So it’s been easy to get bogged down in the last few days with questions like “Holy shit! Jennifer Sprague is making how much?” and “Wait, you think us media types are blowing this salary thing out of proportion because Jennifer Sprague is young and blond and has boobs?” But,…
Back before I posted this piece about how DeVry — yes, that DeVry — wanted to train students from one of its Caribbean medical schools in Texas hospitals, I reached out to the for-profit university for a more detailed explanation of their plans and, perhaps, a comment. None came. But…
Incoming DISD superintendent Mike Miles called Saturday’s sit-down with the board a retreat, but that’s probably a misnomer. The meeting was long and took place on a weekend, and there was a platter full of bacon, but Miles didn’t give an inch. In a Q&A session with media beforehand, Miles…
As the district announced yesterday, and the DMN reported over the weekend (paywall), DISD is accusing five private tutoring companies of more $500,000 in fraud. That’s on top of more than $140,000 the district accused two other companies of illegally taking in April after an external audit. The companies deny…
If you’re like me, you associate DeVry with grainy daytime TV advertisements from the mid-1990s hawking cut-rate degrees in things like medial records and mechanical drafting. But the for-profit college has apparently been moving up in the world, now training not only your stenographer but your doctor. DeVry entered the…
Big front-pager in today’s Morning News about how Mike Miles, Dallas ISD’s new superintendent, will pay his new communications chief, Jennifer Sprague, $185,000 a year. The general consensus among those interviewed for the story: Holy hell that’s a lot of money for that job. Which makes sense because, well, holy…
When Joseph Drake, a fourth grade teacher at Central Elementary School, fired off a testy email to DISD Trustee Edwin Flores (Sample line: “People like you destroy morale, beat us down into the ground, and make us wish we had been greedy enough to go into the business world as…
Two years ago, when George Clayton announced that he was seeking to represent Dallas and Collin countie on the State Board of Education, the first question was, “Who?” It soon became clear that Clayton was, on the surface at least, a mild-mannered administrator at North Dallas High School who believes…
Update at 5:19 p.m.: Dahlander provides some additional context for the numbers: Apparently OPR had not received the campus incident reports previously, which can be as minor as an injury on the playground to an upset parent in the office. Now that they receive them and review each one to…
Earlier this month, the Texas Ethics Commission fined the Alliance of Dallas Educators United Teachers Political Action Committee, which most recently supported the doomed campaign of young Damarcus Offord, $600 for a handful of violations of campaign disclosure laws. I didn’t write about it because I am the Liberal Media…
A week after making one of his bigger hires in Teach for America’s Charles Glover, incoming Dallas Independent School District Superintendent Mike Miles continues to fill out his administrative team. Tuesday, the district announced that it has hired the first five of an eventual 20 executive directors, each of whom…
Elliot Monteverde-Torres, the third-grade math teacher at Felix G. Botello Elementary School in Oak Cliff, hasn’t seen the district’s report regarding his complaint against the school’s principal, but he knows it isn’t favorable for him. Like us, he heard that the district had finished the report, which it was required…
Today is the last Friday of the school year for Dallas ISD schools. For 11 schools in the city slated for consolidation after a school board vote, like the 89-year-old James B. Bonham Elementary, this Friday holds even more significance. Next week, after the students leave, the teachers will pack…
Progress Texas doesn’t much like the virtual school movement that has drawn increasing numbers of the state’s grade-school students away from real classrooms, many of them full-time. For one thing, it’s proven ineffective, the group argues in a report released yesterday. Case in point: Texas Virtual Academy, an online charter…
Teach for America, the teacher pipeline founded by Highland Parker Wendy Kopp, is often tossed into the bucket with the rest of the tools in the reform movement’s toolbox, from charter schools to performance-based pay and the like. For that, and for its place outside the labor movement, it’s often…
What is the single most embarrassing thing that could happen to a college? Accidentally writing ‘pubic’ in the school’s title in the graduation program, of course. Hands down. No, not down there, gosh. And with the tagline ‘Unlimited Possibilities’ … you just cannot make this stuff up. To the graduates…
It wasn’t without some pride that I saw last week that my alma mater, the University of Texas at Dallas, had earned what may be its first superlative. (OK, maybe its second, but the most-hideous-architecture label was unofficial.) The Texas Tribune has helpfully compiled a list of average tuition and…
The Dallas Independent School District elections were held last weekend, and as we maybe should have known all along, Elizabeth Jones, Dan Micciche and Bernadette Nutall — the candidates with tens of thousands of PAC dollars and personal endorsements from the Citizen — blew out their competition. The most interesting…
You don’t shoot the goose that laid the golden egg. You just don’t — not unless you really, really have to or the goose stops pooping out gold. Which is why SMU’s firing of athletic director Steve Orsini yesterday was so perplexing, and why the non-explanation offered by school President…
As Matthew Haag noted yesterday over at the Morning News’ education blog, DISD’s Citizen Budget Review Commission made several recommendations at last week’s board briefing for how the district might cut costs. The most eye-catching: consider getting rid of metal detectors in middle and high schools. The commission’s report calls…
Every kindergartener with a sense of self-preservation knows not to trust the stop signs that jut out from the sides of school buses, because even though they are the same reflective red octagons as those planted in concrete and the word “STOP” is written in the same white font, people…
You knew it was coming. Incoming DISD chief Mike Miles laid it out pretty clearly during his first presentation to the DISD school board last week, to say nothing of his reformist track record in Colorado Springs. But a month and a half before Miles’ official July 1 start date,…
