The folks behind Support Our Schools, the group pushing to free Dallas ISD from many state regulations by turning it into a home-rule district, have finally gotten around to explaining themselves. Their stated goals: to combat voter apathy, extend the school year and school day, woo back the middle class,…
There are plenty of very good reasons to blow up Dallas ISD’s board of trustees. Its meetings are long, petty and often unproductive. In a district that’s more than two-thirds Hispanic, just one of its nine members is the same. Choosing trustees by geographic district discourages district-wide thinking and encourages…
Last night, Spence Middle School hosted a parent meeting to talk suicide. If you don’t already know why, read Matthew Haag’s article in The Dallas Morning News over the weekend: one student dead, three others who tried to take their own lives. A few blocks away, Board President Eric Cowan…
Football is very important to the city of Allen. It’s a place where youth football coaches recruit 12-year-old players with Gatorade and Now and Laters, where anything less than a state championship is a disappointment. This passion is most fully expressed in Eagle Stadium, the state-of-the-art, $60 million football field…
Last year, the Texas Legislature passed on the chance to ban cops and security guards from using Tasers and pepper spray on students in public school. With the state’s largest police group, the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, lobbying against it (the bill “prohibits school district peace officers from…
The outcome of the federal investigation into Garland ISD’s H1-B program, which recruited dozens of bilingual teachers from foreign countries and is now sending many of them back, is uncertain. But if past federal H1-B cases involving school districts are any indication, it could cost the district. Big time. There…
It’s not entirely clear why Garland ISD turned an internal investigation into its H1-B visa program over to the feds. The district’s official line was that it “felt obligated” to tell the U.S. Department of Homeland Security based on the “recommendations of third-party legal counsel,” which was rather opaque. So…
Dallas ISD graduation rates are up. The percentage of kids dropping out keeps going down. That’s undeniably good news, but what about the bigger picture? Are local kids going on to get college degrees that will allow them to compete for decent jobs in an increasingly knowledge-based economy? The answer,…
There’s an argument to be made that Stephen A. Smith, one of ESPN’s more voluble talking heads, is qualified to talk about sports. Reasonable people can (and do) disagree, but Smith has spent two decades as a professional sports journalist and his continued employment by the country’s biggest sports network…
Last year, Dallas’ Woodrow Wilson High School received a cease-and-desist letter from the University of Arizona declaring that the school was infringing on its trademarked wildcat logo. The university agreed, reluctantly, to let Woodrow keep the big tile mosaic on the high school’s floor, but all other uses of the…
File this under State Board of Education news that isn’t depressing and won’t cause you to despair for Texas public education. The SBOE passed long-overdue rules Friday aimed at giving priority to the placement of experts and teachers with actual subject-matter expertise on textbook review panels. It’s a positive step…
Throughout the public collapse of Prime Prep Academy, the charter school co-founded by Deion Sanders, the former Cowboy star has been accused of bullying and even attacking school employees who failed to cow to his demands for more power and more money. Those allegations have largely been hard to corroborate,…
Consolidating Dallas ISD’s administrative departments, currently sprawled across 32 buildings in various states of disrepair, is a no-brainer. Putting them in a $13 million downtown office tower, as district administrators are proposing, is probably as good an option as any. Trustees just aren’t sure that doing so one week after…
A good politician knows how to do two things: pander to his base and, on occasion, be able to get things done. With that in mind, we predict a bright future for TCU student body President Cody Westphal. TCU students have long complained about the university’s abrasive, single-ply toilet paper…
Planning meetings isn’t easy, especially when you’re a boardmember on a taxpayer-funded organization. Then your meetings have to follow a bunch of rules. Mainly, they must be open to the public and generally easy for the public to hear about and attend. It may surprise you to learn that the…
First, a spot of good news: Hillcrest High School has climbed off the Texas Education Agency’s annual list of low-performing schools. So have two other Dallas ISD schools, Francisco Medrano Middle School and John W. Runyon Elementary. Now for the depressing news: twenty-five DISD schools took their place, leaving the…
If you can’t get enough of Deion Sanders talking sports on ESPN or Deion Sanders being accused of assaults in the news, soon you can turn to the Oprah Winfrey Network and see Deion Sanders from a pleasant, uplifting human-interest angle. The network will air a series documenting his life…
No one wants to give kids a crappy education with taxpayer dollars, but Texas regulators are now cracking down on a few charter schools that aren’t actually the most embarrassing ones in the state. In an announcement this month, the Texas Education Agency called out six charter schools that it…
At the close of Prime Prep Academy’s first year, Deion Sanders was already unhappy with his role at the charter school he co-founded with D.L. Wallace. Sanders’ attorney John Nation sent Wallace a letter expressing concern that “Mr. Sanders is becoming marginalized from the very institution that represents his vision,…
Megapublisher Pearson’s high-school textbook Biology ran into trouble this fall with State Board of Education-appointed reviewers. Citing supposed errors in passages focusing on evolution, Ide Trotter, a chemical engineer by training and a creationist, recommended rejection one of the most widely used texts in the country. In response, Pearson stood…
The State Board of Education left us with a bit of a cliffhanger last month. Despite the concerted efforts of creationists, nearly all of the biology textbooks sailed through the adoption process. Two, however, became mired in completely unsurprising ideological objections from the appointed expert reviewers. Pearson’s Biology, one of…
In recent years, when conservative activists have tried to slip creationism into science textbooks adopted by Texas’ State Board of Education, they have dressed it up as “intelligent design,” or explained the need to teach the “weaknesses” of the theory of evolution. A Trojan horse, perhaps, and one that’s been…
