Ron Price says he should be DISD board president for one simple reason: He's black.

If you remember the bad old days of the DISD school board (New Black Panthers attending board meetings with weapons, yelling and screaming matches between trustees, televised racial conflicts), you know that we don't want to go back in that direction anytime soon. But that's what would happen if — as trustee Ron Price seems to be suggesting — we began selecting board presidents based on the ethnicity of the student body (i.e., since there are more Hispanic students in the district than any other group, we need to have a Hispanic board president), we might as well turn out the lights on DISD. Because race, in and of itself, has nothing to do with competency. DISD needs the best person on its board to be president, regardless of race or anything else. And without endorsing anyone, since I don't have a vote anyway, Jack Lowe has done a great job of keeping DISD's board out of the news and allowing the administrators to do their job. A few more years of that kind of leadership, and we'll all have something to be proud of with DISD. A few years of Price running the board simply because he's the longest-tenured board member and because he's black would be a mistake of catastrophic proportions.