When you look at a map of how the Dallas Independent School District has grown over the years, something stands out. In 1884, there were only six small school buildings. The law at the time said that four buildings were for white students and two were for black students. Since then, the system has grown into a huge one that serves hundreds of thousands of students across most of Dallas County. The seventeenth largest school district in the US is this one. The Texas second-biggest. Those are facts, not just numbers. They’re heavy.
We didn’t just wake up and have Dallas ISD. It was founded in 1884, at a certain point in the history of education in Texas: the state had just changed the way public schools were run, turning them into taxable, self-governing districts. At the time, Benjamin M. Baker was the state superintendent. He was happy that the new law would no longer tie teacher pay to the number of students who showed up to school. He thought this was an outdated and cruel practice. When I read that phrase for the first time, it stuck with me. They were willing to say that the old ways weren’t working right from the start, which suggests that there were people in the system who knew this.
One of the first schools, which was just called “Colored School No. 2,” became Booker T. Washington High School in 1902. It’s still there now. It’s not often that institutions stay the same through segregation, desegregation, and decades of changes in cities. Plus, it serves as a reminder that school buildings hold history in ways that spreadsheets can’t quite do.
How the district grew by adding on to other areas tells its own story. From the 1920s to the 1960s, Dallas ISD took in dozens of smaller school districts and one-room schoolhouses. These included the Lagow Independent School, which had just one teacher and was attended by a single family and a neighbor; and the Gould School District, which had just one teacher. The small ones gave way to the big ones one by one. When Seagoville ISD joined in 1965, the school district was already pretty much the way it is today.
Remember that building boom in the middle of the 20th century. The district built 97 school buildings between 1946 and 1966. In 1956, the busiest year, seventeen new schools opened in one year. These people had a lot of faith in their government and thought that public institutions would be ready for growth, which is hard to imagine today. More complicated is the question of whether the infrastructure kept up with the needs. This is something that Dallas ISD has been trying to figure out ever since.
In 2017, the Texas Education Agency said that the district had met the requirement. It’s interesting what that phrase “met the standard” doesn’t say and what it does say. It means that the system is functional and meets the standards. It doesn’t point to a system that’s doing well without doing anything or riding on its past success. Meeting the standard is an accomplishment in and of itself for a district this size that serves communities with very different needs and resources. It’s clear that this is not the end of the story, though.
If you look at Dallas ISD from the outside, you might get the sense that it is in a certain kind of tension that all big city school systems are in. The country is big enough to have real political and institutional power. When it came to segregation, decisions about which communities got which schools and resources were made. The building is old enough to carry the weight of its own history. And it works in a city that is always changing, both economically and racially. This means that the district is always trying to catch up with what Dallas is becoming.
