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…
A week ago, the Washington Post came out with its annual list of the country’s best public schools. This week, it’s U.S. News’ turn. The two lists take a fundamentally different approach to evaluating schools. The Post takes into account only the number of AP, IB and Advanced International Certificate…
Someday, technology will become so pervasive, such an ingrained part of existence, that it will erase the markers that once distinguished individual human beings and merge them into a single consciousness floating somewhere in the cloud. It’s inevitable, really. Just a matter of when. Working to usher in that era…
Until Tuesday, beloved Sunset High School Principal Anthony Tovar intended to resign at the end of this school year, a development seized by critics of Dallas ISD who say so-called reforms are driving away top talent. But then Tovar rescinded, saying he would stay on as principal. All was well…
State Representative Bill Zedler’s legislative career can be summed up as a quixotic attempt to foist his puritanical worldview onto the state’s 26 million residents. Backdoor abortion bans, stripper licensing, Sharia law bans, making life unnecessarily difficult for gay college kids. Whatever your right-wing hobby horse, Zedler’s filed a bill…
It’s tradition by now. Every year, Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews crunches the numbers and comes up with a list of the country’s top public schools, and every year Dallas ISD’s cohabitating School of Science and Engineering and TAG Magnet are near the top. This year is no different. Mathews…
Update on April 16: The Morning News reports that Tovar will not, in fact, be resigning. No reason given yet for the change of heart. Original post: What’s happened at Sunset High School over the last seven years has been, if not quite a miracle, than at least proof that…
Up to 50 Dallas ISD schools could have a changing of the guard next year, as principals announce their resignation or retirement. Superintendent Mike Miles has placed heavy emphasis on principal reform, including replacing those who underperform. But around a dozen principals are not going quietly into that good night…
Congratulations, Texas! After a lot of hard work and many long nights, we’re number one in the nation for repeat teen births. According to the Centers for Disease Control, which released a new report on April 2, in 2010, 22 percent of Texas teenagers aged 15-19 who gave birth were…
Sometimes the Internet is excessively dumb, like yesterday when half of Twitter was announcing #NowThatchersDead and the other half was heartbroken because they thought it was #NowThatChersDead. And other times the Internet can be pretty heartwarming. A good example of the heartwarming Internet is Thomas C. Marsh Middle School’s College…
Ron Paul’s final speech in Congress, delivered on the eve of his November retirement from the House, was a libertarian call to arms. The American public has sunk into unconscionable complacency, he said, and allowed themselves to be entranced by material progress while their hard-won liberties were snatched away. The…
Yesterday morning, things seemed grim for Texas’ gay and transgendered college students, particularly those fortunate to call themselves Aggies. They faced an assault from two fronts. On the one hand, you had the A&M student senate passing a bill allowing students to opt out of funding the school’s GLBT Resource…
Yesterday the State House of Representatives passed Senate Bill 1, a new state budget of $193.8 billion, by a lop-sided vote of 135-12. One of the more surprising parts of the bill’s passage is the approval of an anti-private school voucher amendment, passed by a vote of 103-43. The amendment,…
Watch Emmanual Mudiay on the court and it’s not hard to see how the junior point guard came to be ESPN’s No. 3 recruit in the country, or why University of Kentucky head coach John Calipari would take such a keen interest. He’s big, for one, 6-foot-4 and almost 200…
Texas has never played around when it comes to its standardized tests, and the STAAR exam, the new assessment whose rigor is currently the center of debate in the state legislature, is no different. As one of the primary ways the state evaluates educational outcomes, and thus ensures accountability, the…
Richard Railey is definitely not an idiotic, racist troll. Nope, he’s just your average 56-year-old community college student, pursuing an associates degree in IT security while trying to form a White Student Union at Tarrant County College. Burnt Orange Report wrote about Railey’s quest this morning, and also referred to…
