What are we in for? Before we can understand the accountability wars heating up now in the Dallas school system, we have to see the battle from a statistical helicopter. First let’s fly over the North and East Dallas high schools that still have significant remnant white student populations. At…

What to make of the big boot at JC Penney? CEO Ronald B. Johnson came tumbling out that door grabbing for his hat like a riverboat gambler evicted from First Baptist. Sometimes it’s hard to look cool. But what’s the big picture in this picture? Is there ever a big…

Everybody knows the Shakespeare quote, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” It’s the stuff of T-shirts. But how many people know what it was about? In Henry VI, Dick the Butcher proposes killing all of England’s lawyers as the first step toward accomplishing the treasonous plot…

All right, maybe it wasn’t enormously helpful of me to suggest last July that we bulldoze Fair Park, the 277-acre dilapidated wasteland one mile southeast of downtown that once housed the 1936 Texas Centennial Exhibition. But, c’mon. Why would we just let it just sit there and molder into the…

Is it too soon and maybe even bad luck to say this out loud? Is it even possible that Governor Oops could be over? I’m knocking on wood, tossing salt over my shoulder, making the sign of the cross with my index fingers and looking for garlic in the kitchen…

We all know by now that the high school in the affluent enclave communities of Highland Park and University Park is under siege from bomb and weapons threats. The FBI has joined local police in a so-far fruitless effort to catch whoever is behind a series of written bomb threats,…

On March 22, I penned a story for this page in which I portrayed school district trustee Bernadette Nutall as appearing to be “neutral” on school reform. Her apparent neutrality made her a very singular exception to the rule at a heated community meeting the night before at Madison High…

I’m scared. One, I’m scared because of what’s going on in Kaufman County. Two, I’m even more scared because of what’s going on here, which seems to be one big stupid-fest. You will remember, perhaps, that Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins brought criminal charges last year against Al Hill…

When I was the adolescent son of a family of modest means in a factory town in Michigan, I won a scholarship to study French by living for a summer with a French working class family. It had some to do with my being a damned good French student, some…

UPDATE: HPISD sent a letter in response to this post, and because it’s too long to publish in our comments, we’ve added to the end. I have a column coming out in next week’s paper about the bomb and gun threats at Highland Park High School. It was inspired by…

You get a lot of sad news here, I know. I might have some good news for a change. Say, might. We must cross our fingers first. We’ve been talking a lot in this space over the last few months about the staggering number of people in the city who…

Um, Mr. Grant? Moment of your time? I ask only one thing. If at all possible, can you get the kid out of this? You are the justifiably proud leader of the effort that brought us our wonderful new deck park over Woodall Rodgers Freeway at the north end of…

So in the end will all of the public school principals and teachers with the worst test scores for minority and poor kids wind up in a big political wet kiss with the Tea Party? Wait, am I naive? Have they always been smoochers? While we spend our time worrying…

The response to my article here last week about school reform proves one thing. I’m doing a poor job presenting school reform. The entire issue, in fact, is being framed in the responses to the article as a kind of combination civil rights question and job security dilemma for teachers…

Everybody in school politics always says it’s all about the children. That’s almost never true. If you don’t believe me, you should have been there last night. At a spirited, sometimes cantankerous meeting in the auditorium of James Madison High School in South Dallas, prominent black elected officials, former officials…

The op-ed page of our only local daily newspaper is full of talk today about the national Republican Party’s big overnight discovery and wake-up call: in a document called the “Growth and Opportunity Report” published by the Republican National Committee, Republicans are being informed that they are reviled, feared and…

Sure, historic preservation is a great idea, if people could just decide what history to preserve. In a recent decision to make East Dallas homeowners rip out native plants and replace them with sod, the Dallas Landmark Commission has come down solidly on the side of stupid history. The commission…

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings has scored points in disparate places with his man’s man campaign against woman-beating, from New York Magazine to the metro page of today’s Dallas Morning News — all of it much deserved, if you ask me. A guy like Rawlings, Class of ’76 at Boston College…

On the op-ed page of The Dallas Morning News this morning, two local epidemiologists with national/international reputations weigh in for more aerial spraying to combat West Nile disease. Robert Haley, the Gulf War Syndrome expert, and James Luby, an expert on St. Louis encephalitis at UT Southwestern, call for some…

Well thank goodness Friday has finally arrived so we can have a little privacy here on the lawn, without all those damned readers butting in. Normally when they’re around I don’t like to do inside baseball, because, you know, it just makes them get all anxious and nattery. Then that…