America is the best place ever. Everyone knows that except, it seems, our educators. The College Board is rolling out new guidelines this year for the Advanced Placement U.S. history exams that has some Texas School Board members crying foul. Ken Mercer, noted conservative school board member, says the new…
Denton ISD’s new grading policy rolls out today with the first day of school, to the delight of middle and high school students and the chagrin of their teachers. The district-wide policy veritably ensures that Denton students have to work harder to fail than to pass their classes. Their future…
This year marks the third year in a row that Texas Woman’s University in Denton will contract with a local Holiday Inn to provide housing for students. More than 100 students will be assigned to the off campus hotel that has been haphazardly labeled as campus housing. “Students who have…
Exactly one year ago, Dallas ISD’s Student Intake Center began taking responsibility for every immigrant student coming into the district. The Center focuses on processing the kids who have never attended American schools before, by checking immunization records and other documents, and evaluating their level of education. The Center is…
The Little Free Library project has established a national reputation for encouraging local literacy among kids. The Wisconsin-based group was founded in 2009 and encourages neighborhoods to set up small boxes of books for kids to read and return. The idea of the Little Free Library project is that people…
The Princeton Review on Monday released its annual package of mostly arbitrary lists about colleges that are fun to talk about but don’t really mean anything. The rankings feature categories such as “Birkenstock-Wearing, Tree-Hugging, Clove-Smoking Vegetarians,” “Stone-Cold-Sober Schools” and “Is It Food.” So, when local schools show up on the…
Earlier this month, as reported by Unfair Park and practically every other outlet in town, the Texas Education Agency began the process of revoking Prime Prep’s charter. The reasons for the potential revocation are convoluted, the upshot isn’t. Should its charter be revoked, the school would have to stop enrolling…
Last month, Dallas Independent School District held its annual job fair to fill roughly 2,000 open positions for the 2014-2015 school year. The fair at Conrad High School was stuffed to the brim with eager college graduates, jaded career changers and Dallas newcomers. By mid-morning nearly half the positions had…
The Texas Education Agency is still investigating the Deion Sanders-founded and publicly funded Prime Prep charter school, after officials announced plans to revoke the school’s charter for mishandling funds intended for the school lunch program. Prime Prep is appealing and hopes to stay open. But school lunch funds are just…
And we’re not just talking about the unaccompanied Central American variety. A new report by the Center for Public Policy Priorities zeroes in on a national study ranking child well-being. Several factors come into play, including health care, education, parental employment, and standard of living. See also: – It Really…
Whether Prime Prep manages to stay open or not doesn’t matter to Emmanuel Mudiay. The kid who would have been king, the explosive, rangy point guard, is not going to SMU, whether he would have been eligible to play for the Mustangs or not. Athletic apparel company Under Armour –…
State regulators have revoked the charter of Prime Prep Academy, Deion Sanders’ troubled DFW charter school, over problems with its school-lunch program. Barring a successful hail mary from the school, Sanders’ days as a wannabe public educator are over, and it was byzantine federal grant rules that did him in…
Last year, like so many years, Texas’ attempt to adopt new science textbooks was clouded by controversy, as creationists tried once again to cut out teaching of evolution. This year it’s social studies’ turn. And while experts say the state board, the elected and highly political body that governs textbook…
It was two and a half years ago that we, along with every other media outlet in town, started telling you about Deion Sanders’ disastrous plan to open a charter school with campuses in Oak Cliff and Forth Worth. That disastrous plan eventually became a disastrous reality called Prime Prep…
Between the excitement surrounding high school graduation and the ensuing laziness of the summer months, it’s not uncommon for many college-bound students to flame out. In particular, first generation college students have trouble following through with their fall university plans in the summer months after high school graduation. It’s a…
Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes and Steven Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower have two things in common. They both delve into complicated topics of teenage bullying and social struggles, and Highland Park High School parents don’t want their kids reading either of them. Both contain passages of sexually explicit…
This past spring, Dallas ISD rolled out a generally successful push for eligible families to sign their 4-year-olds up for pre-k. Early registration more than doubled, from 3,288 to 6,905, and while the increase in the number of kids who ultimately enrolled was slightly less impressive — from about 9,000…
How many times in college did you call your parents in a panic because you found out you needed a graphing calculator the day before your math final? Or bombed an exam and called your mom to gripe? Or brought a bag full of laundry home for Christmas break? For…
There’s plenty of money to be made in public education. You just need to be in the right job to make it. And once you’re in that job, it helps if you can get fired. Take Walter Dansby. The former superintendent of the Fort Worth Independent School District, Dansby resigned…
There was a time, not long ago, when police routinely issued tickets to Texas middle and high school students for chewing gum, wearing skirts a little too short and turning their desktops into pillows. Students who swore were ticketed for disorderly conduct. An 11-year-old Galveston boy even faced criminal assault…
No one — not her teacher, not her mom, not the school nurse, not the paramedics — could initially explain why Meaghan Levy, an otherwise healthy kindergartener at Frisco’s Corbell Elementary, suddenly collapsed to the floor as her class walked to the library on the morning of December 12. She…
The Supreme Court’s landmark school-desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education, handed down 60 years ago this week, had little immediate impact on Dallas ISD. Schools remained officially segregated for years and de facto segregated for decades, as district officials slow-walked integration and white families fled to the suburbs…
