"The end result," Tucker told me, "is the fact that most of those kids are not being educated. They are basically finding a way to put them in what I call plantation prisons. They're selling our kids. If they weren't selling our kids, we would not have more kids in prison than in college."
Usually, white Americans, at least older ones, react to that kind of accusation by angrily denouncing their accusers as crazy, lazy, paranoid, unable to break their addiction to the race card and victimhood. But I found a very different response when I raised the issue of mistrust among the affluent whites associated with the new school reform movement in Dallas.
Jay Barker
Mark Melton scrambled to the top.
Jay Barker
Harlan Crow had all but written off Dallas schools when he saw glimmers of hope and decided to kick in and contribute.
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Morath, who is white and retired at age 35 after selling his stake in a tech company he helped start, believes profound mistrust between whites and blacks is natural, inevitable, even necessary, at least for a long while to come.
"I had a professor in college who was one of my favorites, in an African-American literature class," Morath says one afternoon at an Uptown Starbucks. "She said, 'Have you ever been in a bad relationship with somebody, and you break up? How long does it take when you meet them on the street and you don't have feelings of euphoria or anger, so it's just even-steven?'
"She said, 'For me it's generally been about twice the amount of time that I have been in the relationship. If I was with somebody in a relationship for about a year, if I saw them on the street two years later, I'd be OK.'
"She said, 'Now we [whites and blacks in America] have been in a bad relationship, depending on how you count, for about 300 years.'"
That puts it in perspective for Morath, whose take on things is informed by other experiences that might seem anomalous in the background of a rich white guy. When he was a student at George Washington University in Washington, he was the only white member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the nation's most prestigious black fraternity.
"I attended the Million Man March," he says.
That kind of experience does not make Morath the Lone Ranger among the young affluent white people involved in the PACs or the new reform movement. Melton, the co-chair of EducateDallas, is a 34-year-old international tax and deal-structuring lawyer with a major firm. At an East Dallas bar one late afternoon, he, too, says mistrust across racial and ethnic lines is natural.
"I recognize that there's a history that's legitimate."
He believes knowing the history and accepting its consequences can give rise to a whole new approach to education reform.
The '90s reformers were not aristocrats riding around handing each other Grey Poupon from the windows of their Bentleys. Many of them were liberal Democrats in their 30s and 40s. But it's possible that people who are in their 30s and 40s now, whether they are Democrats or Republicans, simply have a different view of the world, informed by different experiences.
In response to questions about his own background, Melton says, "I know what it's like to scramble."
Married at age 20 without a college degree, Melton scrambled through Tarrant County Junior College in Fort Worth, then the University of Texas at Arlington and finally SMU law school at night. He and his wife were so poor their young children qualified for the Texas Children's Health Insurance Program.
To keep his own spirits up, he says, Melton told himself, "Someday this will all pay off, and I'm going to be the guy helping out some kid."
Melton participates in a mentoring project at DISD that includes dinners for high school students where they sit side by side with attorneys, many of whom are black and Hispanic, and who have their own scrambling stories to share.
In what Morath, Melton and others associated with the reform movement have to say about the schools, certain themes recur, and it's not all about empathy and mentoring. These are people from professional and entrepreneurial backgrounds, and eventually they all come around to talking about a more businesslike "systems approach" to running the district. Often their observations include a distinct emphasis on evaluating teachers and getting rid of bad ones.
The clearest statement of it comes from Barth, a 50-year-old serial tech magnate who was the single largest donor to the two PACs. Through a recent venture, a company called Symphonic Source, Barth has contributed more than $30,000 to Kids First, almost all of it in the form of salary for two executives whose time and effort Barth is contributing to the PAC and to an effort called "Leadership DISD," designed to recruit and train community volunteers.
Rattling around the huge living room of an unoccupied North Dallas mansion he uses as his office, Barth, a youthful 50-something, paints a picture — his picture — of an educational system in which kids come last. He describes a personnel system encrusted with arcane practices and ornate policies, heavily influenced by teachers unions and in which management has no incentive for even trying to get rid of a truly bad teacher.
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