"Reform and the definition of reform is change," Nutall says. "So when you 'reform,' what are you reforming? What needs to change?
"We all can say the buzzwords. Is it the community that needs to be changed to drive the education of children? Once you identify what needs to be changed, you can get to the how-to."
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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Of all the people involved in the new reform effort, Todd Williams is the prototype. Still young, Williams is so successful and rich he doesn't have to work anymore.
A 1982 graduate of Austin College, son of a Dallas sportswriter, graduate of Bryan Adams High School in DISD, Williams retired as a partner at Goldman Sachs in 2009 after co-managing an international real estate portfolio worth $60 billion. He and his wife are co-founders of a Dallas charter school.
Williams now is devoting himself full-time to something called Commit!, an organization of 10 people that sits at the top of the reform pyramid in Dallas. Its mission will be to put together a cradle-to-graduation collaborative impact structure similar to what has been done already in Austin, Cincinnati, Harlem, Houston and Los Angeles, bringing all of the philanthropic players in Dallas interested in education into one room and trying to persuade them to work under one yoke.
At a picnic table on the grounds of the offices of Crow Holdings, where Williams works from donated space, he says, "We're not trying to reinvent the wheel. They're all the same concept. We're a regional collaborative. The idea is, let's figure out through data what's really working and how to scale it."
But what does that mean?
An article in the winter 2011 edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, a scholarly journal, gives a somewhat fuller, though technical, description involving two main underlying concepts. The first is based on the belief that children not born into a culture of upward mobility at home need help getting there from the moment they are born to the day they graduate from high school.
The second principle, a little more esoteric, has to do with how philanthropic organizations spend money. Most, according to the article, try to focus on a single goal so they can have some hope of knowing whether their money is achieving anything. The problem with that approach is that it doesn't line up with the cradle-to-graduation strategy necessary to help kids make it.
The authors cite a program called Strive in Cincinnati and others around the country: "These varied examples all have a common theme: that large-scale social change comes from better cross-sector coordination rather than from the isolated intervention of individual organizations."
The phrase "better cross-sector coordination" isn't a very stirring battle cry and certainly wouldn't satisfy Nutall's hunger for specifics from the reformers, but it doesn't sound terribly fascist either. And there is much about Williams at a personal level that might assuage fears about Commit! as some kind of Trojan horse for white control.
Speaking barely loudly enough to be heard over traffic on Maple Avenue, Williams told me about his decision to leave Goldman Sachs and devote himself to education reform in Dallas.
"I had already had more success than I had ever envisioned in life," he says. "I went to the funeral of a mentor I had had at Austin College, almost like a second father of mine, a basketball coach, and I listened to what everybody said. This was a guy who had touched a lot of people. I looked at myself and said, 'What am I doing with my life?'
"My wife is Hispanic. She grew up in a single-parent home. Her mom worked three jobs. She went to SMU."
Through Junior League, Williams' wife, Abby, became involved with North Dallas High School. "She just had a passion for kids," he says. "Together we started funding scholarships, primarily for kids from DISD.
"I started spending more time with the kids. I went on the board of Uplift Education [the charter school organization] in 2004. I really enjoyed it. I found myself being lured more and more to the other side. What I really had a passion for was this stuff.
"In '07, my wife and I helped start a school that's operated by Uplift called Williams Preparatory. It's in Northwest Dallas about four miles from our home. It's 98 percent Hispanic and upwards of 90 percent free- and reduced-lunch kids.
"We got really involved in that school and started spending a lot of time with the kids. I think we just got deeper and deeper into it. Finally, I looked up and I said, 'I really want to spend the rest of my life helping.'"
He resigned from one of the best business positions in the world and went to work as a volunteer trying to fix schools in Dallas. How do you fault somebody for that?
Some of the difference between now and 15 years ago may simply have to do with having history as our guide. The reformers in the '90s had to learn it all head-on, the hard way.
Sandy Kress, a former Dallas school board president, later a White House adviser on education under President George W. Bush, remembers being totally unprepared for the racial enmity engendered by his efforts in Dallas.
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