Texas might be about to make it a lot easier to graduate from its public high schools, but three Dallas ISD schools have been ranked among the 15 most challenging in the country by The Washington Post. See also: Graduating from Texas High Schools Is about to Get a Lot…
In 2013, Texas lawmakers made it a lot easier for high school seniors to graduate. This year, the legislature is set to do it again. Before the 2013 changes, seniors would have had to pass 15 end-of-course exams to graduate. That was too much, the House and Senate decided, so…
Dallas ISD will extend the school day, offer thousands of dollars in relocation incentives to staff and install new grading policies in an effort to close the achievement gap at six district schools deemed “Improvement Required” campuses by the Texas Education Agency,. Beginning with the fall 2015 semester, instructors classified…
Levi Pettit is sorry. The Highland Park grad, one of two University of Oklahoma students expelled this month for leading their Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity brothers in a racist chant, spoke to reporters at Fairview Baptist Church in Oklahoma City after a closed-doors meeting with community leaders. “There is no…
Hey, can I just ask something? Dallas ISD trustees are slated to discuss a proposal barring pay-outs to terminated or otherwise departing employees unless those settlements have been voted on and approved by the school board. The political message is that the administration has been paying people settlements when it…
Tuesday, after a couple dozen kids came home sick on Monday, DISD cancelled school at Lakewood Elementary. Areas at the school — specifically an art classroom — contained high levels of carbon monoxide, enough to make kids in the class complain of stomach aches and dizziness. A retired teacher who…
A teacher at Dallas ISD’s Oliver W. Holmes Middle School, identified by students as Sgt. Griffin, is in trouble after a student recorded his highly motivational rant about his students’ test scores and lack of decorum in the classroom. He says “fuck” a bunch of times, and the whole thing…
With the recent closing of Deion Sanders’ Prime Prep Academy over a $700,000 debt, it seems fitting, in retrospect, that the first Prime Prep employee to publicly accuse Sanders of assault was the finance guy. Kevin Jefferson was hired by Sanders’ co-founder/nemesis, D.L. Wallace, and worked as the chief financial…
SMU announced on Tuesday that George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States, is going to give its 2015 commencement address. It’s G-Dub’s second time to get the gig at the school — he regaled grads as governor in 1999 — a first for SMU. Given Bush’s track…
Even among the staunchest critics of Dallas ISD superintendent Mike Miles, trustee Joyce Foreman stands out in her relentless pursuit of his head. And lately, her anti-Miles advocacy has targeted the basic needs of schools and schoolchildren: She’s voted against things as mundane and necessary approving monthly financial statements and…
According to Leviticus, if a woman has an issue, and that “issue in her flesh be blood,” then she is unclean. She must present a priest with two turtle doves or young pigeons in order to make things right. At the Eagle Mountain‐Saginaw Independent School District, if an employee is…
When Prime Time wasn’t admitting to choking his employees or threatening to throw chairs at them and break their necks, he displayed a generous side. In Prime Prep’s final year, co-founder Deion Sanders donated $132,937 to the school. The former Cowboys star worked at the school in an official capacity…
They weren’t mentioned. Not once. No one, not the parents, not the teachers from other schools nor longtime critic and DISD trustee Joyce Foreman, asked DISD Superintendent Mike Miles about the “reptile’s nest” of instant messages sent between former members of the district’s human resources department at a parental forum…
At an age when most of us were preoccupied with hot-boxing our parents’ cars or eating Crayons (you ate crayons in high school too, right?!), the teenagers at Greenhill School in Addison are making us all look like slackers. “I kind of got into the whole social justice scene during…
Friday was the last day of school at Prime Prep Academy, according to state administrators assigned to pull the plug on the charter school founded by ex-Cowboy Deion Sanders. After two and a half years of legal fights, actual fights and assorted controversy, the Texas Education Agency finally said enough…
We so often associate Prime Prep Academy with its co-founder Deion Sanders that we often overlook all the little people who helped make the school such a dysfunctional place. If it wasn’t for Prime Prep’s school board, for instance, Sanders may have remained permanently fired from the school, removing the…
DISD schools: still not great, but not that bad if you look at other really big districts. So says a report issued by the Bush library and Mayor Mike Rawlings that compares achievement and disciplinary stats across the country’s biggest urban districts. The mission of the reports is described as…
From its beginning last fall, the narrative of the Great Highland Park Book Ban — and I think all spectators can agree that it’s been great — has been about sex. This is understandable. Almost all great book-ban fights are about sex — about when kids should be exposed to…
Monday’s news that Prime Prep Superintendent Ron Price is resigning at the end of January marked the beginning of the end (for real this time, we think) of Deion Sanders’ troubled charter school. His resignation was followed with an announcement from state officials that the Texas Education Agency is appointing…
There was a time, late last year, when someone actually tried to fire Deion Sanders from Prime Prep Academy, the charter school he co-founded. That brave someone was the school’s then-superintendent, an educator unrelated to Prime Time named Rachel King Sanders. At a school unofficially run by some of Deion…
In July, all of the TRUTH-haters in the media reported that Deion Sanders’ disaster of charter school was being “shut down.” But we were wrong. Prime Prep is still open and participating in sports. Not only that, Prime Prep has proudly become the only school in the country to equip…
Update: December 18, 3:28 p.m.: Governor Perry has announced that he will decline having the building named after him. “Upon deep reflection, I have informed the Board of Regents of my decision to politely decline this great honor. I do so because certain places on this campus, like our most…
