Thankful is what I am. But being thankful always worries me. Maybe something terrible is about to happen. I am truly thankful that Dallas right now is pretty much at the forefront of the national school reform movement because of its comprehensive merit pay system for teachers. The Dallas Independent…
It’s not “balanced” journalism if you compare the right big toe to the left big toe but neglect to mention the elephant. The elephant in the room of school reform here and nationwide has always been seniority pay. With distinguished intellectual defenders like author Diane Ravitch as their standard-bearers and…
You can glean many lessons from the recent tension at the University of Missouri, the most trenchant being that life for minority students on many college campuses sucks, which college administrators seem ill-equipped to understand. And then there’s this: A new generation of social-media apps has emerged that provide young people…
On paper, Edwin J. Kiest Elementary in East Dallas’ Casa View neighborhood and Paul Laurence Dunbar Elementary in South Dallas/Fair Park, seem about the same, poverty-wise. Dallas ISD counts 96.1 percent of students at Kiest as “economically disadvantaged,” compared with 99.7 percent at Dunbar. Both are overwhelmingly, distressingly poor. On the ground, the…
Dallas ISD’s Bonham Elementary was a gem. The school reliably received an exemplary rating from the Texas Education Agency plus an impressive number of accolades for one of DISD’s workaday neighborhood schools. In 2009, it was one of 11 campuses nationwide to receive a National Excellence in Urban Education Award…
Every eye in American higher education is about to be on Austin again. Next Monday, the University of Texas will file a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in the latest Abigail Fisher anti-affirmative action case, to be heard by the court in December. The Fisher case — supposed to…
Whatever you think is wrong with lazy stupid modern equivalency journalism — “This guy says chattel slavery is a bad thing, but this other guy says it’s great” — just watch out. We hacks are just the canary. The same syndrome is taking place deep in the coal mine of…
When our older son began kindergarten last fall, my wife and I rejoiced. Some of our joy naturally sprung from watching him pass such a key childhood milestone — OMG, the little guy’s starting school! — but most of it admittedly came from the game-changing impact it had on our budget…
The Texas State Board of Education, the body that decides what millions of Texas schoolchildren should and shouldn’t learn, is the frequent subject and ridicule, and rightly so, what with its penchant for pushing creationism into science curricula, identifying Moses as an architect of the U.S. Constitution, chalking up the…
That didn’t take long. What, a millisecond? The door-slam was still reverberating behind departed Dallas schools chief Mike Miles — supposedly the very devil incarnate, author of all ills, according to the teachers unions — when they went after merit pay, their real target all along. In a press release,…
Yesterday I told you White House cabinet member Julian Castro, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), had slipped into town under the radar the day before to chat with Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings. Rawlings’ spokesperson said after the meeting, “The secretary challenged the mayor to push…
The fight started on the third floor right before fifth period, when the kids were still buzzing from lunch and hardest to manage. Jennifer Duggins, a Spanish teacher, was monitoring the hallway outside her classroom when a surge of students rushed passed her and disappeared around the corner into an…
The tenure of ex-University of Texas Athletic Director Steve Patterson was a barely mitigated disaster. On the job less than two years, Patterson resigned under duress September 15. When he quit, Patterson still had about four years left on his contract, worth $1.4 million annually. He’s not going to get…
A year ago, South Dallas’ Billy Earl Dade MIddle School was in disarray. Things there were so glaringly bad that, on an impromptu visit in mid-October, six weeks into last school year, Superintendent Mike Miles got rid of Principal MIchael Jones and 10 teachers on the spot. The following Monday,…
Stressing the need for stability, the Dallas ISD board of trustees voted 8-1 Tuesday to name former Superintendent Michael Hinojosa as the sole finalist for the district’s vacant superintendent job. Hinojosa previously served as superintendent from 2005 to 2011 and will become the first person to have been hired for…
Money — i.e. making more of it — isn’t the only reason to go to college. The pursuit of knowledge, the opportunity for self-discovery, the chance to test the hardiness of one’s liver are also important benefits. But for people who have to make a living, college is in large…
Tell me that again. Texas school districts, you say, are in state court in Austin telling a judge they need more money because of “the Legislature’s increased demands for standardized testing and curriculum requirements to graduate high school.” Wait. I’m a libtard. I always want the schools to get more…
In April, Pope Francis continued his run of saying pleasantly non-regressive things by declaring that men and women deserve equal pay for doing equal work. He called the fact that women are often paid less a “pure scandal” at odds with the Christian notion of radical equality. But here he…
Dear New Dallas Morning News Editor Mike Wilson: For some reason that I guess I’m not smart enough to figure out – and I blame Eric Celeste, not you – Celeste’s July 7 item on Frontburner about you and the Morning News employee buyouts, “DMN Offers Buyouts to 167 Employees,”…
The Westwood School moved into its current location about 15 years ago, repurposing an Illinois Tool Works warehouse on Proton Road in a semi-industrial corner of Farmers Branch. The neighborhood was drab, all squat warehouses and blocky, single-story office buildings, but it was becoming a hub for North Dallas private…
It should probably go without saying that the University of Texas should not have been admitting unqualified candidates. The place that anyone but an Aggie will tell you is the crown jewel of the Texas higher education system should, at a bare minimum, require that those admitted by able to…
Dallas County used to be pretty damn proud of how it handled truancy cases. In a 2005 letter to then-Attorney General Greg Abbott, District Attorney Bill Hill wrote with evident satisfaction of the swiftness and ferocity with which students were punished for chronic absenteeism. In 1996, a year after Texas…
