Dallas County established its truancy courts a decade ago with the hope that a specialized judicial system would better address the root causes of chronic absenteeism (mental health problems, family issues, etc.) than school discipline or adult courts. County Judge Clay Jenkins has declared the program a success, saying they…
When Joshua ISD officials cut off Remington Reimer’s valedictory speech, we thought it unlikely that it had anything to do with his mention of God. After all, district officials didn’t seem concerned later in the ceremony when another student delivered a prayer, punctuated by a lengthy recitation of scripture and…
More than a year after its fight became public, Dallas ISD is still struggling to cut ties with unscrupulous tutoring companies it’s required to contract with under federal law. A report set to be delivered Thursday to the board of trustees details the Texas Education Agency’s findings against two firms,…
Remington Reimer’s classmates at Joshua High School called him “Spock” — less, it seems, due to any lack of human emotion than because he’s whip-smart. The Cleburne Times-Review referred to him recently as the “most gifted, academically excellent student that Joshua High School has ever produced,” which would explain how…
Taking a charge in basketball is an art, and it has been for a long time. A not-insignificant portion of high school basketball practices — at least as of a decade ago — are dedicated to training players on coming to an abrupt stop, setting one’s feet just so, and…
Update at 2:57: Dallas ISD spokesman Jon Dahlander wrote to clarify that Morath was not actually delivering a commencement address. (For that, you can watch the entire ceremony DISDBlog firmly in the latter category. Morath is their fork-tongued punching bag.” target=”_blank”>here.) “All elected trustees are asked to participate in graduation…
The news broke, as tends to happen in these cases, on Twitter. Omfg that just shows you Irving teachers don’t pay any attention to not review that they changed a girl’s name to UGLY HOE— Haleigh ❁ (@sleepyhaleigh) May 29, 2013 And sure enough, thumb through Irving High School’s brand-new…
In terms of the way we treat school superintendents in Dallas, we’re kind of like the spoiled rich lady who fires her housekeepers one after another, then asks, “What on earth is wrong with the housekeepers of this world?” I can’t even count how many times in the last month…
Type Jerome Oberlton’s name into Google, and one of the first things to pop up is a Baltimore Sun article detailing all the places he used the local school district’s credit cards. These included businesses like Bath & Body Works and Ross, which would seem to provide little of use…
In a key win for the district’s embattled administration, Dallas Independent School District trustees voted tonight to fire two principals and as many as 400 teachers, over the often heated objections of employees and activists. It was the culmination of months of debate and protests over Superintendent Mike Miles’ reform…
For some Dallas ISD students, the senior year of high school is immensely valuable. There are mountains of college credits that can be accumulated free of charged through AP, IB, and dual-credit courses, and the mechanically inclined can enroll in vocational programs like Skyline’s aeronautics cluster. But what of the…
Today is a key moment in the battle for school reform in Dallas, as a list of school principals to be fired goes before the school board. (Check back tonight for the body count.) The main opposition to the reform effort has come from southern Dallas black leadership allied with…
Dallas ISD trustees still haven’t decided what to do about the roster of principals whose jobs could be on the chopping block. The matter has now been delayed twice, thus sparing trustees from making an extremely controversial decision until after this weekend’s election. At their meeting Thursday, trustees did manage…
We learned a little bit more yesterday about Jeff Bliss, the Duncanville High School student whose blistering classroom rant against uninspired teachers seems to have struck a nerve. He’s 18, but he’s only a high school sophomore, having dropped out of school for a year. He’s new to, and not…
This year, a group of parents and administrators at the Dallas Independent School District embarked on pretty much the most thankless task there is: finding a new sex ed curriculum for the district’s students. The job is thankless in large part because no matter what they do, someone’s going to…
In another era, Jeff Bliss’ phillipic against lazy and uninspired teaching would have been witnessed by a few classmates and quickly forgotten. But this is the age of cell-phone cameras and YouTube, so we get to see the full sermon the Duncanville High School student directed at Julie Phung, his…
Prosecutors recently dropped charges in one of the high-profile cases that spurred SMU to take a long look at its often baffling handling of sexual assaults. Last night, a week-and-a-half before another student is set to go to trial on charges that he raped a classmate in a dorm room,…
Three prominent Dallas business leaders have written a caustic public letter to Dallas ISD Superintendent Mike Miles, taking him to task generally for not conferring with them personally on school reform and specifically for threatening the job of a particular high school principal popular in South Dallas. Everybody is entitled…
John Wiley Price first inserted himself into the debate over school reform in Dallas ISD when he showed up at a November board meeting to lambast Superintendent Mike Miles’ heavy-handed attempts to enact change. His specific complaint then was the departure of longtime administrator Shirley Ison-Newsome, but Price made it…
Last night, the Dallas ISD Board of Trustees approved a resolution “opposing legislative efforts to diminish graduation standards and academic rigor.” Basically, they don’t like HB 5, the Texas House of Representatives-approved bill that would reduce the number of tests students take to graduate, and basically create separate college- and…
The Texas Education Agency will go ahead with a new performance rating system, Education Commissioner Michael Williams announced on Tuesday. The new system will score schools on an A to F scale in hopes of closing the achievement gap between white and minority students. “I have heard the criticism of…
Six years ago, wooing a high-profile commencement speaker was the last thing on Paul Quinn College’s to-do list. The southern Dallas school, the city’s only historically black college, was in disrepair, physically and academically, after years of mismanagement. With its accreditation set to be revoked, the entire institution was about…
