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…
Last Friday amid Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, Adamson High School teacher Payal Modi decided to take out her frustrations out on a video projection of the ceremony. Armed with a water pistol, Modi took on the leader of the free world, pointing and squirting her gun at the president’s image while…
Why does everybody in the Texas school reform debate think the most important thing to do is lie about it? It’s the great consensus of untruth. No matter what they do, they all want to make sure nobody can guess what they’re really up to. Nothing is more emblematic of…
Tuesday, the state of Texas’ heaviest hitters, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Gov. Greg Abbott, put their weight firmly behind an issue both have identified as a priority for the 2017 legislative session, school choice. Both leaders are pushing for the legislature to pass a bill that would create education…
The bitter joke at both the national level and here in Texas is the way our so-called populist, Tea Party-era politicians behave when their own oxen are in danger of taking a scratch. Then, watch out! Forget tea. The people be damned. Immediate case in point: feverish last-minute maneuvering in…
When do we start calling the anti-accountability lobby in public education by its true name — the mediocrity lobby? When do we begin to talk about the fact that poor and minority children are not held down half so much by mean rich people as by glad-handing mediocrats who earn…
Apparently not content to quietly leave Baylor University, Art Briles, the school’s deposed head football coach, sued university regents and a school vice president Thursday for defamation and conspiracy. Briles’ suit centers on the claim that he did not, contrary to statements made by regents and the university, know about…
Last week, when Texas state Senator Konni Burton filed Senate Bill 242, she made it clear that the bill was about fixing a specific problem. It was wrong, she said, when Fort Worth Independent School District created regulations to protect transgender kids this year but allowed school personnel to not…
Mexican American Heritage was dead on arrival. Just as they promised in September, members of the Texas State Board of Education rejected the book, labeled as “racist,” “inaccurate” and “embarrassing” by opponents. Wednesday’s preliminary vote was 14-0 against adopting the book as a text approved for use in Texas’ classrooms. The…
SMU confirmed Tuesday that racist fliers encouraging white women not to date black men were posted in two residence hall stairways over the weekend. The flier, titled “Why White Women Shouldn’t Date Black Men” was originally published on unamusementpark.com, a white supremacist blog popular with the so-called “alt-right” movement. The…
A Dallas school trustee suggests that maybe the public schools should not help seal their own doom by aiding unilateral exclusive gentrification.
Bullies beware: There is an app coming to Dallas Independent School District. And taxpayers beware, officials there say they know it works because students aren’t using it. The app is called Safetips, and it’s been the focus of a three-year test run at a single school in Arlington, Carter Jr. High School…
A story in yesterday’s Dallas Morning News about a slow-down in turnover among public school principals in Dallas contained this unattributed wisdom: “Experts say a principal needs five years at the same school to make real improvement. When the principals keep changing, so does the teaching staff. Student test scores…
It was impossible Tuesday, at the first Texas State Board of Education meeting discussing a proposed new Mexican-American Studies textbook, to find anyone willing to say they believed the text was fit for Texas classrooms. Attendees called book in question, Mexican American Heritage, racist, inaccurate and embarrassing for the state…
