Audio By Carbonatix
A concerted effort is under way to pit communities against each
other—especially Hispanic against black—over public school
resources in Dallas. It’s sort of like going to a starving village
somewhere and spreading rumors about secret midnight feasts. It is not
an effort with virtue in its heart.
But, look, let’s talk another day about why anybody would want to do
that. Right now, it’s more important for us to focus on what’s true and
what isn’t.
The big lie is that the magnet schools in Dallas are the secret
feast—fatter, richer and more luxurious than what everybody else
is stuck with.
That isn’t true.
Take the high schools. There are 35 Dallas Independent School
District high schools with fully reported budgets available on the
Texas Education Agency Web site. DISD has 10 magnet high schools,
according to its own Web page.
I put together a cheapo Excel spreadsheet, taking the total
expenditure on each campus and dividing it by the total enrollment to
get a campus expenditure per student.
Of the 10 magnet high schools, eight are below the average
per-student expenditure, some way below. Eight magnets are in the
bottom quarter of the list.
You want to know where the big money is? If you want to get your kid
into a really expensive Dallas high school, you need to encourage him
or her to get arrested, get pregnant, drop out or, for some reason that
I can’t quite fathom, go to James Madison High School, a regular
“comprehensive” or neighborhood school.
The really big money is in getting knocked up. The Maya Angelou
School (for the pregnant) spends three times the district-wide
per-student average, a whopping $19,212. Next comes Redirections, which
I hear is a really good school for potential dropouts, at $12,945 a
head.
Then Madison weighs in at $11,127 per-student per year. The fourth
richest is Village Fair, which we always called “The Prison School”
when we were in DISD. It spends $9,596 per inmate.
Finally when you get down to No. 5, you find the Booker T.
Washington School for the Visual and Performing Arts magnet, which
spends $8,542 per student. This is the first one we find on the list
that seems to be rewarding positive behaviors, with the possible
exception of Madison, which is just a mystery.
I asked school district spokesman Jon Dahlander to explain Madison
and Angelou to me. Never heard back.
Certainly I’m not suggesting that either the Maya Angelou school or
Redirections is a bad thing. More power to them. But let’s get over
this idea that the district spends more money on the kids in the
magnets than on the kids in the regular high schools.
Think about it. The magnets give up all kinds of things in order to
invest in instruction. Sports, for one. That’s a tough one. When my son
was in DISD, we knew several kids who could have gotten into magnets
but decided not to attend because they wanted to play one or more team
sports.
There are other savings. I don’t want to make magnet kids out to be
wimps or anything, but generally speaking a magnet high school can run
with a lower ratio of armed guards per student than the regular
schools. At Booker T. all they really need is someone in the hall with
the authority to insult people’s hairstyles.
The Talented and Gifted Magnet, for example, is No. 10 on my list of
high schools in terms of per-student expenditure, at $6,981 per-kid per
year. Four neighborhood schools—Thomas Jefferson, Hillcrest,
Roosevelt and Madison—spend more. Hillcrest, where Superintendent
Michael Hinojosa’s son has been a student, spends almost a grand more
per kid than TAG.
The two DISD high schools that have received the most national
recognition are TAG and Science and Engineering. Science and
Engineering is No. 29 on the list, at $4,489 per kid. That’s less than
half what Madison spends and less than a fourth of what the district
will spend on you for getting yourself with child.
Precisely because the magnets know they have a spotlight on them,
they’re pretty careful about their ethnic ratios. TAG, for example, is
30.2 percent black, 30.2 percent Hispanic and 32.6 percent white. The
city in the last census was 50.8 percent white, 35.6 percent Hispanic
and 25.9 percent black.
The entire district is 51.7 percent Hispanic, 38 percent black and
8.7 percent white, according to numbers from the TEA.
Some magnets come closer to reflecting the district-wide ethnic
ratios. The School of Health Professionals, for example, is 47 percent
Hispanic, 38.3 percent black and 8.7 percent white.
I guess if you really want to, you can mount an argument that the
TAG high school is whiter than the district. But then you have to
answer the question: Which ratio are we going for anyway? TAG isn’t as
white as the city, nor presumably does it reflect the population of
taxpayers. And, anyway, we are products of our own history, and
therefore we do need to stop every once in a while and reflect on the
history of the magnet program.
The magnets were created as a part of a federal court effort to keep
white people in the district. It’s called desegregation, and it’s an
important part of our national history, experience and character.
I don’t want to get too lyrical here about the value of white people
and start sounding like some kind of neo-confederate. Many of the white
people I have known in my own life have been more trouble than they
were worth. And the origin of school desegregation was not a racially
neutral pursuit of equal opportunity for everybody: It was a campaign
to force white people to stop actively harming black kids.
But.
In this day and age, deseg does run in both directions or in all
directions. Correct me—I know you will—if I am wrong, but I
believe the values of the nation still favor diversity over one-race
rule.
Sadly, a lot of what I thought I was hearing from the audience at
the last school board meeting sounded more ethnically triumphal than
inclusive. Adelfa Callejo, the grand dame of Dallas Hispanic politics,
rose from the audience to denounce the basic rationale behind spending
money on special schools to redress past wrongs.
“As a matter of fact, we all know that the court’s reason for
ordering their creation also no longer exists,” she said. “The
demographics have changed. The ethnic student populations are
completely different today.”
So, now that the district is majority Hispanic, diversity is no
longer a worthwhile goal? Now it’s a bad idea to spend money to attract
and retain white or black people?
Callejo is deservedly a respected spokesperson for her community,
but at the school board meeting she clearly was part of a claque that
had come to express a party line, couched as support for superintendent
Michael Hinojosa.
A Hispanic mother rose from the audience right after Callejo and
expressed the view that extra money spent on magnet schools and
learning centers is money taken away from her own children. In fact,
she said, the existence of the magnets and learning centers rendered
her children “a second-class or a second kind of citizen.”
She said, “Some kids can go to one school, and they can receive more
money than our kids.”
I’m sure the speeches by parents and kids in support of magnets and
learning centers last Thursday night were somewhat rehearsed and
coordinated. But clearly the speeches in support of Hinojosa all
contained the same carefully rehearsed and pernicious theme of
envy—the idea that centers of success in the district work an
injury on all who are not in them.
A student from W.T. White High School asked, “Why should they get
more?”
I wish I had already done my spreadsheet by then. I might have been
able to reassure her that she’s getting more money spent on her at W.T.
White than the students at Skyline Magnet, Science and Engineering
Magnet, the Education Magnet, the Health Magnet or the Law Magnet. Pity
the kids at the Business Magnet, who get a little better than half the
money spent on them that kids at W.T. White receive.
After the board meeting I spoke with longtime community activist,
organizer, thinker and playwright John Fullinwider, who expressed
empathy for both sides—the ones who want to keep the magnets and
learning centers intact and the kids and parents who came to defend the
regular neighborhood schools.
“It’s terrible that somebody is trying to set one group against the
other,” he said.
The district is always described as beleaguered. I’m guilty of
describing it that way myself. It’s not an inaccurate description, but
it’s notably incomplete. DISD also has seen great successes in the last
few years under Hinojosa’s leadership in student achievement and test
scores.
Look around South Dallas, West Dallas and East Dallas where most of
the city’s working class and people of color live, and you can’t help
seeing signs of upward mobility and achievement—not the dismal
downward spiral that characterized most American inner cities only a
decade ago.
Something is in the air—something good and hopeful. It’s still
more a potential than a reality, more of a chance at opportunity than
an actual opportunity. But certainly part of the reason for even that
chance to exist is the historic struggle to desegregate the public
schools, including the hard-fought fight for magnets and learning
centers.
“That money wasn’t taken from the other schools,” Fullinwider said.
“This money was won through four decades of legal and political
struggle.”
There still are great imbalances, he suggested, but the way to fix
them is not by pulling someone else back down the hill. “There are two
ways to fix an imbalance,” he said. “One is to bring up the other
side.”
Maybe before this battle over magnets and learning centers is over
we will find our way to a mutual salvation, as opposed to the suicide
pact the school district seems to be pursuing now.
