Who Framed Carter High?

FOR WEEKS THEY CAME-A VERITA-ble stream of tanned men in sport coats and knife-pleated slacks, wandering the dowdy locker rooms and halls where the sour smell of old sweat mingles with the dull, metallic clank of weights lifted and dropped by huge young athletes in ragtag gym clothes. And as the February signing deadline drew closer, the stream swelled to a flood. Coaches from colleges such as UCLA, Michigan, Miami, Houston, Nebraska descended on Carter High School, eyes bright, maybe a little desperate. Bobby Nevels, Carter’s assistant varsity football coach, had trouble getting to his desk, so thick were the recruiters around it. Eventually, eighteen members of Carter’s state championship team received scholarships-the most of any high school in the state.

Carter’s march to the state championship this past December, during which they soundly defeated six strong playoff teams, should have been the school’s greatest moment of glory. Instead, a series of bizarre, confusing events off the field seemed to confirm what many were already eager to believe about Carter; that it was nothing more than a black football factory willing to break the rules for gridiron success.

In November, the city erupted over allegations that Carter High School and Dallas Independent School District officials had manipulated grades to maintain the eligibility of a star football player who had failed a course, thus keeping Carter in the state playoffs. Suburban schools charged DISD with attempting to circumvent the state’s “no-pass, no-play” law.

For six emotionally charged weeks, the state Commissioner of Education, the Texas Education Agency, and the University Interscholastic League argued that DISD was putting athletics above academics, football above learning. The team’s eligibility status seemed to change minute by minute. In editorials and sports commentaries, the media roundly condemned DISD and a pilot School Improvement Plan at Carter High. The controversy not only dominated the front pages of newspapers, but made Newsweek as well.

Ask most people what all the shouting and bitterness was about, and they’ll tell you something about low-achieving blacks bending the rules in order to make up for academic inferiority. But the truth of the Carter controversy may be exactly the opposite of widespread public opinion. There is much evidence to suggest that what DISD officials and Carter parents were saying all along is true: that a group of disgruntled teachers, most of them white, cynically manipulated the fate of black students to win a political and professional power struggle with a tough Carter principal.

And the effort succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The struggle for the reins of control at Carter was seized upon by various interests and distorted by stereotypes of black parents and students, urban-suburban rivalries, and just plain meanness. While it might have been tangled up in the myth of Texas football and no-pass, no-play, the Carter controversy is really about money, revenge, politics, and power.



MILTON WATKINS AND ROOSEVELT WIL-liams sit around a table in the Carter High School counselor’s office, still trying to put the pieces together. Each man wears one of the familiar “uniforms” of the neighborhood: Watkins, a parole administrator, wears a pinstriped suit; Williams, who works for the Social Security Administration, has on a red Carter Cowboys jacket and cap. The two men led a unique effort to rejuvenate Carter High. Now they wonder what good they accomplished.

What became known as the Carter plan was actually a bold attempt to strengthen the school academically, but few seemed to believe that black parents cared more about academics than athletics, says Watkins. “The funny thing is, we didn’t think the team was that good. The whole us-against-them pressure pulled them together.”

The football team wasn’t even a peripheral issue when the events that eventually boiled over last (all began three years ago. Separately, Williams and Watkins sat down, looked at the numbers, and couldn’t understand it. From the hill on which Carter High School sits, they could see neighborhoods that are home to the best and brightest of Dallas’s black community. From I-20 north to Loop 12 and Highway 67-Carter’s district-reside two district judges, city manager Richard Knight, state Representative Fred Blair state Senator Eddie Bernice Johnson, and many of the city’s black lawyers, doctors, and other professionals. Though it was described in some newspaper accounts as a black inner-city ghetto school. Carter is solidly middle class, with a poverty rate of only 2 percent.

Knowing all this, Williams and Watkins were perplexed: why were the achievement rates of Carter students so abysmal? Failure rates were among the highest in the district. In 1986-87, 57 percent of Carter students failed at least one course, as compared to 44 percent at Lincoln, an inner-city all-black school. Test scores were among the lowest in the district and sinking, while scores at other schools were coming up.

Williams had two kids at Carter and one in elementary school. Like his two older children, they all came up through Adelle Turner Elementary and Atwell Middle School, both highly regarded within the DISD. But like so many others, the Williams kids saw their grades drop and they began to struggle when they hit high school. “What happened during that two-mile trip to Carter?” asks Williams.

He quickly saw that part of the trouble was lack of parental involvement. Williams and Watkins began knocking on doors and visiting churches, recruiting parents to join the PTA. “These were mothers and fathers whose sons didn’t play football,” says Watkins. “In fact, my boy is a girl”

The parents began methodically dissecting the problem at Carter. “We would chat with kids and find out that not much went on at Carter,” says Watkins. Homework was rarely given and seldom graded when it was. Grading policies varied from teacher to teacher, and parents felt their children never knew where they stood. Students would go six weeks without a test, and when they failed one test, had little chance of pulling their grade up.

Discipline in the halls was nonexistent and security was a problem. The principal, though popular with the parents, seemed to have little control over the school. And while many of the teachers were good, others were apathetic, or even hostile to parents. Some teachers radiated an attitude that Carter children couldn’t learn. After Williams’s son’s English teacher began the year by announcing that most of those in the class would fail-and his child began fulfilling that prophecy with low grades-Williams took him out of Carter and enrolled him in a private school, where he made As and Bs.

“We needed accountability and consistency, on both sides,” says Williams. At one point, angry parents attended a meeting of the DISD board and threatened to sue them for “educational malpractice.” Williams and other parents talked about boycotting the school unless things improved.

But DISD administrators already knew about the problems at Carter, says Chad Woolery, assistant superintendent for secondary education. And they thought they had just the man to turn the school around: C.C. Russeau.

A gruff, no-nonsense principal with a reputation as an autocrat and a scourge of teachers, Russeau had spent years as a principal in the DISD, trouble-shooting at problem schools. Russeau, a short, portly man whose gray beard wraps around bulldog jowls, was to become the focal point of the controversy to follow, a role he seemed to relish. In fact, many parents believe that the whole Carter mess was largely an attempt by rebellious Carter teachers, most of them white, to ’”get” Russeau.

“A lot of teachers don’t like Russeau,” says Watkins. “He’s arrogant, and he’s a black administrator. I like his style. He’s a fighter.”

Williams agrees. “As old as he is, he has not learned what society believes about black children, that they can’t learn.”

Russeau’s career as an educator had inauspicious beginnings. In 1948-49. he taught adults third and fourth grade at the Dallas Vocational School. In the Fifties, he worked as managing editor of a black weekly newspaper and at the post office. It wasn’t until 1961 that he returned to education, signing on to teach science at Madison High School.

After receiving a master’s degree in education administration at North Texas State University, Russeau became assistant principal at Madison in 1965. It wasn’t long before he developed a reputation as a strong leader, someone who could turn troubled schools around. He served as principal at Adelle Turner Elementary. Longfellow Career Academy, Adamson High School, and Wheatley High School.

“The schools where I go achieve,” Russeau says. Much of his success was based on old-fashioned discipline. His rules were simple: everyone should be in class on time. Nobody could be in the hall without a pass; students would dress appropriately and speak to each other respectfully. Those caught in violations faced his certain wrath.

But it was at Wheatley that Russeau developed what DISD calls the “Russeau system,” large chunks of which later became known as the Carter School Improvement Plan. It was an outgrowth of the district’s “management accountability system” introduced in the late Seventies under superintendent Linus Wright. Propelled by the district’s failure to increase the achievement of minority students, the plan called for administrators, teachers, and the principal on each campus to develop a yearly School Improvement Plan to address deficiencies on standardized tests. Each school’s performance on achievement tests is analyzed, and a broad plan is developed to address specific problem areas. Teacher organizations put up a ferocious fight against the SIP, contending that it took away their creativity in the classroom and overly emphasized testing. But the school district, under pressure from minority school board members and parents, stood by the system, pointing to improvements it had made not only in students’ achievement scores, but in their grades as well.

Each DISD school had an SIP, but Rus-seau pushed the concept to the hilt. He took the standardized test results on “learner standards” and identified each classroom’s areas of weakness. For example, in a certain teacher’s freshman English class, students might be struggling with pronouns and use of semi-colons. Russeau would then hold teachers to a plan to bring those scores up a certain percentage. He made it clear that failure to raise the scores would be reflected in each teacher’s evaluation.

Many teachers hated the plan. ’”It’s too rigid in structure, leaving little if any room for professional judgment,” says Bob Baker, president of the Classroom Teachers of Dallas. The DISD’s Chad Woolery has a different view. “It provided no wiggle room,” he says. “It held them accountable.”

When Russeau was appointed principal of Carter High School in May 1987. he held a series of meetings, inviting parents and teachers to develop a new Carter SIP with the Russeau system as its centerpiece. Though everyone agreed that something had to be done, the planning sessions grew more and more acrimonious; some teachers believed the parents’ requests were unrealistic or an infringement on their expertise. But eventually, the Carter SIP was put into place-“with no meaningful input” from teachers, says Baker.

In addition to setting dress codes for teachers as well as students and bringing in a policeman part-time to increase security, the new system asked teachers to be available for tutoring students each morning at 8 a.m. instead of 8:15. What drew the most opposition, however, was the heart of the Carter plan: a new grading system.

Teachers at DISD high schools had long been free to establish their own grading systems using any of six criteria, such as homework, special projects, and tests. The new Carter grading system, built on Harvard University research, was rigid and specific, requiring teachers to base each six weeks* grade on this formula: 25 percent homework. 25 percent class participation, 25 percent weekly tests, and 25 percent from a final six weeks’ test. The system was simple and easy to understand, a virtue in the eyes of supporters. Students could see just where they stood-and why-at all times.

Russeau also required that teachers assign and grade homework four days each week. Contrary to later newspaper accounts, the class participation grade was not awarded merely for attending class. It was to be given for what the district calls “bell ringers,” short test questions assigned in the first eight to ten minutes of class and aimed at improving specific weaknesses identified in standardized tests. (Some teachers criticized the bell-ringers as “just teaching the test,” a contention Russeau doesn’t buy. “I don’t understand that argument.” he says. “You’re teaching the skills that will be on the test.”)

The grading system also required that teachers give a test every Monday covering the previous week’s material; average grades every Tuesday; and send home written grade notices to be signed by parents. This allowed time for extra tutoring or parental pressure to be applied before a failing grade was set in concrete.

Watkins is blunt about parents’ reaction to the plan. “What we liked about it was what teachers-probably 10 percent of those at Carter-didn’t like about it,” he says. “It held teachers accountable.”



RUSSEAU’S NEW SYSTEM WAS EXACTLY what many Carter teachers did not want to see. They already felt stretched to the breaking point. Now came Russeau, a Joe (Lean on Me) Clark without a baseball bat. He demanded more time on the job, more testing, more parental contact-and above all, more paperwork, already the bane of a DISD teacher’s existence.

One of those who was most furious was Donna Faye Baker, a longtime Latin teacher and at the time the building’s “union steward” for the Classroom Teachers of Dallas, a local organization with about 2,000 members affiliated with the Texas State Teachers Association and the National Education Association. On the first day of the semester in September 1987, Donna Baker met Russeau with eleven grievances.

It was Donna Baker’s husband. Bob Baker, who would later become an outspoken critic of Carter in his role as president of the CTD. Baker inherited a union that had been losing membership to other teachers’ organizations in recent years, and his strong stance against Russeau’s plan may have been part of a larger strategy designed to attract new members through a feisty, activist image. Bob Baker’s rallying cry, at school board meetings and on a Channel 8 “town meeting” on the Carter controversy, was “Get out of our way and let us teach.”

The CTD claimed as members thirty of the ninety mostly white teachers at Carter, probably more than any of the city’s five teacher organizations, though district-wide it had been losing ground to the larger Dallas Federation of Teachers. As Russeau took over the school, teachers unhappy with his style of management gravitated to the CTD. Bob Baker says that CTD members agreed with Russeau’s efforts to improve student discipline. “But professional communication with Russeau was virtually impossible.”

The grievances filed by Donna Baker alleged that the plan violated the Texas Education Agency’s rules on minimizing paperwork by requiring teachers to compile weekly averages, give weekly tests, and administer “bellringers” daily; violated employees’ civil rights by requiring men to wear a shirt and tie; violated school board policy by the 25-25-25-25 grade system; and violated state law by requiring teachers to be at school more than seven hours and forty-five minutes each day.

Baker and Russeau resolved some of the grievances, like the teacher dress code, in favor of the CTD. Others were tunneled to a grievance hearing held by Dr. Robert Brown, DISD administrator of high schools, who said Russeau could not require teachers to use the four-part grading plan because it violated district policy. But Russeau continued to ask teachers to do it on a voluntary basis; many agreed, but some teachers adamantly refused to go along.

On November 24, Donna Baker was involuntarily transferred to Woodrow Wilson High School; before the school year ended, four other teachers, all critics of the Carter plan, met a similar fate. At the time. Baker said she was transferred because she had filed numerous grievances that fall and planned to file more (one of them charged that Russeau had cooked a squirrel on the school’s hot plate). Russeau says she was transferred because she could not support the Carter plan. (Donna Baker declined to be interviewed for this story.)

In December 1987, the CTD, Donna Baker, and another teacher named Frances Spradlin filed suit against the DISD and Russeau in federal court, alleging that the district violated the teachers’ civil rights by the involuntary transfers and failed to respect changes made in the plan through the grievance process. The suit still has not been scheduled for a hearing.

Throughout the 1987-88 school year. Russeau and the parents battled dissident teachers over implementation of the Carter plan. Seeing that Russeau had the total support of the parents, several teachers tried another tactic. They passed around a letter written by Harley Hiscox of the United Teachers of Daitas, proposing a plan for getting rid of Russeau. Another teacher tried to get students to circulate a petition calling for Rus-seau’s ouster. Parents were furious. “We felt that we had among us traitors.” says Watkins, “people who did not feel about the education of our children as we did, who were trying to pit the children against the parents.”

In the spring of 1988, the Carter SIP went through the annual revision process. Parents were more committed to it than ever, and on May 26 the new plan was approved by the school board as a special one-year pilot program, which, if successful, could be implemented in other high schools. The pilot designation allowed Russeau to outmaneu-ver the CTD by making the grading policy mandatory. At the request of the parents, the board also voted to allow those teachers who felt they could not support the plan to voluntarily transfer to another school.

Eighteen teachers requested transfers, and sixteen accepted other assignments, leaving about ten CTD members in the building. Watkins says the school “still had a handful of malcontents” opposed to the reforms- among them, he says, math teacher Wilfred Bates, who had refused the transfer he was offered. A simple mark in Bates’s gradebook would ignite the statewide furor over Carter.

Meanwhile, the Carter pilot program and grading policy was sent to Judge Barefoot Sanders, the federal judge who oversees the DISD’s desegregation order, and to the TEA. Both approved it, with no mention of any attempted circumvention of the state’s no-pass, no-play law. Still, the CTD didn’t back off. Blocked on the federal front, on June 6 the organization filed suit in state district court, asking for a temporary restraining order prohibiting the implementation of the Carter pilot program.

On August 15, 1988, visiting judge David Cave heard the suit, which alleged, among other things, that the DISD had denied teachers due process by forcing the plan on them. One of two teachers allegedly denied due process was Wil Bates.

The CTD also argued that the plan demoralized teachers. Again, one of the seven CTD teachers named as most demoralized was Bates. DISD attorneys reminded the judge that all teachers who wanted to transfer had been allowed to do so. Judge Cave, who seemed to have little sympathy for the CTD’s contentions, denied their request for a restraining order and set a date of January 9 to decide the matter definitively.

With the teachers” avenues of legal protest being systematically cut off. the stage was set for what was to follow. “They had to create some kind of controversy to give them ammunition to go to court,” says Don Hicks, DISD’s attorney. He believes it’s no coincidence that three months later, with the trial date rapidly approaching and Carter on its way to the playoffs, the University Inter-scholastic League received an anonymous phone call.



IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THEIR HAPPIEST moment. For the first time in some thirty years, a DISD school was going to the state football playoffs. The Carter Cowboys were scheduled to play Piano East High School the following evening, and everyone with kids at the school had made plans to attend. But parents who walked into DISD board member Thomas Jones’s monthly meeting at Carter on Thursday evening. November 10. found an angry, confused crowd.

Earlier in the day, investigators from the TEA and the UIL had visited Carter while Russeau was out of the building on jury duty. One of the investigators looked at a math teacher’s gradebook, asked him to recalculate a grade, and determined that running back Gary Edwards had failed Algebra II during the first six weeks’ grading period. And, since Edwards had played in three games while allegedly ineligible, the UIL then declared that Carter was out of the playoffs under the no-pass, no-play rule of House Bill 72. Superintendent Marvin Edwards (no relation to Gary Edwards) did not argue with the findings.

About 500 people attended the meeting that night, and the rumors were flying. Superintendent Edwards, deciding there was more to the incident than met the eye, promised the outraged parents that he would look into the matter.

The parents were asking some questions of their own, and things didn’t seem to add up. Why, four weeks after Gary Edwards received a passing grade, was the UIL given an anonymous tip that he had actually failed? When they discovered that one of the teachers involved was Bates, who they knew was a CTD member opposed to the Carter SIP, their suspicions mounted.

A group of the parents decided that what was under attack was not the football team, but the principal and the SIP. That night, the parents passed the hat and came up with $3,000. Eventually, they raised a total of $17,000 and hired lawyer Royce West to get an injunction allowing Carter to play. If DISD didn’t pursue an investigation, the parents vowed, they would.



ON THE NIGHT OF NOVEMBER 10. superintendent Edwards had gone on television to say that Carter was out of the playoffs. But the next day Edwards retracted his statement, saying that his own investigation indicated that Gary Edwards was indeed eligible. With Carter apparently back in the playoffs, the media went crazy. Over the next few weeks, stories in the newspapers and on television roundly condemned DISD and the Carter system, alleging that it was “soft,” “designed to lower standards,” and “tailor-made for athletes.”

To make matters worse, the suburban schools got into the act, with officials from Grand Prairie ISD and Piano ISD, whose districts stood to gain a great deal if Carter were ousted, condemning the program as an attempt to circumvent no-pass, no-play.

At this point, some Carter supporters and DISD officials began to suspect a conspiracy to strike at Russeau and the Carter SIP. One DISD official says that those suspicions were heightened when he discovered that Dr. Marvin Crawford, the Grand Prairie superintendent, had information about Gary Ed-wards’s grades on the very day the UIL and TEA visited Carter. Had someone who wanted to “get” Carter sent Gary Edwards’s grade sheets to Grand Prairie? Crawford seemed to prove that theory after a high-ranking DISD administrator called to let him know Grand Prairie might be playing in Carter’s stead pending an internal investigation. Crawford told the official that he had the evidence in front of him, and added that he would use his influence to see that DISD was barred, the official says. (Crawford denied that he had been given Gary Edwards’s grades.)

The Carter parents were bewildered, No one seemed to believe that black parents cared more about academics than athletics, that they had pushed a plan to make their own children and the school’s teachers more accountable. Though they told reporters their version of events, that story wasn’t getting out. In fact, they heard scathing commentaries from Channel 8’s Dale Hansen and KRLD’s Alex Burton, who apparently never set foot on the campus or talked to a Carter parent.

Many parents and DISD administrators believe there was a well-orchestrated plan by CTD members to call and write newspapers, pushing their version of events. When asked by a DISD official why the stories in The Dallas Morning News seemed to be slanted against the Carter plan, assistant managing editor Ralph Langer said the paper was getting numerous phone calls from people claiming to be current or former Carter teachers who said there was widespread cheating going on at Carter. But later, when TEA investigators returned to Dallas to investigate the plan, they gave their motel phone number to Carter teachers, asking them to report any cheating. The investigators reported that they got no phone calls and later issued a report saying they found no evidence of widespread grade manipulation.

To some degree, it’s easy to understand the confusion, if not the quick rush to condemn Carter before the facts were in. Even months later, it is difficult to determine exactly what happened. Based on interviews and transcripts of the testimony before the UIL, TEA, and state District Judge Paul Davis, D has pieced the events together. Taken as a whole, the evidence, albeit circumstantial, indicates that Wilfred Bates, a dissatisfied teacher, and the CTD manipulated events to create a controversy and bring disgrace on the popular Russeau.

Gary Edwards’s algebra grade is at the center of this dispute (see box, page 94). In early October, Gary’s father, Thurman Edwards, met to discuss his son’s grades with math teacher Bates. Edwards was concerned because Gary, a football player and a solid B-student who was on Carter’s “Advanced Diploma Track,” had told him he was having trouble in Bates’s Algebra II class. Gary had thought he was doing well in the class until he got a notice that he was in danger of tailing algebra. The notice also came as a surprise to Coach Arvis Vonner, who sent a progress form with each athlete every week for teachers to sign. Vonner says Bates had never indicated that Gary was in trouble.

When Bates showed Thurman Edwards his son’s grades, Edwards didn’t understand the teacher’s grading system. Bates told the father that his standards were high and that he usually failed a high percentage of his students. Edwards felt that in an odd way, Bates was boasting.

A closer look at Bates shows a teacher radically out of step with his peers: 78 percent of his students that six weeks failed, as opposed to the two other algebra teachers1 rates of 12 percent and 17 percent. And there were signs that Bates was in trouble professionally. Though he had received good reviews from principals in the past-Russeau had given him a high rating the year before- a 1987 letter to Russeau from Mary Lester, DISD’s director of mathematics, was submitted as evidence in the trial before Judge Davis, Lester sent up red warning flags about Bates’s teaching.

“Dr. Bates should be monitored very closely by the principal in that his classroom climate is very negative.” the administrator wrote. “In his present state of mind. I cannot imagine him being effective with students.” She suggested that Bates be referred to the district’s psychologist.

Bates’s abnormally high failure rates and problems with students may have been related to his academic and professional background. Bates is primarily trained not in math but in technical arts, or shop, and it is unclear just how much experience he has had in teaching math (see box, page 66),

The day that he met with Bates, Thurman Edwards asked the principal to transfer his son to another class. But before Gary Edwards could transfer, Bates had to give him a grade. Confusion over his transfer grade lasted a week, aggravated by the math teacher’s refusal to follow the Carter plan in averaging the grade. Gary was transferred to a class taught by John Abbe.

Instead of using numerical grades. Bates used a system of checks and symbols, and he weighted the scores using his own plan. During this week. Bates gave Gary Edwards four different transfer grades. The grades changed based on how Bates weighted the scores and the value he substituted for an NC (not complete) that Gary Edwards received for a homework grade.

The values Wilfred Bates assigned to NCs and check marks seemed arbitrary. According to Russeau. Bates explained that in his system, the checks could have different values: “In one case it meant 100. in another 19, in another 17,” Russeau says. Bates said that he converted students’ NCs to 100 at the end of the six weeks “if they corrected the behavior.” This seems contrary to DISD rules, which say that grades cannot be changed after ten days.

Russeau wrote Bates a series of three letters, asking that he comply with the SIP and convert symbols in his book to actual scores for all students. Bates didn’t respond until after the third letter. On October 7, Russeau and Bates met with DISD administrator Robert Brown about the teacher’s refusal to follow the system. That same night. Bates. Bob Baker, and several other Carter teachers met with school trustee Thomas Jones at the CTD’s office.

“It was a gripe session.” Jones says of the meeting. “Bates was very vocal; he was full of complaints. He was not going to do what the plan called for. He was not going to do the bellringers.”

When the six weeks ended on October 12, Gary Edwards took home a report card that said he made a 72 in algebra. Coach Vonner was informed that the student had passed.

The case should have been closed.

But it wasn’t. Almost a month later, the UIL got an anonymous phone call from a man who told them Gary Edwards’s grades had been changed so that he could remain eligible. The UIL staff member asked that the caller put his complaint in writing. On November 8, just a day or so after the call, an anonymous letter was hand-delivered to the UIL’s Austin office.

The letter was ostensibly from a parent who wanted his or her daughter transferred from Bates’s class and her failing grade changed “like Gary Edwards’s.” A source with the UIL, however, believes that the letter wasn’t actually from a parent, but came ’”from within the building” at Carter.

On November 10, UIL investigator Bill Stamps and TEA investigator Walter Ram-bo came to Carter. They went straight to Abbe and asked him to recalculate Gary Edwards’s first six weeks’ grade. Correctly weighting the 80 Gary had received on the six weeks’ test as 25 percent, and 65, a transfer grade from Bates, as 75 percent. Abbe wrote on the blackboard in his classroom for Rambo: (65+65+65+80) divided by 4 equals 68.75. A failing grade-but Abbe’s gradebook showed that Edwards had passed with a 72.

Why Abbe chose 65 as the transfer grade is a mystery. He had been given two other transfer grades by Bates as well: 67 and 72. The 65 came from a grade Bates had computed before being told to convert the symbols in his gradebook- And how is it possible that Abbe, a math teacher for more than twenty-five years, had made an arithmetic error in figuring his student’s grade? Apparently, none of the other students’ grades were miscomputed. Confronted with the error, Abbe wrote an apologetic letter of confession on the spot.

The TEA and UIL investigators conferred. Rambo concluded that Gary Edwards had failed; Stamps then ruled him ineligible. They called the superintendent to the school, explained the situation, and left for Austin.

Rambo never talked to Russeau. If he had. he might have learned that there had been confusion about Gary’s grade dating back to early October. He might have found out that Bates had a history of noncompliance with the pilot grading plan. He might have been shown the two green papers on which Bates had figured the transfer grades of 67 and 72-either of which, if chosen, would have put Gary over the top. He might have seen that Gary’s final average-had it been calculated with a 72 as the transfer grade, using the Carter plan and 100 for the NC-was 74, a passing grade.

The next day. Superintendent Edwards held his own investigation at a meeting with Bates, Russeau, and Abbe. Convinced that the TEA’s investigator had not gotten all the facts, he told Russeau it was up to him. Had Gary Edwards passed? Russeau said he had, so Edwards reinstated Carter. He had done what he felt was the right thing-though he and others later wondered if they had done the smart thing. In the next few weeks, it would become Carter and DISD against the TEA, the UIL, Commissioner Kirby, and the suburban school districts.



HROUGHOUT THE LATE FALL, THE Carter football team kept winning. Though he was under intense pressure, Gary Edwards made three game-winning plays, inspiring teammates who felt drawn together in adversity.

But the school district’s path to victory wasn’t as straightforward as the team’s proved to be. On November 15, the University Interscholastic League held a hearing in Austin; after seven hours of testimony, the league decided it did not have jurisdiction and referred the case to the TEA. The next day, on November 16, TEA Deputy Commissioner Tom Anderson found in favor of DISD. But Grand Prairie and Piano school districts, who had lost players to no-pass, no-play (as well as playoff games to Carter) and stood to gain financially if their teams were reinstated over Carter, insisted on an appeal. (Carter’s playoff wins brought in $306,000 for the district, based on ticket receipts; Piano, for example, could have received as much as twice that amount had they gone all the way to state.)

Commissioner Kirby called for “an administrative review” of Anderson’s decision. DISD attorney Don Hicks would later call the proceedings a “kangaroo court.” complaining that Kirby suspended due process, Kirby did not swear in the witnesses, and DISD attorneys were not allowed to cross-examine them. Hicks also was furious that Piano and Grand Prairie attorneys were allowed to participate, arguing that they had little stake in a DISD grading system.

Hicks and others point out that Kirby was between a suburban rock and an urban hard place, since his support comes primarily from suburban and rural school districts. And he is politically beholden to teachers’ organizations. Kirby is hired by the State Board of Education; the board’s most recent election swept in teacher-supported candidates. In a fight between DISD and the suburbs, between administrators and teachers, who would Kirby choose?

Kirby heard testimony from Rambo. Stamps, Superintendent Edwards, and others, finally coming down to the single issue of the NC grade on Gary Edwards’s homework. What did it mean? DISD officials said that it should have been 50 or more because Gary said he had correctly worked and handed in seven of the ten problems. But Bates testified that he never graded homework; he simply walked around to see if students had attempted all the problems. (Again, a violation of the SIP.) DISD attorneys pointed out that Bates had given Edwards a grade of 100 for the NC on the green sheets given to Vonner.

Finally, Kirby asked Bates what the NC would have ultimately meant if Gary had stayed in his class instead of transferring out. Bates said it would have been a 100-showing that the student’s behavior had been corrected-but a zero if he did not stay in the class. But during the earlier UIL hearing, Bates had testified under oath the NC meant between 50 and 70. Brown, the DISD administrator for high schools, later told the state court that Bates explained to him that his checks could have different values; Bates said he recalled the values from memory when it was time to average grades.

’The more I hear, the more confused I get,” Kirby said, drawing the review to a close. “I’m not sure reading any more is going to do anything other than muddy it further.” He asked Bates one final question: what was the NC worth on the day Gary Edwards transferred from his class?

“Zero,” Bates replied.

Despite his admitted confusion over the grades, and despite the fact that Bates had changed his story numerous times. Kirby made a ruling: Gary Edwards was ineligible. The state commissioner of education apparently ignored Coach Vonner’s testimony that Bates gave him one transfer grade of 67 and another transfer grade of 72, with the NC counting 100, as well as the district’s testimony that Bates was not following the Carter grading plan.

That afternoon, as Kirby’s ruling was handed down, attorneys for DISD were waiting in anticipation in Judge Paul Davis’s state district court, where they immediately filed a motion for a temporary restraining order against the UIL until the issue could be decided in a court trial. Davis granted the order, and after a four-day hearing (which Kirby claims was one-sided). Davis ruled on December 7 that the action taken by Russeau restoring Gary’s grade was appropriate. The judge cleared Carter for the state playoff.



A FINAL TRIAL IS SCHEDULED FOR March 27, but the football games are over. The Carter Cowbovs won. Russeau says they may take away the team’s trophy and the title, but not the knowledge that they were, indeed, the best. For the time being, at least. DISD has also won. though at a cost of $7,.000 in legal fees. And there is no price tag for the damage inflicted on the district’s reputation.

Meanwhile, the final hearing for the CTD’s state suit against DISD has been postponed, and the federal suit has yet to be scheduled. On January 10. Bates was transferred to Gaston Middle School to teach vocational education, over the protests of the CTD. In February. Gary Edwards signed a letter of intent to play football at the University of Houston.

Bob Baker, who still heads the teachers’ union, denies any “conspiracy” to undermine Russeau or the Carter plan. But he admits that the media attention has helped the CTD’s position. “When Donna Baker got pulled out [of Carter], nobody paid any attention. But get involved with no-pass, no-play, and you get Second Coming coverage.”

After all is said and done, it’s unlikely that the genera] public’s perception of the Carter plan will change. The issues are complex, and the conventional wisdom deeply ingrained. And for the media, the story is easier to understand if it’s about no-pass, no-play instead of a power struggle between administrators and teachers, between school districts with different agendas, between stale and local officials. “It’s hard to sell the idea that the TEA commissioner was making a play for power,” says Hicks.

The Carter controversy may have effects reaching far beyond a single school. In January, state Representatives Fred Hill of Richardson and Bill Arnold of Grand Prairie introduced legislation that would make Commissioner Kirby the final authority on grading systems and extracurricular eligibility, while exempting him from his present statutory obligation to follow due process in hearings.

“I think the suburban and rural districts will rue the day they pushed that legislation.” says Hicks. “1 don’t want to leave anything to the subjective judgment of Kirby.”

And there are fears within the DISD that Kirby will exact revenge when accreditation and ftmding time rolls around-fears heightened when TEA’s attorney, assistant District Attorney Kevin O’Hanlon. threatened the district after the hearings were over. “He told me not to push it because we were coming up for accreditation and the commissioner would take our funding,” says Hicks, fuming.

As for Russeau, he is firmly convinced that there was a conspiracy-that Bates and Abbe, along with the leadership of the CTD, tried to sabotage him and the Carter School Improvement Plan. But the principal is con fident that time and the STEELS test, which measures how well students learn the state- and district-mandated curriculum, will prove the Carter plan works. Already he”s seen failure rates drop and attendance rates for both teachers and students increase. But Russeau wonders. If achievement test scores also improve, and if Carter High begins to produce National Merit Scholars, as he has promised parents, will the media be on his doorstep to write a happier ending to the Carter story?

BATES: THE MAN AND HIS RECORD In checking on Dr. Wilfred Bates’s involvement in the Gary Edwards-Carter High affair, D discovered some puzzling discrepancies in the information Bates furnished the DISD, both when he was hired and when he applied to be placed on the career ladder program, which grants higher pay for more hours of experience, advanced degrees, etc.

■Bob Baker, president of the Classroom Teachers of Dallas, told reporters that Bates had a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. Actually, Bates’s bachelor’s and master’s degrees are both in industrial arts. He does have some twenty hours of math (six or seven courses) on which he earned Bs and Cs.

■Bates says that he taught math and industrial arts in Tulsa public schools during 1956-57. But according to records. Bates taught only industrial arts.

■Bales taught in the Denver public school system during 1960-1969, except tor a sabbatical year during which he earned his doctorate in technical education. A clerk in the Denver ISD office could not con firm that Bates taught math there, as he stated on his DISD application.

■On his DISD service records. Bates says he taught public school in Vigo County, Indiana, from 1970-1973. But there is no record of Bates in Vigo County personnel files, payroll records, or faculty records. An archivist at Indiana State University says that during those years. Bates was actually a professor of industrial education at ISU.

■In 1982. Bates was hired to teach math in the DISD at $20,656 a year. He campaigned to upgrade his pay. based on his years of experience in Tulsa, Denver, and Vigo. According to the DISD’s Chad Woolery, Bates is now at the top of the pay scale, making more than $37,000 a year- despite the shaky documentation of his past record.



NUMBERS GAME



The Carter dispute is complex, but one thing ought to be clear: what was Gary Ed-wards’s grade?



October 4-Thurman Edwards asks that his son be transferred to another algebra class.

October 5-Wilfred Bates gives Gary Edwards a transfer grade of 63; is asked by Russeau to recompute the grade based on the Carter plan; grade is refigured as a 65. Both grades included a zero for an “NC” (not complete) on a homework grade. Edwards said he did eight often problems on the assignment.

October 6-Bates is instructed by Russeau to convert grade book in accordance with Carter plan. No response.

October 7-Bates meets with ad-ministrators and is rebuked for failing to comply with plan. Bates and other disgruntled teachers appeal to DISD School Board member Thomas Jones.

October 11-Gary Edwards informs his coaches that he might fail algebra; has received no daily grades in new class.

October 12-First period: Gary Edwards scores an 80 on six weeks’ algebra test. Third period: Coach asks Bales for Gary’s transfer grade. Sixth period: Bates gives coaches a green paper showing Gary’s transfer grade as a 67. converting the NC homework grade to a 100. A second green sheet is later submitted, recomputing grade as a 72. New teacher John Abbe averages Gary’s grade for the six weeks at 72.

November 7-Anonymous phone call to UIL alleges that Gary Edwards’s grade was changed to circumvent no-pass, no-play.

November 8-UIL receives hand-delivered anonymous letter of complaint, supposedly from a Carter parent.

November 10-Russeau out on jury duty; investigators arrive at Carter; Abbe recalculates grade using 65 as transfer grade, declares Gary failed. Carter is ruled ineligible.