I don't want to say it's sophomoric, but it's an oversimplification.

I just think they're flat out wrong. We literally have thousands of people working every day to improve not only the education of African-American kids, but other kids as well.

That's one of the things we're going to have to look at and tease out of the data. Are all of our efforts on behalf of low-performing kids hurting high-performing kids?

Absent having a fuel delivery, we're going to have to look at alternatives as early as Tuesday. We're hopeful that if we partner with some of our friends and colleagues at other community agencies, we will have enough fuel on hand. But if we don't, over the course of this weekend, we will have to make a call.

At some point people are going to have to decide if we're going to keep addressing the failures of the past or begin to address the future. How do you expect to go hand in hand, solving the problem, when one of the parties is throwing stones?

You have to be able to tease those details out.

We know it's a big inconvenience. But our overriding concern is safety. We could not be sure what would be out there. We wanted to err on the side of abundant caution.

We have not given you anything that, while painful, we cannot live with.

I think, generally, it's great news for us as a school system. All of the credit goes to our classroom teachers.

We did not make the kind of leapfrog improvement we need to. While I wasn't ecstatic, I'm pleased with the trend lines.