Randy Best found his way into the pages of the Observer in the mid-’90s, when a company he founded, Voyager Expanded Learning Inc., landed some plum DISD contracts and, just after he left the district, Superintendent Chad Woolery. He gained national attention a decade later when he was criticized for…
Prime Prep Academy opened the doors of its Oak Cliff campus on Monday as promised. Students went to class, teachers taught, Deion Sanders tweeted inane things. Prime Time delivers again. There are, however, some unresolved issues, and not just with the athletic program, which has been banned from district play…
John Ellis Price, the founding president of UNT-Dallas, made precisely zero friends among the school’s faculty two years ago when he fired every one of them. That was when the school officially spun off from UNT in Denton and established itself as a separate entity, which Ellis said meant faculty…
State Senator Dan Patrick, a Houston Republican, fired something of a warning shot two weeks ago when he announced a renewed push for school choice, both in the form of vouchers and expanded charter offerings. “To me, school choice is the photo ID bill of this session,” Patrick told the…
NBC5. Note: Jump to the :35 mark for the dancing. First, a question: why do people in leadership positions in Dallas feel its a good idea to dance in public? Because it’s not. You would think they would have learned that after this video, which was apparently so embarrassing it…
Last month UNT-Dallas made the rather unexpected announcement that founding President John Ellis Price was stepping down effective August 2013, leaving him in office long enough to launch the so-called New University Model. Details about the model were left up to Bain & Company (the consulting affiliate of Mitt Romney’s…
Last year, just after state lawmakers had finished cutting $5.4 billion from Texas’ public education system, voters passed a constitutional amendment intended to put $300 million back into schools by allowing the General Land Office to put a portion of its real estate earnings into the Available School Fund. That’s…
Responding to a fairly dismal report from the purveyors of the ACT test, the Texas Education Agency is searching for a silver lining in an otherwise irredeemable truth about the 2012 crop of high school grads: Only a quarter of them are ready for college. Because the figure bears repeating,…
Prime Prep Academy, Deion Sanders’s charter school, is scheduled to debut Monday. The school’s much-discussed football program, the one that was reportedly going to be the subject of a reality show and that Deion himself was going to coach? That might have to wait. WFAA’s Brett Shipp reported Friday that…
Zan Holmes Jr. arrived in Dallas in 1956 to study theology at SMU. He had been here a week, living in a one-room flat in South Dallas, when he heard a car crash on nearby Central Expressway. An ambulance and police cars beat him to the scene, but the white…
A new report submitted to the Texas Legislature says that Texans who earn their bachelor’s degrees in the humanities have higher levels of debt and lower earning potential than people who get degrees in math and science-related fields. In 2010, the majors with the highest rates of unemployment were humanities…
Two years ago, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched Completion by Design, a $35 million program aimed at dramatically increasing the graduation rates of community college students. The money was parceled out to nine target states, Texas among them. The Texas group was spearheaded by the Lone Star College…
Last week, Superintendent Mike Miles proposed giving teachers $750 in incentive pay for the coming school year. “Last year, we asked the teachers for a lot,” Miles said, per the Morning News. “We asked the teachers to extend the number of minutes that they are teaching, and to increase the…
NPR ran a story on Wednesday about David Barton, the Aledo-based pseudo-historian who has built a career arguing that America was established on Christian principles. It found that his claims aren’t particularly hard to debunk. For one, Barton has only a bachelor’s in Christian education from Oral Roberts University, with…
The Texas Education Agency released its Adequate Yearly Progress report for 2012 a bit ago, and DISD and about three-quarters of its individual campuses missed the mark, just as they did last year, and the year before, and the year before. Much of that can be attributed to tougher standards…
Update at 3:31 p.m.: Just heard back from Paul Quinn President Michael Sorrell who told me this is part of an ongoing effort to make the school’s dining options healthier. They’ve added a grill and cut back on fried food in recent years, and there’s the garden, of course. “The…
It’s inevitable in a district the size of DISD that, in the lead-up to a new school year, there’s a mismatch between the number of teachers the district has and the number of teachers it needs. But as DISD Blog pointed out, the district still has more than 300 vacant…
Performance pay in public education is a touchy subject. It seems like a good enough idea in theory, but once you get into the details of how exactly performance will be defined and measured in practice, things start to get thorny. One option for avoiding controversy: Define performance as attendance…
You know Gail Spurlock for finally revealing to the world that the Pilgrims were not only a persecuted religious minority who established a beachhead of European settlement in North America but were, more importantly, communists. It’s why they died. This wouldn’t have been terribly newsworthy were Spurlock not running for…
Dallas, both city and county, has held the line on property taxes in recent years despite dwindling revenues and shrinking budgets. Still, your property tax bill is probably going to increase after September 1, when Dallas County Community College District’s new budget goes into effect. DCCCD spokeswoman Ann Hatch said…
The University of North Texas at Dallas has come along way since it was founded in 2000 as a 55-student extension of UNT’s Denton campus. In 2007, it moved onto its permanent campus and three years later became a standalone institution that now boasts a shade over 2,000 students. Not…
By most measures, LG Pinkston High School is failing. The school, which neighbors Fish Trap Lake in a poor area of West Dallas, has higher dropout rates, lower graduation rates, and lower test scores than the rest of Dallas ISD. It is considered academically unacceptable by the state and has…
