Thursday, March 28, 2024 Mar 28, 2024
73° F Dallas, TX
Advertisement
Publications

Whatever Happened To Nolan Estes?

By Eric Miller |

Sitting at his desk on a recent spring afternoon, professor Nolan Estes was feverishly shuffling papers when his face suddenly lost its color and his head collapsed onto the desk. Secretaries and colleagues working nearby feared that Estes had suffered a stroke. They whisked the towering educator to the University of Texas clinic; doctors immediately began emergency treatment. But as his head began to clear, Estes popped out of bed and abruptly began to button his shirt. “I’ve got a flight to Oklahoma to catch,” he quipped impatiently. “I don’t have time for all this.”

Nolan Estes is on the move. He’s still selling ideas, imparting his educational wisdom, shaking hands, flashing smiles and spitting out jokes. (One former aide thinks Estes should run for the U.S. Senate.) At 53, his hair is graying and he has added superfluous pounds to his 6-foot-5-inch frame, but the man who many people believe made the Dallas public school system what it is today-good or bad – has changed very little.

When Estes first came to Dallas in 1968 from the U.S. Office of Education in Washington, Dallas schools still were openly identified as “Negro” or “white” in school directories, and school officials felt that federal funding was an evil (and that what the public didn’t know about its schools wouldn’t hurt). By the time he left in 1978, the district was two years into a massive school desegregation order and was receiving more than $20 million in federal funds, as well as directing a multimillion-dollar public relations effort to gather information from the community – and to try to sell the public on what it was doing.

It’s been nearly five years since Estes abandoned the big-city hot seat as DISD school superintendent to retreat to the calmer waters of Austin academia. Even though he’s taken it on the chin for some of the programs he created and nurtured while he was the Dallas school chief, he has since become a Johnny Appleseed for the DISD, sowing nationwide educational seeds on the district’s behalf.

“I still get phone calls from folks all over the country asking for information about our educational programs,” says Larry Ascough, special assistant to Superintendent Linus Wright. “They tell me that they heard about our programs from Nolan.”

But if Estes hasn’t forgotten Dallas, neither has the city forgotten him. Even today, the mention of his name seems to evoke either praise or outrage. A Harvard-educated man, Estes was hired by a liberal school board; by the time he left, it had swung full-circle to become a conservative board of education. Philosophically, he was and is a conservative Baptist, yet he was always a progressive educator. His school politics were pragmatic but so murky that, at times, liberals complained that he was slightly to the right of Henry VIII while conservatives believed that he was a flaming liberal. But he was the consummate politician, always landing on his feet. Had he not, he never would have lasted a decade in a job with a life expectancy similar to that of a World War II paratrooper.

Although the Estes era came to an official close in 1978 (when he departed for Austin to become a professor of educational administration and coordinator of the superintendency program at The University of Texas), many of his programs, policies and attitudes still frame the DISD. The city still lives with a court-ordered school desegregation plan that Estes helped develop, and it lives with the federal controls wrought by its introduction of federal funding. Not to mention the remnants of the devastating Estes misadventures: the carnivorous Foundation for Quality Education Inc., with its careless handling of money; the millions of dollars worth of shabby school-renovation projects; the painful civil and criminal litigation resulting from widespread allegations of corruption within his administration. As recently as the summer of 1981, it was discovered that Estes “borrowed” a 75-horsepower outboard motor that the DISD owned. (He had been “borrowing” it for eight years.) Earlier that year, Estes had been associated with another controversy: It was revealed that he was being investigated in connection with the possible falsifying of a federal grant application by a Cleveland School official who had worked as one of Estes’ assistant school superintendents during the early Seventies.

“Most of the people in the school district miss him,” says Harry Guier, a DISD curriculum writer. Guier reached that conclusion last spring after studying Estes for nine months while completing the academic requirements for his doctorate in education. Despite Estes’ long absence, Guier says that most school administrators he interviewed still refer to Estes as “the boss.” “They’d like to see him come back,” Guier says. “Listening to them talk reminds me of a bunch of guys attending a World War II reunion. It’s like: ’Boy, we got our tails shot off, but we’d love to return to the good ole days.’ “

But for Estes, these might be the good ole days. College life apparently agrees with him. As with other jobs he has held, he is still calling his professorial post “the best assignment in the country.” And, finally, major controversy is no longer a part of his life. From all indications, he remains the workaholic he always was. In his spare time, the man who pulled himself from a Waco elementary school classroom to control a $4 billion budget at the U.S. Office of Education at age 37 is hotly involved in other educational pursuits that take him outside Austin. He is pushing ideas – the latest of which he calls “computer literacy” – and is hauling-in consultant fees from such large school districts as the one in Chicago.

Dallas school administrators even claim that over the past year or so they have seen Estes hawking Radio Shack computers at display booths at educational conventions all over the country. Although Radio Shack officials deny that Estes is involved with any marketing of their products, they admit to having called on him to make speeches on the topic of technology in education for a “modest” fee. “But he is not an employee of Radio Shack, and he is not selling our computers,” says Bill Gattis, director of the education division of the Fort Worth-based corporation and a former DISD employee.

Stroll the halls on the third floor of the education building on the UT campus this summer, and you’ll find Estes teaching a morning class entitled “Computer Application in Educational Administration.” Dr. Leonard Valverde, interim chairman of the educational administration department, says the class fits in well with the general theme of Estes’ most recent research and publication in the area of how to employ and incorporate technology into public-educational systems.

“As far as I’m concerned, as chairman, I feel Dr. Estes is doing a fine job with the superintendency program,” Valverde says. “And, he’s likewise kept up with his research and publication.”

Valverde says that UT graduated another crop of would-be school superintendents only a few weeks ago, and already four or five have landed jobs to head Texas school districts. At the end of the summer, the school will embark on training another group of at least 10 graduate students, who will spend 23 months working toward an educational doctorate in school superintendency.

Although much of Nolan Estes, the man, remains an enigma, one thing appears certain: He will remain in the forefront of issues in public education, and he will continue to be a nationally recognized educator.

But for some reason, Estes doesn’t want to talk about himself these days – the primary reason you won’t find any Estes-quotations-on-Estes in this article. Repeated attempts to reach him by phone were unsuccessful. The one time a secretary let a phone call slip through, Estes said he was too busy to talk – he was in the midst of an important conference.

“I’ll call you right back,” he said.

He hung up before asking for a return phone number.

And, cornered in a hallway in the UT education building on a recent summer afternoon, he again declined to talk about himself.

“I’m running behind; I’ve got a meeting I’m going to,” he said. “I’ve got to catch a plane to Washington tomorrow morning, and I’ll be in Pittsburgh next Thursday.”

He always did say it was hard to hit a moving target.

Related Articles

Image
Arts & Entertainment

Here’s Who Is Coming to Dallas This Weekend: March 28-31

It's going to be a gorgeous weekend. Pencil in some live music in between those egg hunts and brunches.
Image
Arts & Entertainment

Arlington Museum of Art Debuts Two Must-See Nature-Inspired Additions

The chill of the Arctic Circle and a futuristic digital archive mark the grand opening of the Arlington Museum of Art’s new location.
By Brett Grega
Image
Arts & Entertainment

An Award-Winning SXSW Short Gave a Dallas Filmmaker an Outlet for Her Grief

Sara Nimeh balances humor and poignancy in a coming-of-age drama inspired by her childhood memories.
By Todd Jorgenson
Advertisement