To those same skeptics, the Morning News' support of Dallas Achieves! has become something of a crusade, which extends to shooting down people who haven't embraced the plan. Two school board members who have questioned parts of it, Lois Parrott and Adam Medrano, have both endured the wrath of the paper's editorial page lately. Parrot particularly suffered, losing the paper's endorsement after she questioned Hinojosa's proposal to give bonuses to principals whose schools make academic progress. Personally, I think this can be a good idea, but it's not the slam dunk the paper thinks it is. Merit pay for principals could cause them to overemphasize test scores, manipulate the results or even compete to work at schools where it's easier to post big gains in testing.
My point is, Dallas' Only Daily is oversimplifing some of the issues involved here. Talking about education is extraordinarily complex, and reforming it falls under the management principle that holds that for every change you make, there are several unintended consequences that could cloud the original intent. The paper's editorial board seems to do a thorough job researching its positions, but it could stand to concede that things are not always as simple as ABC, 123. --Matt Pulle
