School district steps up amid state takeover. FWISD? Don’t be silly | Opinion

You might have missed it, but we recently had a refreshing — and rare — burst of accountability from a local government.

The Lake Worth school board decided Jan. 20 not to appeal the Texas Education Agency’s decision to place the district under state supervision. School board President Tammy Thomas owned up to the trustees’ mistakes, saying they waited too long to hire a new superintendent and otherwise address repeated failure at a district campus.

So, Lake Worth will not take up an administrative appeal that is an option under state law or (presumably) drag out the process in district court. The work to fix a long-stagnant district and improve education for more than 3,000 students can proceed apace.

Like its much larger neighbor, the Fort Worth Independent School District, Lake Worth saw state Education Commissioner Mike Morath move to take over after one campus repeatedly failed to meet basic performance standards. Like FWISD, Lake Worth’s overall rating was not quite as dire (even as students routinely struggle to demonstrate subject mastery), leading some to question whether the intervention came on a technicality.

But in Lake Worth, trustees owned up to the entire crisis. Their counterparts in Fort Worth have had to be dragged into accountability each step of the way. Even now, they are appealing Morath’s decision, adding months to the necessary overhaul.

It’s not just a political tug-of-war or administrative gobbledygook. There are children right now moving through Fort Worth schools — or at least they’re supposed to be. The institution will go on, but each individual child gets one shot at an education. The longer it takes to get the district proficient at teaching reading and math, the more children who will suffer.

Ever since the spotlight fell on the district’s abominable performance at those basic tasks, the board and the district’s defenders have offered up scapegoats. It was the superintendent’s fault — never mind that this board hired her. It was a lack of state funding increases. It was the narrow legal provision that allowed Morath to step in over one campus, which the district closed anyway.

Or, some argue, it’s all a secret Republican plot to eliminate public education. Maybe the district needs better reading and math teachers, but it’s got plenty of qualified candidates for Conspiracy Theories 101.

Plus, the district is fighting a quirk with a quirk. This week, officials objected based on a disagreement over when they entered a partnership to overhaul the troubled Leadership Academy at Forest Oak Sixth Grade, which triggered a pause in state ratings. Every piece of available evidence suggests a systemic learning crisis in Fort Worth, but the district’s elected leadership wants to argue over calendar pages.

The Lake Worth board’s different reaction is instructive. If the factors listed above were truly responsible, they would be to blame in LWISD, too.

That’s not to say that in either case, the board is entirely at fault. When districts fail over decades, there’s plenty of blame to go around. The community, teachers and administrators, policymakers and families must all measure their roles in it and work together to prevent it from happening again.

At this point, the Lake Worth district is much better positioned to recover than Fort Worth ISD, simply because its leaders have acknowledged how they got to this point and are embracing a major step without interfering.

Your move, Fort Worth.