do good while conspiring to do evil — is not unique to black Dallas. It reflects centuries of our national history, where, as a matter of fact, that happened.
James Tucker, publisher of the only black newspaper in Colorado Springs, Colorado, is involved in a dispute with Mike Miles, a school superintendent there who is about to take over leadership of DISD. Tucker believes Miles is in league with people whose deliberate aim is to prevent black students from becoming educated.
Tucker doesn't believe, as Foreman does, that rich white people would deliberately keep black kids uneducated in order to employ them in menial jobs. He believes white people want to keep black children in prison as slaves.
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