Zan Holmes Jr. arrived in Dallas in 1956 to study theology at SMU. He had been here a week, living in a one-room flat in South Dallas, when he heard a car crash on nearby Central Expressway. An ambulance and police cars beat him to the scene, but the white…
A new report submitted to the Texas Legislature says that Texans who earn their bachelor’s degrees in the humanities have higher levels of debt and lower earning potential than people who get degrees in math and science-related fields. In 2010, the majors with the highest rates of unemployment were humanities…
Two years ago, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched Completion by Design, a $35 million program aimed at dramatically increasing the graduation rates of community college students. The money was parceled out to nine target states, Texas among them. The Texas group was spearheaded by the Lone Star College…
Last week, Superintendent Mike Miles proposed giving teachers $750 in incentive pay for the coming school year. “Last year, we asked the teachers for a lot,” Miles said, per the Morning News. “We asked the teachers to extend the number of minutes that they are teaching, and to increase the…
NPR ran a story on Wednesday about David Barton, the Aledo-based pseudo-historian who has built a career arguing that America was established on Christian principles. It found that his claims aren’t particularly hard to debunk. For one, Barton has only a bachelor’s in Christian education from Oral Roberts University, with…
The Texas Education Agency released its Adequate Yearly Progress report for 2012 a bit ago, and DISD and about three-quarters of its individual campuses missed the mark, just as they did last year, and the year before, and the year before. Much of that can be attributed to tougher standards…
Update at 3:31 p.m.: Just heard back from Paul Quinn President Michael Sorrell who told me this is part of an ongoing effort to make the school’s dining options healthier. They’ve added a grill and cut back on fried food in recent years, and there’s the garden, of course. “The…
It’s inevitable in a district the size of DISD that, in the lead-up to a new school year, there’s a mismatch between the number of teachers the district has and the number of teachers it needs. But as DISD Blog pointed out, the district still has more than 300 vacant…
Performance pay in public education is a touchy subject. It seems like a good enough idea in theory, but once you get into the details of how exactly performance will be defined and measured in practice, things start to get thorny. One option for avoiding controversy: Define performance as attendance…
You know Gail Spurlock for finally revealing to the world that the Pilgrims were not only a persecuted religious minority who established a beachhead of European settlement in North America but were, more importantly, communists. It’s why they died. This wouldn’t have been terribly newsworthy were Spurlock not running for…
Dallas, both city and county, has held the line on property taxes in recent years despite dwindling revenues and shrinking budgets. Still, your property tax bill is probably going to increase after September 1, when Dallas County Community College District’s new budget goes into effect. DCCCD spokeswoman Ann Hatch said…
The University of North Texas at Dallas has come along way since it was founded in 2000 as a 55-student extension of UNT’s Denton campus. In 2007, it moved onto its permanent campus and three years later became a standalone institution that now boasts a shade over 2,000 students. Not…
By most measures, LG Pinkston High School is failing. The school, which neighbors Fish Trap Lake in a poor area of West Dallas, has higher dropout rates, lower graduation rates, and lower test scores than the rest of Dallas ISD. It is considered academically unacceptable by the state and has…
The world of early childhood education is cutthroat. There are only so many hyper-concerned parents willing to shell out public college tuition for their 3-year-olds to get the type of preschool education that will propel them into the Ivy League. Used to be, you could slap the name “Montessori” on…
Back in May, longtime Dallas Independent School District educator George Clayton was defeated in State Board of Education reelection bid, apparently ending his all-too-brief, redistricting-shortened two-year term. The loss was partly because he was badly outspent by Tincy Miller in her attempt to regain the seat she occupied for several…
Given his high profile over the past few months and some much-publicized decisions, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Mike Miles has actually been DISD’s superintendent. Which he has, of course, but not officially and not full-time until Monday, when he took the reins in earnest. It was a busy…
Incoming DISD superintendent Mike Miles might have been getting the impression that Dallas wasn’t as friendly as billed, what with all the pointed questions about administrators’ pay scale. So, to prove we really do love him, the Dallas Regional Chamber is unrolling a billboard campaign timed to coincide with the…
The $1.15 billion 2012-13 budget approved unanimously by DISD trustees last night contained no real surprises. We already knew the state was cutting $37 million in funding. The district opted not to seek a tax increase, so to compensate, the district trimmed $22.8 million, or about 2 percent, from last…
News has been trickling out as DISD Superintendent Mike Miles has filled out his leadership team. Thursday, it was Seattle Public Schools’ Aurora Lora as assistant superintendent. Friday it was Ft. Worth ISD’s Sylvia Reyna as school leadership chief and the fifth and penultimate member of Miles’ cabinet. The burning…
Dana Allen, a Lakewood parent, is thrilled with the education her 5-year-old receives at Lindsley Park charter school, but is displeased that the school has no gym, no cafeteria, no library and no computer lab. She attributes the absence of such basic niceties to the school’s lack of state funding…
When it meets later this morning, the DISD Board of Trustees will get an update on efforts to boost the number of students taking and passing Advanced Placement exams. As the graph above shows, the short answer is, a helluva lot more than there used to be. Right at a…
At his odd press conference defending the $185,000 salary of his communications chief, new Dallas ISD supe Mike Miles mentioned that he’s never had coffee with Jennifer Sprague. It sounded unlikely, but you knew what Miles meant: They don’t hang out. They’re not bros. But it was only a matter…
