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The poet Margaret Wheatley once wrote: “There is no power greater than a community discovering what it cares about.”

It seems like everyone has talked over the last year about the state of public education in Fort Worth.

Resolutions from the Fort Worth City Council, Fort Worth ISD school board, and Tarrant County Commissioners declared literacy for students a top priority. A wide variety of community forums, discussions and presentations tackled education questions. Fort Worth is rallying around a shared interest in our kids being academically prepared for the future.

These conversations are happening in an environment of intense partisan divide in our country, and that political division is increasingly making its presence known in Tarrant County and Fort Worth. Sometimes it feels like we are all playing for two different teams, and everything is about whether a person is on the “red” squad or the “blue” one.

At Fort Worth Education Partnership, the organization I lead, we wanted to learn more about what Fort Worth and Tarrant County residents think and feel about local public education, so we commissioned a poll this spring and released a report about the findings a few days ago.

As we analyzed the results of the poll, we noticed something striking. Almost all Fort Worth residents agree on the fundamentals. It turns out we are less divided than our politics suggest we are. We were able to look at responses broken down by political party, and on almost every question, Republicans and Democrats are much more united than we expected — at least on priorities for public education.

Across party lines, there is strong support for academic accountability. 89% of Democrats and 88% of Republicans in Fort Worth say it is important that Texas has a system to measure individual children’s and overall school performance. There is also consensus about the importance of students meeting grade level. 90% of Republicans and 90% of Democrats believe students should meet grade-level expectations before advancing to the next grade.

Fort Worth Republicans and Democrats both want more choices and better access to quality options. While some want us to believe parents are starkly divided on the issue of public school choices, when we asked Fort Worth residents how important it is for families to have several public school options, including charter schools and district schools of choice, both Democrats (95%) and Republicans (85%) agree that it is “important” or “very important.”

Academic quality shapes family choices. It is also clear that parents are paying close attention to school quality, with academic performance emerging as the top reason they consider changing schools. Nearly half (46%) of Tarrant County parents have considered changing their child’s school; among those, the top reason for considering change for both Democrat and Republican parents is academic quality.

This alignment goes beyond party lines. We saw the same strong consensus when we broke down responses by income level and race/ethnicity.

Across race, income, and political lines, Fort Worth residents are unified in what they want:

• schools that work for all kids,
• transparent, honest, and clear information about how students are doing,
• more public school options for families to choose from, and
• strong support for teachers and school leaders who are making a difference.

That kind of consensus provides us a unique opportunity — to not just talk about what we want but also to pursue it together.

Margaret Wheatley’s poem begins, “There is no power greater than a community discovering what it cares about.” It continues:

“Ask: ‘What’s possible?’ not ‘What’s wrong?’ Keep asking.

“Notice what you care about. Assume that many others share your dreams.”

“Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters.”

In Fort Worth, we’ve already started that conversation, and we have discovered a shared belief: All our children deserve access to a high-quality education.

So, let’s be bold and go for it. We believe it together. We can achieve it together.

One of Fort Worth’s most notable citizens died February 15: Clifford Davis. He was 100.

Born Oct. 12, 1924, Davis grew up the son of a sharecropper in Wilton, Arkansas. Wilton was deeply segregated, and the local Black school system stopped at the eighth grade. Clifford’s parents rented a house in Little Rock, the state capital, where he and five of his six siblings lived while attending high school and college.

He graduated from Philander Smith College, a historically Black institution, in 1945. Davis wanted to go to law school, but there were none in Arkansas that would accept Black applicants, so he moved to Washington, D.C. to attend Howard University, where he received his law degree in 1949.

He worked with Justice Thurgood Marshall on the landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education, that eventually led to school desegregation.

After moving to Fort Worth, Davis represented five Black students who were barred from attending Mansfield High School in 1955. Davis sued Mansfield ISD and won in 1956. When his clients attempted to enter the school, however, they were met by a mob. In 1959, he brought a class-action suit against Fort Worth ISD, which remained segregated. He won, and this time the system agreed to a plan to integrate its schools. Eventually Mansfield ISD and Fort Worth ISD integrated, largely because of lawsuits and pressure from Davis.

Davis opened one of the first Black law firms in Tarrant County and was one of the county’s first Black judges.

An elementary school in FWISD bears his name.

And here is where the story takes a turn.

Last year at Clifford Davis Elementary, 6% of students met grade level standards in reading on state assessments. 7% met grade level in math. That means, in a typical classroom, only 1 or 2 students are meeting grade level.

These results hold true across all the different groups of kids at the school, Black students, who make up 45% of the student population, show similar outcomes to the overall numbers.

And this is not about one school; across all subjects and all schools in Fort Worth, 77% of Black students are not meeting grade level.

As we honor the memory of Clifford Davis in Fort Worth, we are also forced to acknowledge that we as a community have defaulted on the promise of desegregation—that all children deserve equal access to a quality education. The school that bears Mr. Davis’s name stands as a stark reminder and symbol of that broken promise.

That’s why I believe literacy (and numeracy) is a civil rights issue. Clifford Davis was not just fighting for all children to have access to a school building. He was fighting for the idea that all our children have a fundamental right to a minimum standard of education—one that provides access to literacy.

Clifford Davis was right.

The most meaningful way we can honor Mr. Davis’s legacy today is to continue his fight, because what he was fighting for has not yet been realized.

Most of us who were born after the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s want to believe that if we had been alive then, we would have been on the right side, the side of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Clifford Davis. The heroes we have read about. We want to believe that we would not have stood by and been OK with segregated schools, water fountains, and lunch counters.

What side would we have been on? What would we have done?

Here’s our chance to answer that question. In this very moment, 2025, in our city, all children still do not have access to the education they deserve. Whose side are we on now? What will we do now? What we tell our grandchildren about where we stood?

This isn’t about blame and certainly not about blaming one particular school. When Rosa Parks had to sit at the back of the bus, we didn’t just blame the bus or the bus driver. There are all kinds of big, complicated reasons for the situation we are in. Nevertheless, it is true: the promise of equal access to education has not been fulfilled in our time.

What if we as a city rallied to the cause? What if we collectively said, “Not on our watch?”

Let us, as a whole community, take up again Clifford Davis’s fight to give all the children of Fort Worth the opportunity to receive a good education. And let’s start with Clifford Davis Elementary School.

In her poem, Turning to One Another, Margaret Wheatley writes:

 

There is no greater power than a community discovering
what it cares about.
Ask “What is possible?” not “What’s wrong?” Keep asking.
Notice what you care about.
Assume that many others share your dreams.
Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters.

 

Ask. Discover. Notice. Dream. Be brave. Start conversations.

There is no power greater than a community discovering what it cares about.