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The stars of the Dallas Cowboys are well-known. With the top-end talent on the roster being looked upon to bear the brunt of the load in 2024, it will still take a full-team approach if they are going to be considered a real threat this season.
While there are varying expectations for players up and down the roster, here are three players who have a chance to be better than expected, and perhaps have a bigger impact than some originally thought.
When it comes to versatility and the ability to be a plus player on the roster, not many provided more upside than defensive back Israel Mukuamu. The now veteran secondary player has played all over the defensive back end, and with new leadership under control this year, he has a chance to be used perhaps in the manner he should have been all along.
It’s clear that he has a unique skill set that Dallas should be taking advantage of. From his long and athletic frame to his ability to play safety, nickel corner, and boundary corner, there isn’t much that he can’t do in the secondary.
With DaRon Bland’s absence, we may get a chance to see Izzy play cornerback on the outside more than we initially thought. That being his more natural position, where he played in college, it could be good for the Cowboys and their depth.
When you think of Dallas pass rushers, the first name that comes to mind may not be Chauncey Golston. However, the former EDGE-turned-defensive tackle is now once again being called upon to line up out wide.
With Sam Williams gone for the season, the Cowboys have been scrambling to find pass rush depth, and while they have added pieces to the mix to help, one of the main keys was on the roster all along in Golston.
Don’t be surprised if he is able to show production both in the pass rush and in the run game, as Golston is a big, physical player who has shown quality ability in limited action.
This will be a controversial one, but something that is very possible to happen. Luke Schoonmaker is coming into his second season with many within the fan base ready to, if they haven’t already, write him off. With other weapons on the roster, he has become a forgotten man, and that’s something you may want to rescind before it’s too late.
Schoonmaker has talent and the ability to produce in the NFL. It will take him staying healthy and making the most of his opportunities to do so. He’s under the microscope this season, and that’s okay as the fanbase opts for a show me, don’t tell me approach to last year’s second-round pick.
He may never be a high-end piece for this team, but that doesn’t mean he can’t exceed expectations this season. Look for Schoonmaker to surprise some people this year, even if it is only marginally.
DALLAS — Days after Dallas Police Officer Darron Burks was shot and killed while on patrol, the vast community of those who knew and loved him was still in shock.
As many as a hundred people gathered Sunday at the South Central Police District along Camp Wisdom Road in Dallas to share fond memories of the beloved classmate, teammate and friend.
Following nearly two decades as an educator, Burks shifted his career to focus on the community in another civic-minded career. When he was killed, he’d spent just eight months as a police officer for the Dallas Police Department.
While a steady stream of people laid flowers, balloons, flags and other memorabilia to remember the fallen officer, the group gathered in front of the memorial promptly at 4:04 p.m., representing his membership within the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc., to remember the fallen officer.
Burks joined the organization as a student at Paul Quinn College and his longtime friends said he always moved with character and integrity.
“What a lot of y’all don’t know is that he was a righteous person all the way. Everything he tried to do in life was right. He lived his life right. He served his community right. When he taught students in the classroom in the educational career field that he chose. He did that right,” said Ken Frazier, fraternity brother and friend for more than 20 years.
While Burks made his mark in the classroom for nearly two decades as an educator, few were surprised when he became a police officer
“That was the career field that he chose to do, serving and protecting others who could not protect themselves, serving people who were less fortunate, the underprivileged. No matter what your socioeconomic background may have been, Burks was that type of person who would fill that gap and say, ‘Hey, if you need a helping hand, I’m here to give it all free to you,’” Frazier said.
Grief and disbelief still hung in the air as people cried, prayed and laughed through more tears. However, the community of supporters and a group of friends who’d become more like family vowed to remember Burks for the purposeful life he’d lived, rather than the tragic manner in which he died.
“I wish more people could be like him, including myself. Right. Some attributes of his life and his character. It gives us something, you know, gives us all something to strive for,” said Chastity Colomb.
A couple that knew Burks from his time at Paul Quinn College wanted their young daughter to see and hear the legacy that he left.
Former football teammate Billy Walker laughed with tears in his eyes as he remembered their college days.
“You couldn’t find a flaw [and] He’s definitely going to be missed, especially by me,” he said.
His wife De’Andrea Walker Lacy, also a classmate at Paul Quinn, grasped their daughter’s hand as they looked over the memorial.
“I just let her know that those are the type of people in life that you want to meet and those are the type of people in life that you can take advice from. You can learn from a person like Officer Burks,” she said.
A celebration of life service is planned for September 7 at Watermark Church in Dallas.
Jimmy Small (Source: Dallas Fire-Rescue)
DALLAS – Dallas Fire-Rescue is mourning the off-duty death of a firefighter.
Driver-Engineer Jimmy Small died on Wednesday, according to the Dallas Black Firefighters Association.
Small began working for Dallas Fire-Rescue in April 2017.
He most recently worked as a rescue driver at Station 52 in West Oak Cliff.
The circumstances around Small’s death are under investigation.
“Please keep his family, and the members of this department, in your thoughts and prayers as they search for closure,” wrote Dallas Fire-Rescue in a post online.
HELP WANTED. New city manager for Dallas, Texas.
The job: Administer a $5 billion budget. Guide more than 13,000 employees. Ensure streets and parks are built and maintained, drinking water is clean, garbage is collected, public libraries are open, neighborhoods are thriving, building permits are issued, fires are put out and residents stay safe.
Exciting challenges: Steer the city through a $4 billion pension shortfall, a contentious land use plan and the redevelopment of a massive convention center downtown.
Your board of directors: 14 City Council members with different priorities and personalities, led by a mayor who is often absent and struggles to get along when present.
Personal requirements: A backbone of steel and skin of leather.
Expectations: Competence, trustworthiness and, most important, public accountability standards.
Wait. Actually, scratch that last part. Sure, this is a CEO-level job with astronomical expectations. But here in Dallas, for a job that could actually make or break the city, accountability is optional.
Candidates for Dallas city manager might ask the Dallas City Council: What are your priorities for me? How will you measure my success?
They’ll get 15 different answers.
That’s because the council, the city’s elected board of directors, has failed in its fundamental duty to set public, measurable goals for the city manager.
That should be shocking, because no serious company would seek a new top executive without clear metrics for success and agreed-upon priorities for how that person should spend his or her time.
If this City Council doesn’t take up the difficult political work of negotiating and shaping a handful of priorities for its next city manager, it will set itself up for another battle of wills like the one it had with former City Manager T.C. Broadnax.
Broadnax benefited greatly from the council’s failure to set performance goals. Much of his tenure in Dallas was a game of divide and conquer, and he played it well.
We learned just how bad things were when we began looking into how the council had measured the prior city manager’s work over the years.
We wanted to know how Broadnax had performed according to the sort of evaluations high-level executives are accustomed to. We were curious how he had measured up to the goals that were set for him and that he set for himself. We wanted to see the feedback that he might have gotten in a performance review of the type that most of us have experienced. So we asked for the paperwork.
Dear reader, there wasn’t any.
No evaluation forms. No written reports of goals or accomplishments. No scores or ratings.
What the city offered was a 2022 memo explaining how the city manager’s performance evaluation usually goes. The city manager is invited to prepare a report of accomplishments and identify goals for the coming year. A consultant interviews council members individually and summarizes their assessments in a closed session with the full council.
Council members we interviewed said their one-on-one sessions with the consultant focused on general feedback rather than data-driven criteria.
This is what accountability looks like for the person with the top job at City Hall. Never mind that city employees down the ladder have evaluation plans.
In fact, the timing of the city manager’s verbal performance review jumped around year to year. The consultant urged a council committee two years ago to establish a time frame so that the council wouldn’t be rushed and so that the city manager could meaningfully prepare.
As far as we know, that didn’t happen. In fact, Broadnax didn’t even have a performance evaluation in 2023, his last full year in Dallas.
Is it any wonder that Broadnax chafed at questions from reporters and from his own bosses about his performance? He could move the goal posts as he pleased because the council didn’t put anything on paper about its own expectations.
Outsiders searching the internet for clues about Dallas’ priorities might stumble upon Broadnax’s 29-point “100-day plan” after he quieted an attempt to oust him in 2022, or a webpage titled “2023 City Manager’s Top 25 Goals,” or the Dallas 365 dashboard that “tracks our progress on 35 performance measures.” But council members say those measures are outdated.
Where goals were tracked, they were usually marked incomplete. More often, goals had vague targets. It will surprise residents who are deeply unhappy with city services that in the Dallas 365 dashboard the city is almost entirely “on target.” (The exception, public safety, is listed as “caution” even though the mayor touts this as Dallas’ greatest success.)
The problem, again, is that Dallas isn’t really measuring its city manager against clear and important strategic priorities. Many of the listed city goals are focused on department-level work, not broad strategic goals appropriate to a chief executive. And there are so many of them, they amount to microtargets for lower-level problems.
If everything is important, nothing is.
The good news is that this transition period between city managers gives council members time to commit to a set of priorities and metrics. And they only have to look to the Dallas Independent School District for a template on how to do it right.
The school district oversees 139,000 students, 20,000 employees and a budget of $1.9 billion.
The DISD superintendent has an enormous challenge in educating a population of low-income students. She must manage a massive public debt and construction program. But she has guideposts for what success looks like, and that comes through her board of directors.
Here’s how DISD does it.
First, the board of trustees establishes a set of goals for itself focused on student outcomes. There are only five goals, but they are tangible and meaningful and have deadlines attached. One is that 56% of third graders meet or exceed state standards for math by June 2025. Another is that 67% of graduates are college, career or military ready by the same year.
Each goal has its own set of three to five progress measures, or benchmarks, that let the school board know whether it’s moving in the right direction and at the right pace, such as whether student achievement in district math and reading tests reaches certain levels by the middle of the school year.
The board also agrees on a set of “constraints.” These are guardrails to ensure Dallas ISD doesn’t sacrifice other important criteria, such as student happiness, in pursuit of its academic targets. For example, 68% of students must respond positively to campus climate surveys by the spring.
All of these goals and metrics are documented on the district’s website and in board policy so that they are easy to find. They are crafted with the superintendent and set the foundation of her evaluation form.
“When you don’t do that work, you just jump from fire to fire,” said school board President Joe Carreón, who explained that the board has a formal committee whose only job is to refine the superintendent’s annual evaluation criteria. The full board votes on the final scoring rubric.
The evaluations of school administrators and teachers are confidential under state law, but the annual appraisal instrument that DISD’s board uses to grade Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde is public.
Sixty percent of her grade hinges on the student outcome goals. The rest of her score is determined by her performance on financial management, minding the “constraints” and stakeholder satisfaction. The school board’s perception of the superintendent accounts for only 4 of 100 possible points.
“We’ve removed ourselves emotionally and personally from it,” Carreón said. “It’s just numbers.”
Elizalde’s contract lays out how big a raise she’s eligible for based on her evaluation score. She can also earn up to $100,000 in bonuses for meeting certain academic targets.
Her contract is 28 pages, plus an amendment. Broadnax’s contract was five pages, with zero mentions of evaluation scores and zero indication of what would constitute a satisfactory performance.
We asked experts in public administration about goal-setting. They reinforced what DISD is preaching.
“If people have too many goals, our brains can’t manage that. Our brains are not multitaskers,” said Deborah Kerr, professor of the practice emerita at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. She specializes in performance management and measurement.
It’s easy, when you’re constantly marshaling reams of statistics and reports and presentations, to fall into what scholars call the knowing-doing gap. That’s when you perceive talking about a problem as taking action, making it look like you’re doing something when you’re not, Kerr said.
This has been a recurring trap for Dallas city leaders. How many studies does it take to change a light bulb at City Hall?
This city needs direction, and it’s the council’s duty to provide it.
Don’t look to the mayor of Dallas for leadership. Council members went off-site Aug. 9 for a retreat to discuss “near-term priorities” and “long-term visioning,” according to a meeting agenda. Mayor Eric Johnson, their presiding officer, didn’t attend. His spokesman didn’t respond to emails.
That’s not unexpected. Dallas is in a leadership crisis because we are in a leadership vacuum. But such vacuums aren’t accidents. They arise from a failure of vision. We cannot have a leader without a destination. And neither the mayor nor the council has given the city a destination.
Until Dallas City Hall has real strategic goals for its city manager, it doesn’t have any way to hold the leader responsible for leading. There is no place to go and, inevitably, no accountability for not getting there.
Before it hires our next city manager, the City Council has to take deep stock of itself and decide what the major strategic priorities should be for that leader and how it will measure success and create accountability. How will it reward excellence? How will it punish failure?
Our city needs the council to achieve consensus and draw a map for the next city manager, with mileposts and timelines.
Because no matter how talented or enthusiastic, that person can’t build or sustain a great city on a foundation of bureaucratese and bromides.
Part of our Leading Dallas series, this editorial explores how the City Council can get better results by revamping the performance review of the city manager.
We welcome your thoughts in a letter to the editor. See the guidelines and submit your letter here. If you have problems with the form, you can submit via email at letters@dallasnews.com
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