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…
Prime Prep Academy, the charter school that Deion Sanders co-founded last year and was fired from last week, is known for its suspicious tendency to attract some of the top high school athletes in the country. Now, the parents of those athletes say they were misled by school officials and…
As evangelicals continue to revel in their victory over the Christmas-hating PTA moms in Frisco, the folks at the American Humanist Association are proving that they don’t need God on their side to force a North Texas school district to capitulate. AHA announced today that Isaiah Smith, the Birdville High…
Texas is one of a handful of states that hasn’t adopted the coming Common Core curriculum standards, but former State Board of Education member Cynthia Dunbar nonetheless believes that the creep of “socialized education” is apparent in a new environmental science text. In an innuendo-heavy segment that could be debunked…
The creationists didn’t win Friday when the State Board of Education took up new biology textbooks in an ideologically fraught, historically contentious adoption process. Most of the materials sailed through. But they didn’t exactly lose, either. Biology, one of the top two or three most widely used textbooks in the…
In last year’s cover story on Deion Sanders’ Prime Prep Academy, we described D.L. Wallace as little more than a snake-oil salesman. Last month, just before Sanders was briefly fired, he called his business partner a “snake.” Whatever the preferred moniker, the Prime Prep co-founder and CEO is gone. He…
It wasn’t that long ago that Frisco’s embrace of Christ’s birth was so suffocatingly full-bodied that the Washington Post’s Hank Stuever embedded himself there for three holiday seasons for Tinsel, his book exploring the gaudy excess of the modern American Christmas celebration. How quickly things change. This year, just five…
The State Board of Education doesn’t vote on new high-school biology textbooks until Friday, but the Discovery Institute — an avowed foe of teaching evolution in public schools — is bracing for the worst. Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, an institute board member, tells Evolution News and Views that the proposed…
Preston Hollow Elementary is losing the battle to woo the middle- and upper-class families who live nearby. It’s not unique in this regard. Sanger Elementary, you’ll recall, was spurned by the coveted high-level-city-bureaucrat demographic, and other grade schools in Dallas’ well-heeled ‘hoods draw largely from poorer neighborhoods, while the local…
Every year, thousands of Texas high school graduates continue their educations at community colleges, but only a fraction –16.2 percent according to a recent study — will ever go on to complete a four-year degree. A number of factors contribute to such an abysmal college completion rate, most of which…
Just before 9 a.m. on Tuesday, 16-year-old Jerry Nguyen stepped out of a friend’s Volkswagen Beetle in front of Bryan Adams High school to wait for his bus. He was struck and killed a few moments later as the car was executing a U-turn. Nguyen studied science and engineering at…
Justin Lookadoo can’t figure out what all the fuss is about. He showed up at Richardson High School yesterday to give the same motivational speech he’s given to students thousands of times only to have his name desecrated on Twitter and be pilloried by the media. His presentation, he told…
Around 1 p.m. today, the hashtag #lookadouche showed up on the Twittersphere. A group of students at Richardson High School were skipping regularly scheduled math or science classes to attend an optional PTA-sponsored assembly. The day’s guest speaker was a motivational speaker who has co-authored faith-based dating books, Dateable: are…
A student en route to Dallas ISD’s Townview Magnet died this morning after being struck by a car. The incident happened at East Dallas’ Bryan Adams High School. According to news reports, the teen was dropped off by a woman just before 9 a.m. to wait for the bus. The…
