In a little less than a week, Texas voters will head to the polls to cast their off-year ballots, filled with important if uninspiring items like bond elections and amendments to the state constitution. For Dallas County voters, perhaps the most contentious item on offer asks whether Dallas County Schools…
You and I will be asked to vote Nov. 7 on killing the Dallas County school district, or Dallas County Schools, as it calls itself. The proposition is to let DCS “continue,” or stay alive. To kill it, you have to vote against. In the drumbeat of bad stories over…
When the 2018-2019 school year kicks off next August, four Dallas elementary schools will sport new names, thanks to a vote by Dallas ISD Board of Trustees. Thursday night, the board voted 9-0 to require that schools named for Albert Sidney Johnston, Stonewall Jackson, William L. Cabell and Robert E. Lee,…
First thing you probably will have to do, if you even hope to understand what’s going on these days in the Dallas public school district, is turn most of your assumptions upside down. On Aug. 17, the three African-American members on the Dallas school board voted to kill two tax…
Eric Hauser, author of The Adventures of Pepe and Pede, won’t be keeping any of the meager profits reaped from his book. Hauser, a former Denton ISD assistant principal, released his book Aug. 1. Its themes and imagery — which include Pepe, a frog, and Pede, a centipede, draining the…
How times have changed.The worst threat posed to poor minority kids in Dallas once came from a callous white leadership. Now poor and minority kids get shafted by a callous black Southern Dallas leadership that cares more about preserving its good-old-boy political patronage system. You may not agree with me…
The story of the 1988 Carter High School Cowboys is tough to get right. There are so many moving parts — one of the most talented high school football teams in history, a school fighting for a new grading system that leads to an eligibility scandal and a group of…
Denton ISD removed Eric Hauser — the Rodriguez Middle School assistant principal who courted controversy last week after the release of his self-published children’s book, The Adventures of Pepe and Pede — from his post Monday afternoon. Hauser is being reassigned to an unannounced role with the district because of the…
If I utter one single encouraging word about charter schools, I get this instantaneous backlash from people, many of them friends, insisting that charter schools are part of an elitist plot to undermine and one day do away with public school education and, by the way, I am an idiot…
The school reform issue ought to split up conservatives as badly as it does liberals. But it doesn’t. I can’t figure that out. No matter which side looks at it, school reform turns on the same fundamental question: Can a poor, minority kid from a chaotic background be as smart…
Yesterday, Dana Goldstein, who covers a lot of things for The New York Times, including education, took note of Dallas schools in a story about reform efforts here, calling Dallas, “a national leader in trying to figure out how to encourage students of all backgrounds to willingly go to school…
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ensured Thursday afternoon that Dallas County voters will have the final say on the fate of Dallas County Schools, the bureaucracy that doesn’t operate any schools but only provides bus service. The school district is a relic of a time when countywide districts, rather than city…
Lots of people I know wish they could do a celebratory victory dance in front of City Hall today over the outcomes in Saturday’s local runoff elections, especially the surprising defenestration of three City Council incumbents favored by the mayor and The Dallas Morning News. It’s amazing. I not only…
It’s not fun, but it is interesting at times to watch the Washington press corps struggle with public education issues. I have empathy. If anything bollixes up our bookkeeping in the news business about who’s a black hat and who’s a white hat, it’s that damned education issue. Last week,…
In the late 1950s, my mother, a second-grade teacher, left her job in an affluent all-white suburb of Detroit to teach at an almost all-black school in Pontiac, Michigan. She believed that more cutting edge work was being done there in early education. Not long into her tenure at Bethune Elementary, she…
My fellow East Dallas superannuated hippies, progressives, bleeding hearts, people who really care, liberals, hair shirts, morally superior persons, bloody saints, whatever we call ourselves: Please listen up. We are being taken for a ride and played for fools in this June 10 District 2 Dallas school board election. All…
Picking up where the Dallas ISD school board left off earlier this year, the Texas House of Representatives voted Tuesday to ban the state’s public schools from suspending students attending pre-kindergarten through second grade. Like Dallas, the proposed state wide policy includes an exception for extreme behavioral issues like violent…
Ever ready to rush in with a press release where the religious liberty of Texas public school students is threatened, even when it isn’t, the Texas Attorney General’s office fired off a letter to Frisco ISD on Friday warning them that a “prayer room” available to Liberty High School’s 2,100 students had…
We talk here all the time about things that are hopeless, things headed to hell in a hand-basket, the usual, so every once in a while, when something good does happen randomly, I like to offer it as a footnote or caveat or just for grins. In that vein, the…
As he promised he would to the Observer’s Jim Schutze a couple of weeks ago, Dallas state Senator Don Huffines filed a bill Tuesday afternoon to get rid of Dallas County Schools, the school district that doesn’t operate any schools. Dallas County Schools, for the uninitiated or confused, runs the…
If he needed a reminder, Dallas state Senator Don Huffines is getting one: Remember, no matter where you are, if you’re speaking to the public, someone is probably filming. During a discussion with Richardson ISD parents and students at the state capitol Monday, Huffines grew irritable when pressed about his…
School vouchers, by another name, are apparently just as sweet to Texas’ Republican leadership and the state’s advocates for school choice. Monday afternoon at the Texas State Capitol, Dan Patrick joined with parents and state senators to announce Senate Bill 3, the 2017 legislative session’s biggest school choice bill. Rather than…
