Here’s me in a Dallas school board meeting waiting to see if the board will pass a merit pay system for teachers — the single most important element to date in what is now a 3-year-old program of massive school reform. It would be a monumental change, more significant than…
I have a column in the paper, at least for the first part of this week, about paddling my canoe up White Rock Creek. I know what you’re thinking. “So why haven’t you been fired?” No, listen. It has a lot of important stuff in it. I hat-cammed it, so…
Last night the Dallas school board passed into law a merit pay system for teachers in the biggest victory yet for school reformers and for Superintendent Mike Miles. We probably are about to find ourselves under the national microscope as media and academics from everywhere come here to hover. They…
This, believe it or not, is an entire column about me paddling a canoe up White Rock Creek. Me up a creek with a paddle. That’s gonna be it. Well, wait. Of course I do see certain metaphysical significance. You don’t think I would just take off and devote a…
Certain amount of talk going around about the superintendent of schools in Paris, Texas, who shot off an angry public letter to parents attacking the validity of statewide student achievement tests. Apparently Paris ISD Superintendent Paul Jones has been getting viral attaboys from test-haters the world over after telling Paris…
A small dagger pierced my heart when my wife told me our 27-year-old son’s reaction to the news story she had emailed him about the n-word-using police commissioner in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. He emailed her back: “Wow. Way up there.” I took that to mean that our fifth-generation native-Texan son…
North Dallas state Representative Jason Villalba has been taking a certain amount of heat lately for courting the California hot-sauce-maker, Huy Fong Food Plants, trying to sell them on the idea of relocating to North Texas in order to escape local environmental complaints in the company’s hometown of Irwindale, California…
I have a piece in the paper this week about D Magazine publisher Wick Allison and his turn-around on the Trinity River toll road — now he’s against it — for which I genuinely admire him. I have been around people his age in the past, and my impression is…
Today we have a lead editorial in The Dallas Morning News, our city’s sole and only daily newspaper, which starts off with a certain mistake that wounds my heart every time I see it. Again today they say, “There’s a troubled neighborhood along South Lamar where residential property has suffered…
Whoa. I’m in the checkout lane at Tom Thumb reading the May issue of D Magazine so I won’t have to buy a copy. Oops, smudged the cover, sorry. Tore a page, sorry. Then I see this story by Tim Rogers: “The Trinity Parkway Is Dead.” On the way to…
A career as a rough-and-ready entrepreneurial job creator just ain’t what it used to be. I’m thinking about Cyrus McCormick sweating his brow off at the smithy on his dad’s farm in Virginia where he eventually banged together the first horse-drawn reaper in 1831, or Henry Ford 65 years later…
When I saw the big news yesterday from New York about the Dallas billionaire Wyly brothers — a federal jury found them guilty on all counts in a $550 million tax evasion case — I had to go back to Joe Guinto’s excellent story last year in D Magazine: I…
If there was ever a window for the Dallas schools home rule initiative to reach some reasonable outcome, it may just have closed. Mark Melton, a lawyer and education activist, made a good faith effort last week to bring about a compromise people could live with, but people told him…
Yesterday afternoon was scary. True story: I was at home. I go to the kitchen to watch the rain lash the driveway. I can hear the tornado sirens. Well, sirens. Then, the rain stops. Sirens stop. Silence. Suddenly, I hear the dreaded “sounded like a freight train” sound — a…
I have a column in the newspaper this week about drinking water fluoridation and a controversy that kicked up recently when three Dallas City Council members responded politely to an anti-fluoridation activist. Dallas Morning News columnist Jacquielynn Floyd was acerbic, choleric and apoplectic, invoking the Red Scare, Howdy Doody and…
During a recent city council meeting, Regina Imburgia, a 58-year-old homemaker and self-described anti-fluoridation activist, walked to the microphone to talk about why Dallas should stop putting fluoride in its drinking water. She had spoken to the council several times before, and also to the television reporters who cover City…
You maybe know by now that a some-kind-of-a-whatever-committee at City Hall has been kicking around the idea of giving the Dallas City Council a big pay raise, from $37,500 to $60,000 a year. Eric Nicholson here pointed out last month that council members would make more than rookie cops and…
What do you think? Should Dallas Judge of Criminal District Court #6 Jeanine Howard, now at least nationally famous if not internationally for her “You Ignorant Slut” ruling in a rape case, think about returning to private law practice? Or run for president? It’s so hard to know these days…
Last week somebody called me and asked me to go back and listen to Krys Boyd’s April 29 Think program on KERA radio, in which Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings and Dallas school trustee Bernadette Nutall debated “home rule,” a proposal that could radically change the way we govern Dallas public…
You know what the one good thing is about a bad school system? It’s a great excuse for everything else. Mayor Mike Rawlings stirred the pot earlier this week by telling KERA that Dallas lost out on a recent huge corporate relocation, Toyota’s American headquarters, because of our bad school…
In recent weeks we have seen repeated serious indications that the bitterly divided camps on school reform may be getting a tad less bitter and a smidgeon more inclined to engage in semi-civilized conversation than whop each other in the head with 2-by-4s. A couple weeks ago when Dallas Superintendent…
There was an op-ed in The Dallas Morning News this week talking about the damage Republicans suffered when Cliven Bundy, the racist rancher from Nevada, “wandered off script.” Off script?…
