You already knew that Mike Miles, DISD’s new superintendent, isn’t one to mince words. That was, after all, part of the thinking in hiring him: that a straight-talking, pull-no-punches leader could transform DISD from an improving but still struggling urban district into one of the country’s finest. So far, Miles’…
The ACLU of Texas released its annual compendium of books that school districts have pulled from their shelves for being too coarse, profane, sexual, or otherwise too interesting for our precious children, despite every Mom in America having a copy of 50 Shades of Gray by her nightstand. There’s good…
At first blush, it would appear that Playboy’s annual ranking of the country’s best party schools is completely arbitrary. How else to explain the appearance of the University of Western Ontario in last year’s top 10 or Plymouth State the year before? But no, this is science. “Our methodology?” Playboy…
The Dallas Independent School District has been wrestling with how best to evaluate its teachers for going on forever. In August of 2011, the district unveiled a plan to develop an evaluation system, a lengthy, three-committee process that would take until 2014 to implement. That’s right: just creating the evaluation…
Tomorrow afternoon, Mark Cuban, Mayor Mike Rawlings, and Harvard Business School guru Clayton Christensen will walk into a room with a dozen other civic, academic, and business leaders for the sixth and final closed-door meeting of the 21st Century Commission to finalize their vision for the future of the University…
On January 5, a student at Dallas ISD’s Sunset High wrote a letter to his school’s assistant principal. It was about his math teacher, Richard Hood. According to the student, Hood was having students in his Algebra II class memorize answers in advance of the coming Assessments of Course Performance…
SMU is not known as a party school, at least according to the party-school power rankers. But this is still college, where people have a tendency to gather in large groups and drink, and the school does have a robust Greek scene, so there are parties at SMU, and they…
Note: The original post said the car was at Coppell High School. It was at Hebron High School in Carrollton. And yes, it was driven to school by a 15-year-old, per Jalopnik’s update, which you’ll find below. The car you see above is a Lamborghini Gallardo LP570-4 Super Trofeo Stradale…
When Paul Hardin took over as president of SMU in 1972 after a stint at tiny Wofford College, his youth and frankness made him a favorite of the media. Not so with the school’s well-heeled supporters and alumni. A 1976 article in D Magazine gives an example: One influential SMU…
The football team at Prime Prep Academy, Deion Sanders’ charter school, has been struggling to find opponents after a UIL committee barred it from competing against district opponents.That pretty much wiped out their schedule, save for a game against Parish Episcopal at which they endured a 50-6 shellacking and another…
Erica Edmonds fears that her son’s trip to Europe could have ended much worse, maybe with something like what happened in New York City last summer to Leiby Kletzky, who was kidnapped and murdered on his way home from a summer day camp. But what 13-year-old Julius Hill allegedly went…
The New York Times this morning has a piece arguing that the Chicago teachers strike is a window on the nation’s heart over the last few years, where education is concerned. I would say it’s been 15 years at least, and in a weird way a lot of it started…
Saying someone throws like a girl is not generally acceptable, at least in the age of Title IX and political correctness. Such pronouncements reek of paternalism; certainly we’re sophisticated enough to know that gender differences that seem to be innate are really learned, the product of a lifetime of social…
Last Saturday, a few hours before SMU’s football team kicked off its season with a miserable loss to Baylor, I was driving down Lovers when I noticed scattered yard signs proclaiming “SMU is Dallas, Texas.” I scratched my head at why the school had chosen such a terrible slogan, since…
WFAA’s Brett Shipp went out to the football practice yesterday of Prime Prep Academy, the charter school co-founded by former Cowboy Deion Sanders. What happened was dangerous, awkward, embarrassing, and yet another example of why Sanders shouldn’t have a school, and why this state should spend a few more shekels…
Randy Best found his way into the pages of the Observer in the mid-’90s, when a company he founded, Voyager Expanded Learning Inc., landed some plum DISD contracts and, just after he left the district, Superintendent Chad Woolery. He gained national attention a decade later when he was criticized for…
Prime Prep Academy opened the doors of its Oak Cliff campus on Monday as promised. Students went to class, teachers taught, Deion Sanders tweeted inane things. Prime Time delivers again. There are, however, some unresolved issues, and not just with the athletic program, which has been banned from district play…
John Ellis Price, the founding president of UNT-Dallas, made precisely zero friends among the school’s faculty two years ago when he fired every one of them. That was when the school officially spun off from UNT in Denton and established itself as a separate entity, which Ellis said meant faculty…
State Senator Dan Patrick, a Houston Republican, fired something of a warning shot two weeks ago when he announced a renewed push for school choice, both in the form of vouchers and expanded charter offerings. “To me, school choice is the photo ID bill of this session,” Patrick told the…
NBC5. Note: Jump to the :35 mark for the dancing. First, a question: why do people in leadership positions in Dallas feel its a good idea to dance in public? Because it’s not. You would think they would have learned that after this video, which was apparently so embarrassing it…
Last month UNT-Dallas made the rather unexpected announcement that founding President John Ellis Price was stepping down effective August 2013, leaving him in office long enough to launch the so-called New University Model. Details about the model were left up to Bain & Company (the consulting affiliate of Mitt Romney’s…
Last year, just after state lawmakers had finished cutting $5.4 billion from Texas’ public education system, voters passed a constitutional amendment intended to put $300 million back into schools by allowing the General Land Office to put a portion of its real estate earnings into the Available School Fund. That’s…
