After a few fits and starts, the DISD Board has hired a new Superintendent for the District, Dr. Mike Moses. Dr. Moses is a former Texas Education Commissioner and most recently the Deputy Chancellor of Texas Tech University. He also has front-line public school experience over the years as a teacher in Duncanville and a principal in Garland, among other positions.
Besides his broad educational training and experience, Dr. Moses got to know the DISD, and its Board, quite well during his tenure as the state’s Education Commissioner, so he has the professional education background many said that they wanted, as well as a more than passing acquaintance with education politics, including in Dallas.
The search, as you would expect, had its interesting moments.
One of the candidates considered was County Judge Lee Jackson, in the vein of a nationwide trend of looking at nontraditional candidates (that is, people other than education bureaucrats) for big-city school superintendent positions — for example, a former Army general now running the Seattle schools or a former Governor of Colorado hired to run the schools in Los Angeles.
Judge Jackson seems to have done a creditable job over the years of heading up the Commissioners’ Court and working with the diverse populations of Dallas County, but the Board ultimately went in another direction. Another school of thought that arose during the search was that the Board should hire a “professional educator” as Superintendent. Many were of the opinion that what this really meant was that the successful candidate should be someone from inside the District, with the implication that preferably it would be someone who wouldn’t rock the boat too much, especially where plum administration jobs, contracts and the like are concerned.
One other complicating factor many looked at, and which we would be less than direct if we didn’t acknowledge, was a sort of ethnic consciousness that informed part of the search. With a district whose student population is about 90 percent minority, many felt that a minority Superintendent would bring a greater cultural understanding and sensitivity as well as serving as an authoritative role model for the District’s children. I happen to think that those are valid points, worthy of consideration, but it sometimes came across to non-minority ears as sounding like a particular ethnicity was a threshold qualification for the job, again mixed up with who would win control of the levers of power at 3700 Ross.
In the final analysis, it looks from here that the Board was able to persuade an extremely well qualified person in Dr. Moses to take on the job. After what the District has been through in the last few years from a public relations standpoint, we should probably feel relieved that a person of his caliber was interested in signing on, and the whole Board deserves credit for reaching out to him and persuading him to take the job. Maybe now they can even drum up support for a much-needed bond program.
Dr. Moses has quite a task ahead of him, and I’m pretty sure his path won’t always be smooth. However, and it’s been said in this space before, DISD schools do a better job than they’re often given credit for, in East Dallas and elsewhere, so there’s a foundation to build on. Improvements are warranted, but they’re also quite possible, as we can see from the much-improved Houston schools.
I’m looking forward to seeing what the new Superintendent can do to raise both the quality, and the perception of that quality, of our public schools, and I hope he gets the community support he needs to do that.
