Everybody wants change, but nobody trusts it - especially if a big salary is attached

The faces at 3700 Ross have come and gone over the years, but the people in the community who watch DISD tend to stay the same. I point this out because it helps explain the chronic suspicion around the place. What looks like a new idea to a new superintendent looks like a repackaged old idea to community members. It's neither fair nor unfair. It's just the way it is.

So, it was no surprise to me when a friend asked, "Why is DISD bringing in a Communications Director at twice the salary of her prior position?" I don't know anything about that hire or about that particular situation at all. I can say that there's been countless variations on that question asked at Board Briefings and Board Meetings over the last few years.

The Dallas "public" is always suspicious of large DISD admin salaries. This is because, in part, the high profile faces come and go, and yet the school system keeps chugging along "just the same". The average voter doesn't know what the specific impacts of the highly paid individuals are.  How can the voter measure the value of what they don't know?  Easy.  They don't.


The DISD teachers are suspicious because they are constantly being asked to adapt to changes being constantly dictated from highly paid administrators. From their perspective, every time a new director comes in somewhere up the chain of command, or a principal is changed out (which happens often on many campuses) systems change as the new administrator "does things their way". The constant change is overall demoralizing; the message being communicated is that the teachers' work is never good enough, that it never quite measures up.

To be fair, it should be pointed out that administrators push for change because they have been brought in specifically to change the status quo.   Administrators are constantly under pressure to find that "magic bullet".  Added to that, many administrator positions require the person to be master of a wide variety of skills that don't necessarily have anything in common.  The public sector generally believes that a good business manager could go into education and still be a good manager, the reality is that there is a lot to education that business never has to deal with.

Education has more similarly to government agencies than it does to business entities. There are literally thousands of requirements from state and federal agencies that a public education organization has to comply with and operate under. All this makes for a system that is both very rigid (from regulatory perspective) and constantly fluid (frequent changes mentioned earlier). The constant message from society is that DISD is not good enough, so everyone in the system who feels like they are working hard and doing well naturally look to the other groups in the system as the source of "trouble."

What does this have to do with salaries? Well, lots of change and lots of not knowing what is really being done creates a lot of distrust.  Salaries are always a particularly hot topic because no one knows how to tell if we are getting out money's worth.

Everyone understands the principle of "you get what you pay for." But we are at a hard spot in K-12 education. It is not what we want it to be, and yet it is improving and adapting. We are educating our children for jobs that don't exist yet. How do you measure success for a moving target?

As for Dallas ISD, the best thing Mr. Miles can do to build public trust in his expensive personnel decisions is to tell the public exactly what he is expecting from each appointment.  In other words, tell us what we are suppose to be getting for our money. If the public can see the targets met, the price tag will seem justified ("you get what you pay for"). Conversely, if the targets are not met, the public needs to see Mr. Miles protect their investment in the position and fill it with someone else who can perform to that pay scale.