Mayor Parker’s tough talk on Fort Worth schools: Shut up about politics. Get results.
Texas’ new truth-teller is Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker, and she said what needed to be said about our schools.
In a district wrought over protest stunts by partisan political candidates, she spelled out the actual complaint city leaders in general had with top school officials.
“I know one thing we’re not talking about,” she said the other day. That’s student achievement — “how kids are doing.”
In a district where nearly three-fourths of our third-graders can’t read on that level, we are running out of time to catch up.
You might not realize this. But Fort Worth has never been very smart.
Our residents are less likely to have a college degree than Houston’s or Dallas’, and have worse SAT scores.
Our high school graduation rate even trails working-class cities like San Antonio or Oklahoma City.
“I want our focus to be ... how do we make sure our students are reading at grade level?” said Parker, a 2002 graduate of a small-town Texas public school and now a city education leader and first-term mayor.
She went on.
“Make sure they can do algebra in the eighth grade the way they need to,” she said.
“And more importantly, what is their path out of high school? We have not been talking about any of that!”
It wasn’t new from Parker. She was saying this before she ran for mayor.
But it was delivered with more urgency, almost as if Parker wanted to double up as school superintendent in Fort Worth, where 84% of students live in the same poverty she knew growing up.
It was the kind of speech we should be hearing every day from school board President Tobi Jackson and other trustees.
Parker knew exactly where to lay blame for the politics: politicians.
“You could blame Republicans. You could blame Democrats. But I don’t really think that does you any good,” she said.
“We have to acknowledge that every single family — every single student — deserves access to a high-quality education regardless of their ZIP code. And right now in Texas and in Fort Worth, that is simply not the case.”
Superintendent Kent P. Scribner, a personable and polished leader, was supposed to fix it all when he arrived seven years ago.
He delivered an early boost and accomplished the near-impossible by winning public support to upgrade long-dilapidated minority schools east of Interstate 35W.
But he never seemed to be on the same page with city officials or business leaders.
In the end, he made gains toward equity, but not excellence. And that was unlikely to change after seven years.
The same week as Parker’s talk, Scribner spoke as a guest of the Texas Tribune news site.
The pandemic uncovered “gross disparities” in our education system, he said — true for both inner-city and rural schools, all with no affordable broadband service.
Scribner’s problems began when Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick made a 2016 trip to embarrass him over local orders involving transgender students’ civil rights. Lately, political candidates from Haslet, Keller and Southlake have used him as a punching bag to campaign against any discussions of racial injustice.
“I think folks understand that this is an effective political strategy,” Scribner said. “Tarrant County is the ground zero, the bellwether. It’s not even red-blue. It’s a battle for the Republican Party.”
That won’t stop anytime soon.
Parker is right. We need to hear less about politics.
And more about results.
This story was originally published April 1, 2022 at 10:54 AM.
