On The Edge

THE MEETING AT EMANUEL METHODIST CHURCH WAS HASTILY ARRANGED, but the guest list contained some of the (op names in minority leadership circles. The Rev. Zan Holmes would be there, along with lawyer Royce West and school board trustee Thomas G. Jones. Activist attorney Adelfa Callejo planned to attend, and so did park board member Rene Martinez and Hispanic lawyer Diane Orozco.

The Dallas Independent School District board of trustees, a nine-member elected body dating back to 1888, had just been seated with a majority of ethnic minorities-two Hispanics and three African-Americans. It was the first time an elected body in the city of Dallas could boast more blacks and browns than whites. Now, these and other leaders of Dallas’s African-American and Hispanic communities came together with high hopes of forging a historic coalition. They would solidify minority power and send a new political order on its way.

The Hispanic faction got right to the point. “We want an Hispanic to be president of the school board,” Adelpha Callejo told her colleagues, “and we want you to support Rene Castilla.” Castilla. a second-term trustee, had vied for the post a year before but had lost in the zero hour to longtime board President Mary Rutledge, who this year was retiring. With the help of the board’s three black trustees and the newest minority board member, Oak Cliffs Trini Garza, Castilla was certain that his time had come.

But the African-Americans had an idea of their own. They wanted Dr. Yvonne Ewell to lead the DISD board. They felt that Ewell, with 39 years of service to public education in Dallas, both as an administrator and a trustee, had earned the post through her relentless prodding of the system on behalf of minority schoolchildren.

And besides that, they didn’t like René Castilla and said so. Castilla had angered blacks and browns alike a couple of years before by supporting DISD Superintendent Marvin Edwards’s efforts to end the school system’s lengthy entanglement with the federal courts. No. Castilla wasn’t the type the AfricanAmerican contingent had in mind.

Furious, the Hispanics let the blacks have a piece of their minds. “We don’t tell you who to run from your community,” Callejo told the assembly. She and others pointed out that Hispanics had been steadfast in their support of the African-American community’s chosen leaders, even when (hey didn’t particularly buy their act. Who were the blacks to tell the browns which candidates they could run?

The debate lasted well into the evening and continued by telephone into the wee hours of the night. But in the end. no one would budge. The deal collapsed.

By the time the election was held the next night. the Hispanics had cut a deal with the Anglos. Rene Castilla was elected president in a 5-4 vote, and Dan Peavy, a white from East Dallas, became the board vice president. The blacks walked away with nothing.

To add insult to injury, Peavy’s nomination came not from a fellow Anglo, but from Trini Garza. “The minority coalition won’t work.” Thomas Jones said bitterly to a reporter for The Dallas Morning News after the meeting was over. That’s absurd, Castilla said later. “What coalition?”

Since the election last May. Castilla has worked hard to mend fences, especially with Ewell and her alter ego, Kathlyn Gilliam. But the back-room politicking will stick in the minds of DISD observers and insiders for some time. It showed the essential polit-icalization of a board that most people think ought to be more worried about the sorry state of public schools than about forging political coalitions. And it heralded the coming of age locally of three-party politics-the politics of race.

If most parents and taxpayers believe that problems like school finance, teacher accountability, educational philosophy, and failing students are to be the driving forces behind a public education board of trustees, they probably haven’t sat in on one of those board meetings lately. School boards across the country, especially those in urban areas like Dallas, have come under fire as much for their political bickering as for their failure to reverse the steady decline in student achievement. And while political bickering among elected officials is nothing new, it seems especially offensive when it involves the futures of thousands of schoolchildren.

Serving on the DISD board was once considered the highest public calling. Now it’s deemed an act close to lunacy. Where once the school board was the bastion of like-minded civic volunteers, it has become increasingly political and increasingly diverse. As one DISD staffer put it. “Diversity breeds distrust.”

At this critical lime in the future of Dallas schools, distrust is the most obvious byproduct of the Dallas school board, and it is the major force that these nine individuals from nine different backgrounds must work to overcome.

Arguably, it is now or never. As Sandy Kress, a lawyer and chairman of the Commission for Educational Excellence is fond of saying, “a window of opportunity” exists that may not appear for another decade or so. Public pressure to turn the schools around is getting stronger every day. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) recently warned the trustees to shape up or face the consequences. The media has launched an unrelenting assault on the board’s petty preoccupations. The Kress Commission, as it has been dubbed, appears to have galvanized unprecedented public and media support for its reform plan, which has yet to be fully embraced by the very board that appointed the commission. Hovering out there in the wings is the need to marshal taxpayer support for a much-needed bond issue. And on top of all that, because of the new census and its mandated redis-tricting, all nine trustees must stand for reelection in May of 1992. Already there is talk in the community of fielding a slate of candidates that would challenge the whole lot.

If there were ever a time to work together to get public education back on track, this, it would appear, is it.



ELEVEN YEARS AGO THIS MONTH. D MAGAZINE PRINTED A scorching account of the workings of the DISD school board entitled “How the Clowns Control the Circus.” The article is now the stuff of legend around 3700 Ross Avenue, even though only one of the current trustees was in power in 1980 and then-Superintendent Linus Wright was replaced three years ago by Marvin Edwards. More than once during the course of preparing this story, I met with, “Oh no. you’re not going to write another ’Circus’ article, are you?”

The long memories are not without justification. A typical board meeting back then was depicted as a “hissing, scratching, clawing melee in which the opponents have one goal: to draw blood.” Long board discourses, printed verbatim, showed one member or another accusing somebody else of back-stabbing, of coming to the table with a hidden agenda, of conducting tirades purely for the benefit of the press.

What’s that old saying about “the more things change…”? A typical board meeting at the DISD, circa 1991, resembles not so much a cat fight as a pontificating contest. The old politics of personal animosity have been replaced by the politics of race and personal agendas. Neither makes for particularly progressive governing. Neither is likely to make Dallas schools one whit better.

The whole concept of the lay school board serving as a link between the goals of the commmunity and the practical business of educating its future citizens is as old as the republic itself. But something happened on the way from the little red schoolhouse to today’s embattled system of public education. And if Dallas has taken a dim view of the goings-on of its local representatives, we are not alone. Back in 1985, The Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL) in Washington, D.C., saw a system in crisis throughout the country and set out to report on it. Their findings closely parallel the predicament that Dallas’s school board now finds itself in: low voter turnout for school board elections; difficulty in attracting qualified candidates: a poor public image; negative media coverage; disdain on the part of state officials; tension, if not outright hostility. among staff, parent and teacher groups, even fellow elected officials. An update of the study, which the IEL describes as “’more of the same, only worse.” will be published this fall.

According to the institute’s report, the public has a low tolerance for board bickering and “grandstanding.” and for board members who seem well-intentioned but ill-prepared. Community satisfaction with its school board was high, the study concluded, when members seemed to be pulling together, working as a single entity, with a “business-like image.”

That may be the crux of the perception problem. There are few things the D1SD school board resembles less than a business-like proceeding. And there’s a reason for that. Fewer and fewer members have business backgrounds. Of the current nine members, one is a window-washing contractor, one is a journalism professor, another a former music teacher now in construction, another a former DISD administrator. A decorator, an engineer, a justice of the peace, a community volunteer, and a restaurant and bakery owner round out the board. All are well-intentioned volunteers. But none have much experience running an institution as complex as DISD.

If large percentages of DISD students were achieving on a competitive level with the rest of the country, the fact that business leaders have deserted the Dallas school board in droves would be inconsequential. As it is. there is much hand wringing over the declining quality of the individuals who choose to run. Just last spring, former Sanger-Harris president and longtime civic leader Jack Miller considered a campaign, but after attending a few squabbling, meandering meetings, he gave up on the idea. Here again. Dallas is not alone. According to Fortune magazine, business leaders across the US. have all but abandoned their local public schools, preferring to hobnob in higher education or get involved in private schools.

There has been increasing interest in school board elections by ethnic minorities. More representation by African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians makes sense in an age in which more and more school systems are dominated by minority kids. (Even so, the inequity in racial ratios is huge; in 1990, according to the National School Boards Association, blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities counted for fewer than 7 percent of elected school board reps.)

The presence of more minorities on school boards has led to more contentious proceedings, nationwide research suggests, because basically, minorities and their Anglo counterparts tend not to view service in the same way. The Institute for Educational Leadership terms these ideological differences “trusteeship” vs. “representativeness.” What they mean is that minorities tend to cling hard to the fact that they were elected by a certain constituency to represent that constituency. Anglos tend to view their job as one of representing the district as a whole.

There is no question that the DISD board fits that pattern. The blacks in particular, especially Kathlyn Gilliam and Thomas Jones, are driven by a desire to protect the interests of other blacks. Given their firm belief that years of institutional racism have resulted in the mis-education of their young, such protectionism is easy to understand. But it rarely provides for harmonious discussions or consensus thinking.

It also leads to distrust of the system, and to a view, insiders say, that the DISD staff-from Marvin Edwards on down-is at their beck and call. “I call it ’elected official syndrome,’” one staffer says. It was the black trustees, the source says, who pushed for full-time board aides-DISD staffers whose job it is to type correspondence and coordinate school business for the board members. One such aide serves the three African-American trustees, and the other works for the remaining six board members. Highly placed sources charge that the minority trustees take advantage of their tax-supported assistant. overloading her with requests for reports, or calling her to their homes to take notes during informal lunch meetings.

Some board members have accused other board members of abusing and demoralizing the DISD staff-from Marvin Edwards on down. Trustee Ed Grant, a fiscal conservative, has vowed both to make an issue out of board members ordering aides to come to their homes (a frequent charge aimed at Yvonne Ewell) and using DISD funds for blatantly political gatherings (a frequent charge aimed at Thomas Jones), and to be ever-vigilant to the way the board spends taxpayer money. For instance. Grant put the issue of lax accounting by board members (of travel and other expenses) on the meeting agenda several times. The issue made the front page of The Dallas Morning News, and the flap led to a new policy adopted in April.

That myriad disputes over procedure and personal behavior divide the board should come as no surprise, given the fact that minority trustees firmly believe that DISD is permeated by “institutional racism.” That goes to the core of the unitary status debate (the process of freeing the district from federal court scrutiny). When the issue comes up. the debate always tends to divide the board members along racial lines. A lot of people thought that naming an African-American-Edwards-as superintendent would give the African-American board members the confidence to move the district out of court. It didn’t.

Listening to long-winded speeches about years of alleged abuse and neglect of minority children stemming from decades of “racist” teachers and administrators, it’s hard not to become saddened by the historical baggage that seems to block every path to progress. Race permeates every issue the board considers-from boundary changes to relieve overcrowding to the racial makeup of the Arts Magnet, to new methods of improving student performance. Even Kite-based management, which puts most of the decision-making power in the local school rather than in the central bureacracy, has stirred racial animosity. According to Kathlyn Gil-liam, site-based management, the centerpiece of Kress’s reform proposal, is racist. “That’s the kind of plan white folks come up with when blacks finally get in charge,” she has said.

How all of this affects the way Johnny is learning to read or write is difficult to say. But it is clear that DISD kids are having trouble in the classroom. For years our schools have limped along trying one new “programmatic remedy” after another, approved by one school board after another, in an offort to keep Janie from slipping further behind the Japanese. Now we have decided that many of those “remedies” were worse than the disease, and a new set of reforms is on the table. To the extent that harmoniously functioning trustees could assess fresh ideas, marshal public support for them, hire learned professionals who could inspire their staffs to implement (hem. and raise the money-public and private-needed to get (hem off the ground, a top-flight school board could truly turn DISD around.

Perhaps because the public is tired of race as a political theme, many Dallas citizens have little confidence that this DISD board can do that. And low confidence in the DISD board translates to a poor perception of the school system as a whole. “We’re trapped in a time warp.” observes Bob Weiss, a DISD parent and member of the Kress Commission. “Ever-present are the vestiges of racial and class segregation. They’re issues we just can’t get rid of.”



ORMEH BOARD PKESIDENT MARY RUT-ledge remembers the day the call came in from the TEA. It was on a Wednesday af-ternoon in April, months after the accreditation report was due. It’s ready, Marvin Edwards was curtly informed. Either come down and get it or we’ll put it in the mail.

Worried about keeping the report under wraps, Rutledge advised Edwards to send an aide to Austin on the next plane. “1 can”t imagine what would have happened to those copies if they had gotten loose in the mail,” she says.

As it was, the blistering report was leaked to the media within 48 hours, and headlines screamed that the TEA might jerk the district’s accreditation. Details of the preliminary report were dribbled through the media for the next few days. It was a devastating blow to a district that seemingly could get nothing right. The TEA accreditation team criticized Dallas’s high dropout rate, crowded classrooms, and wide disparity between whites and minorities. But the most stinging attacks were aimed at the school board itself.

For starters, the TEA accused certain board members of tying staffers up in meetings so many hours each week that those employees could scarcely function in their jobs. Furthermore, they charged that board members routinely made “unauthorized” visits to schools, sometimes dressing down a particular principal or teacher. They cited burdensome requests on Edwards and his aides to produce reams of reports, and they exhorted the board to improve the way it communicates within its own ranks, and to the media and the public at large.

Predictably, few DISD insiders believe that the TEA report was fair. For one thing, they claim the accreditation team came armed with file folders of newspaper clippings critical of DISD and seemed to base at least some citations on press coverage rather than direct observations. As a case in point, the report mentioned the way board members account for their expenses, even though the TEA team visited Dallas in November and the accounting ruckus didn’t occur until March.

Another factor, some believe, was the members of the accreditation team itself, who tended to hail from small towns. “Some |of the criticisms] were justified,” says longtime board secretary Bob Johnston, “but every major city-Houston, El Paso- has gotten the same criticisms of its board,” The smaller towns, Johnston says, still have boards out of the Fifties. “Especially since singie-member districts came about in the Seventies, boards have gotten increasingly political. Boards are political animals.”

Some of the TEA-cited problems had already been corrected-for example, the inordinate amount of time spent in meetings. By any measure, the DISD board spends an awful lot of time meeting-an estimated 30 hours a week. By contrast, the Richardson school board requires more like seven to eight hours a week, according to RISD board member Patti Clapp. But that has changed, Dallas board members claim, partly because last January the board began starting its afternoon committee meetings at 4 p.m. rather than 1 p.m. The later hour not only leaves the staff free during school hours, but it has cut the length of the meetings. “When you start at 4.” says Dan Peavy. “you tend to end up around 6 or 7. When we started at 1. we tended to end around 6 or 7.”

Long meetings lend to spawn long speeches, long speeches lead to hot tempers, and hot tempers are what the media tend to report. Johnston believes that the fact that DISD has two beat reporters from the Morning News and one from the Dallas Times Herald-plus assorted broadcasters when the occasion warrants-contributes mightily to the district’s perception problems.

DISD explanations aside, the TEA report did little to improve public confidence. And some of the allegations tended to confirm our worst fears. The TEA’s charge that the board tends to micro-manage the district’s affairs-getting involved in administrative rather than policy issues-may be the most serious and unsettling accusation. It went right to the heart of what some observers see as the worst failing of the board-its refusal to function as a true board of directors, setting overarching goals and spelling out policies. Critics say that the board sticks its nose in too many affairs that should be handled by Edwards and his staff.

Critics and defenders of the board can quibble over whether an item in question constitutes a policy question or an administrative task, but the truth is, past years have shown more and more involvement on the part of the board in the school district’s day-to-day affairs. “The problem is,” says Rut-ledge, “whenever we get off on something that really isn’t a policy matter, someone will claim that they need a deeper understanding in order to know how to assess the policy.”

Personnel matters are a case in point. Many school districts, Richardson among them, leave personnel issues almost totally to the hired professionals. Clapp. the Richardson board member, estimates that in 12 years on the board she has attended between five and seven board-level personnel hearings, a court of last resort for unresolved disputes. In contrast. DISD wrote into Marvin Edwards’s contract the board’s right to ratify all hirings and firings throughout the district. Though board members say that they usually go along with Edwards’s recommendations, they spend a lot of time discussing them.

The truth is, they spend a lot of time discussing just about everything. I’ve listened to long discussions of the history of racism in America, the U.S. military’s alleged discriminatory policies in the Persian Gulf, the teachings of Louis Farrakhan, power struggles within the black community, strong mayor vs. city manager governments. Saul Alinsky’s subversion tactics, and so on. Most of these speeches come from the minority board members, a fact that goes back to the way minorities view service to the school board. For a group that is just beginning to be empowered, a bully pulpit is a bully pulpit, and the DISD board room serves as well as anything else.

Long speeches on the actual business at hand-education-aren’t rare either. “By their nature, board members tend to know how to do things better than anyone else,” Johnston says with a wink. The board secretary points out that a recent trend has seen more and more board members with a background in education. That in itself may lead to a tendency to “micro-manage.”

Any regular follower of the DISD board can’t help but notice that important issues seem to drag on and on and on. At one meeting board members will ask for certain figures or reports. Then at the next meeting, they’ll claim not to have gotten them in time to read them, or they’ll say they weren’t what they asked for. Most often, Marvin Edwards sits stone-faced, answering politely only when called upon, and occasionally rubbing his eyes in fatigue.

Sometimes the delays are purposeful. For example, during 1989 discussions of unitary status, Thomas Jones stated that he couldn’t vote until Edwards produced an entire history of the nation’s efforts to desegregate schools, from Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) forward. The report took months to compile and was delivered in boxes. At other times, the pontificating is for the sake of the press, or to send a message back to the neighborhood.

Edwards induces some of the stress himself, insiders say, because he often appears to be indecisive, offering the board too many options from which to choose. He is a quiet man, an able educator, but hardly a take-charge kind of leader.

To be fair, the board has hamstrung Edwards as well. A case in point is Edwards’s frustration over leading a school system that is still lied up in court, as it has been for decades. At a networking function some time ago, where Edwards was dining with other highly placed African- American business and political leaders, Dallas Housing Executive Director Alphonso Jackson reportedly asked Edwards what he thought of Federal Judge Barefoot Sanders, whose court oversees D1SD desegregation efforts. Edwards replied that he had never met the man. Jackson leaned over the table, incredulous. “What do you mean you never met him?” Jackson asked. “I have lunch with my judge [Federal Judge Jerry Buchmeyer] once a week!”

But Edwards’s character is not crucial here. It is difficult to imagine what kind of superintendent could effectively manage the D1SD board. And Dallas may not get to find out anytime soon. The word is that Edwards, despite the obvious discomfort he feels with some aspects of the job, is committed to DISD and doesn’t want to leave. Even if he did, the school board would likely have trouble replacing him. Large-city superintendents are rapidly becoming an endangered species. Currently, 19 urban districts are looking for a superintendent, says Linus Wright, now president and CEO of Ideal Learning Inc. “It used to be said that the tenure of a superintendent was roughly the same as an NFL football coach,” Johnston says. “Now it’s probably less.”

IT WAS A MAGNIFICENT MOMENT. AFT’ER nine grueling months of intensive study of school reforms all over the country, Sandy Kress stood at the microphone to present the members of the DISD school board with the fruits of his committee’s toil: the Commission for Educational Excellence’s final report. It was a blueprint for moving the district forward, a tough-fought compromise plan that, by all accounts, came out of a remarkable collaboration among people with a variety of points of view, It was, some said, a paradigm for the New Dallas: an ethnically balanced group of private citizens-among them Bob Weiss of The Meadows Foundation, UT South we stern’s Dr. Robert Haley, downtown business leader Joyce Foreman, Hispanic Chamber President Elva Rodriguez-engaged in honest and constructive dialogue. Progress, at last.

Kress, a consummate politician, took time to single out and thank each member of the school board for their individual contributions. Most of the trustees were beaming. The crowd gave the committee a standing ovation, and some of the school board members jumped to their feet to applaud as well. Most of them made little speeches, thanking the group for all of its hard work.

Noticeably non-responsive was Kathlyn Gilliam, whose eyes never left the papers on the table in front of her. She did not thank either Kress or the other members of the commission. She made no comment, at least not until the last of the commission members were well out the door.

Yvonne Ewell, however, had plenty to say. It was Ewell who, last summer, persuaded her fellow board members to form the commission in the first place. The board had decided to convene a group to look into the needs of DISD facilities before putting a bond issue to voters. Ewell wisely believed that the public would be more likely to swallow the bond issue if it looked like they were addressing education reform as well.

And so the Kress Commission was born. Each DISD board member appointed someone to serve, and heads of various minority adjunct bodies took seats, too. The task was an arduous one, and not without its bumps. Hundreds of pages of studies were read, and education experts were brought in to share with the commission the current thinking on issues ranging from standardized tests to multicultural instruction. There was, at times, heated give and take. But the group hung together-black, white, and brown.

The resulting report has been hailed as a truly outstanding map for reform. It gives principals and teachers and parents more control over their individual schools and provides for tough, yet fair, ways of measuring progress-or the lack of it. Most astonishing was the committee’s promise to raise some $6 million in private funds for the purpose of rewarding schools and individual teachers who show that they can help students improve.

But it was clear that one board member was going to be tough to win over: Mrs. Gilliam, as she is invariably called, had been skeptical from the start. Her comment on the interim report: “There’s nothing new in here.” Her statement at the issuance of a brochure to galvanize public support: “I’ve never seen anything so tasteless in my life.” Her remarks at the district budget hearings: “We don’t have the money to devote to these reforms.” Her remarks after the Kress entourage departed on the night the report was presented: “It’s a lot easier to put ideas on paper than to translate them into action.”

If publicly Gilliam has been less than supportive, her private efforts have amounted to sabotage. According to sources who were there, the three African-American board members-Gilliam, Jones, and Ewell- called the minority members of the commission together in mid-spring to discuss the report. Gilliam stated plainly what she wanted them to do: withdraw from the negotiations and file a separate, minority report. Having lived so long with the politics of divisiveness, perhaps Gilliam couldn’t abide a multiethnic united front. The commission members refused. “I told her I’d worked too hard for too many months with the other members of that commission,” says one member. “I said that’s just not the way I do things. I believe in changing things from within the system.”

A study of the behind-the-scenes workings of the DISD school board, past and present, cannot help but reveal the powerful impact that Gilliam has had on DISD in the 17 years she has served on the board. She is smart, a hard worker, an extremely effective representative from her district. But it is apparent that she has also become accustomed to her power-and it is considerable. Staff, fellow board members, and community leaders alike often go to great lengths to “placate Mrs. Gilliam.”

But Gilliam’s attacks on the Kress Commission report, and on Sandy Kress himself, have been mean and underhanded even by her standards. In August, she appeared at a press conference with the Rev. S. M. Wright, her longtime ally, minister, and employer at People’s Baptist Church, to vilify Kress and condemn his efforts, especially his attempts to build support in the African-American community for the proposed reforms. Calling the Kress reforms “tantamount to plagiarism,” Gilliam appeared upset because she, her fellow board members, and Marvin Edwards were not getting credit for school reforms already in place. Privately, DISD insiders speculate that Gilliam cannot bear seeing her power usurped by new leadership.

For years, Gilliam has been able to manipulate other minorities who have come to the board; Ora Lee Watson, now a DISD principal, resigned after less than a year on the board rather than risk open confrontations. Now, Gilliam’s opposition to the Kress report has put Yvonne Ewell in an awkward position. She’ll have trouble distancing herself from it because the commission was her idea. But Ewell rarely breaks ranks with Gilliam and Jones. Jones has supported the commission’s plan publicly, but insiders doubt that his motives run much deeper than surface politics. Ewell’s remarks the night the report was presented were candid and revealing. “I’m reminded of that saying.” she said. “Be careful what you ask for because you just might get it.”

Those words may turn out to be more prophetic than even Ewell intended. Bolstered by a viable shot at reform and fed up with throwing money down what seems to be a yawning hole, the public is beginning to wake up. Nationally, a backlash against school boards is just beginning to stir. In Boston, where former DISD Deputy Superintendent Lois Harrison-Jones was recently named superintendent, the mayor pushed a law through the Massachusetts state House giving him the authority to throw the elected Boston school board out and replace it with an appointed one. Texas has yet to hear rumblings of anything so drastic, but periodically someone raises the issue of at least limiting the board’s terms.

Political consultant Harry Tanner, whose job it is to seek out and encourage local political candidates, believes that interest in the school board is on the rise, citing the number of qualified candidates who ran campaigns in last May’s elections. People are already beginning to consider races in 1992, Tanner says, when all nine positions will be up for grabs. Especially if the board does not embrace the Kress Commission report, it is likely that a full-scale effort will be mounted in the business community to throw out all the current members. With Kress himself declining a bid to run for mayor in favor of pressing hard for his reforms, and a growing list of community leaders signing on to hold the board’s feet to the fire, the pressure isn’t likely to abate any time soon.

Even the blacks, whose seats have been considered invulnerable to attack, may face serious challenges. “The name of the game in politics is bringing home the bacon,” Kress says. “With student achievement what it is-especially among minority children- there may be serious questions as to whether or not they are doing that.”

There are signs that at least some of theboard members see the writing on the wall.Castilla has moved quickly to establish a newdecorum and restore a business-like clip toboard proceedings. He is, he says, trying tomake the board “pro-active” by assigningtasks to the members. “For too long,”Castilla says, “the board has appeared tomeddle because it hasn’t had enough to do.”Like everyone concerned with the running ofschools. Castilla and his fellow boardmembers must be held accountable-thewatchword of education reform. As one observer put it, “At what point do they movefrom being part of the problem to part of thesolution?”