Oh, happy day. Under a recent edict, Dallas school kids now will have to take fewer tests. And, as we all know, testing is a form of child abuse invented by testophiles. Why else would any decent adult ever make a kid take a test? Why, indeed? I thought we might…
Reality check. That’s all. I just thought you might like to know that Texas now leads the nation in spending more on prisons than schools. To be sure, we spend more on public education in Texas than we used to. State and local expenditures for pre-K thorugh 12th grade increased…
When the Texas Legislature decided to allow the licensed, concealed carry of handguns on the state’s public university campuses, it gave the state’s schools until the beginning of the 2016-2017 academic year to get things figured out. On Wednesday, the University of Texas at Austin finalized what campus carry will…
When grief and profound mistrust swirl together in a threatening cloud above our heads as they have this past week, we should be forgiven the occasional lapse into fear and even despair. But even one moment of fear and despair may mask a more important reality: There are specific pragmatic…
Late Wednesday, former Baylor University Head Football Coach Art Briles asked a federal court to remove him as a defendant in a lawsuit brought against the school by a former student who claimed she was raped by a player. That player, Tevin Elliot, who has been convicted and sent to prison…
Huge news just happened at the Dallas Independent School District. It’s a story that solves the riddle of school reform and ought to end the debate about former Superintendent Mike Miles, at least among people with any intellectual honesty. But it’s about to slide by us virtually unnoticed. First, a…
Ester Zapata’s sister and brother attended Mount Auburn Elementary. Zapata’s two eldest children, now 24 and 18, went there as well. So when it came time for her youngest, Emily, to enter kindergarten, there was no question that she’d follow in the footsteps of her aunt and uncle and brother…
On the map, District 2 for the Dallas school board looks like a mini-Texas with a big white hole in the center, which, in a sense, it is. Right at the heart of the city, District 2 swings up from East Dallas, takes in Preston Hollow and runs over to…
The Dallas ISD board is going to take a long look at board Vice President Miguel Solis’ idea to get stop suspending kids in kindergarten, first and second grade. Solis hopes it’s not too long. Solis first brought up his plan at last month’s board briefing. Keeping kids out of…
Of Dallas ISD’s 227 schools, eight are reasonably affluent, meaning half or less of their student populations are poor. Even then, to get to eight, one must count William B. Travis Academy (fourth and fifth grades) separately from William B. Travis Vanguard (sixth through eighth) even though they share a…
On a chill night four days after Christmas, Steve Baxter settled into the molded plastic bleachers in The Colony High School gymnasium and beamed as his younger son, Andrew, took the court for his fifth straight game as the Richardson Pearce Mustangs’ starting point guard. Baxter had ample reason to…
Baylor’s mess, the one the Southern Baptist Convention-affiliated school got itself into by turning blind eyes and wagging fingers to women who accused the school’s football players of sexual assault, isn’t nearly settled. Personnel dominoes are still falling, potential athletes are leaving the school in droves and the school’s leadership…
Erika Estrada never quite fit in with the moms of White Rock Valley. “It’s very Stepford,” she says. Estrada got an inkling shortly after she and her husband, Rick, bought a spacious ranch-style house on Highedge Drive in 2004 and they were peppered with invitations to living-room Bible studies. She…
I tell myself, if it’s anything to do with how adults feel about kids and education, don’t try to predict it and do try not to be surprised. Dallas School Board member Miguel Solis is arguing for a new policy to reduce the number of very little kids who get…
In the 1970s, when Sam Tasby’s lawsuit forced Dallas ISD to stop slow-walking desegregation, white enrollment began to drop like a stone. In 1970, there were 94,383 white students in the district. By the end of the decade, the district enrolled fewer than half that many, 42,030. The rate of decline…
As it has in each of the last four years, Dallas ISD’s School for the Talented and Gifted has been named the best high school in the country by U.S. News and World Report. The district’s Science and Engineering Magnet, which shares the Yvonne A. Ewell Magnet Center building with…
Dalton Sherman is a legend. Eight years ago, at the age of 9, he stood before some 17,000 Dallas ISD teachers and staff members packed into the American Airlines Center and delivered a piece of oratory so precocious and so trenchant that, once the speech was posted to YouTube, he…
On Wednesday night, NBC 5 carried a report about a DeSoto mother, Ayanna Smith, calling for the immediate dismissal of a teacher at The Meadows Elementary for paddling her son, a kindergartener. Which doesn’t seem that far out of bounds given that Texas’ definition of criminal assault (“intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly…
The elephant in Dallas ISD’s living room is segregation. Has been for decades. Before 1970, when Sam Tasby sued to force the district to integrate, the issue was the Jim Crow-style separation of blacks and whites. Since then, it’s been the flight of whites (who now account for 4 percent…
Dallas is at the edge of a wonderful and terrible moment. Nobody else is going to be able to help us, because nobody outside the city will get it. We’re about to finally try to crack the hard nut of racial segregation and concentrated poverty in our city. The trick…
On Thursday, Dallas ISD trustees will be confronted with some sobering statistics about the stark economic segregation that divides Dallas, more than almost anywhere else in the country, into silos of haves and have-nots. According to a 2012 study from the Pew Research Center, 37 percent of low-income residents in…
On Thursday night, after a couple of months of discussion and one scaldingly hot take by Dallas Morning News columnist James Ragland (“I vote YES on recess”), Dallas ISD trustees on Thursday night required all district elementary schools to provide recess, a minimum of 20 minutes through the remainder of the…
