In Advance of SMU’s Saturday Commencement, a Few Honorary Degrees

Big weekend planned on the SMU campus, where Laura Bush will deliver the commencement address Saturday morning at Moody Coliseum to the some 2,000 Mustangs escaping the Hilltop. But in advance of the weekend shindig, there are tomorrow’s honorary degree recipients symposia featuring some fairly bold-faced names: Harold W. Attridge,…

Sooner Than Later, DISD Wants a High School “Geared Toward the Nontraditional Student”DISD Wants a High School “Geared Toward the Nontraditional Student”

Tonight, of course, is the Dallas Independent School District board of trustees’ called board meeting, at which the board will discuss and approve campus staffing formulas for the 2009-’10 school year; Schutze is attending, but of course. But at this very moment is the lengthy warm-up: a regular ol’ board…

DISD Trustee Carla Ranger Writes of Texas AG’s Opinion: “Voting Rights Have Been Sacrificed on the Alter of Political Power.”

“Bummer.” That’s how Dallas Independent School District board trustee Edwin Flores initially responded yesterday when Unfair Park asked for comment concerning the Texas Attorney General’s opinion yesterday that the board “was not authorized to change the length of its members’ terms of office” from three to four years last November…

UTD Prof Wants to Go Fast, Daddy

The home page for Diandra Leslie-Pelecky’s research group in the Department of Physics at The University of Texas at Dallas isn’t altogether exciting — though, late some nights, I will feel absolutely qualified to discuss the studying of nanostructured magnetic materials to understand their fundamental properties, as well as potential…

Carla Ranger Believes Targeting of DISD Learning Centers is “Racial Politics”

Yesterday, Tawnell Hobbs summarized the debate over the fate of the Dallas Independent School District’s learning centers, created by court order in the 1980s to “return disadvantaged, inner-city, minority students to their neighborhood schools and provide quality educational programs with supplementary funds,” as the district’s Web site puts it. District…

School’s Out: Kent Fischer Quits The News.

First Dallas Independent School District watchdog Allen Gwinn suggests he’s shuttin’ ‘er down — come 2010, maybe, “then it’s somebody else’s problem” — and now this: Kent Fischer, one of two education beat writers at The Dallas Morning News, just announced publicly the resignation he gave his bosses on Monday…

DISD’s Making One Dell of a Deal

Allen Gwinn’s taken a sneak peek at the Dallas Independent School District board of trustees’ briefing agenda for Thursday, and one item in particular struck him as … well, interesting. Which is: Ratification of Authority to Execute Master Lease Agreement with Dell, Inc. for Sixty Months and Provide for Subsequent…