On a chill night four days after Christmas, Steve Baxter settled into the molded plastic bleachers in The Colony High School gymnasium and beamed as his younger son, Andrew, took the court for his fifth straight game as the Richardson Pearce Mustangs’ starting point guard. Baxter had ample reason to…
Baylor’s mess, the one the Southern Baptist Convention-affiliated school got itself into by turning blind eyes and wagging fingers to women who accused the school’s football players of sexual assault, isn’t nearly settled. Personnel dominoes are still falling, potential athletes are leaving the school in droves and the school’s leadership…
Erika Estrada never quite fit in with the moms of White Rock Valley. “It’s very Stepford,” she says. Estrada got an inkling shortly after she and her husband, Rick, bought a spacious ranch-style house on Highedge Drive in 2004 and they were peppered with invitations to living-room Bible studies. She…
I tell myself, if it’s anything to do with how adults feel about kids and education, don’t try to predict it and do try not to be surprised. Dallas School Board member Miguel Solis is arguing for a new policy to reduce the number of very little kids who get…
In the 1970s, when Sam Tasby’s lawsuit forced Dallas ISD to stop slow-walking desegregation, white enrollment began to drop like a stone. In 1970, there were 94,383 white students in the district. By the end of the decade, the district enrolled fewer than half that many, 42,030. The rate of decline…
As it has in each of the last four years, Dallas ISD’s School for the Talented and Gifted has been named the best high school in the country by U.S. News and World Report. The district’s Science and Engineering Magnet, which shares the Yvonne A. Ewell Magnet Center building with…
Dalton Sherman is a legend. Eight years ago, at the age of 9, he stood before some 17,000 Dallas ISD teachers and staff members packed into the American Airlines Center and delivered a piece of oratory so precocious and so trenchant that, once the speech was posted to YouTube, he…
On Wednesday night, NBC 5 carried a report about a DeSoto mother, Ayanna Smith, calling for the immediate dismissal of a teacher at The Meadows Elementary for paddling her son, a kindergartener. Which doesn’t seem that far out of bounds given that Texas’ definition of criminal assault (“intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly…
The elephant in Dallas ISD’s living room is segregation. Has been for decades. Before 1970, when Sam Tasby sued to force the district to integrate, the issue was the Jim Crow-style separation of blacks and whites. Since then, it’s been the flight of whites (who now account for 4 percent…
Dallas is at the edge of a wonderful and terrible moment. Nobody else is going to be able to help us, because nobody outside the city will get it. We’re about to finally try to crack the hard nut of racial segregation and concentrated poverty in our city. The trick…
On Thursday, Dallas ISD trustees will be confronted with some sobering statistics about the stark economic segregation that divides Dallas, more than almost anywhere else in the country, into silos of haves and have-nots. According to a 2012 study from the Pew Research Center, 37 percent of low-income residents in…
On Thursday night, after a couple of months of discussion and one scaldingly hot take by Dallas Morning News columnist James Ragland (“I vote YES on recess”), Dallas ISD trustees on Thursday night required all district elementary schools to provide recess, a minimum of 20 minutes through the remainder of the…
The fault lines running through the charter school debate Wednesday afternoon at Dallas City Hall were striking. The City Council chambers were filled with kids from one of Uplift Education’s schools, the one that’s been left in a lurch by council rancor over approving a seemingly routine zoning change. Joyce…
Yesterday the Dallas City Council took kind of a dive on a tough issue about a charter school that wants to expand on a new campus in the racially segregated southern hemisphere of the city. This will prove to be Round 1 in a war for the soul of southern…
The University of Texas athletic department is unlikely to face any NCAA sanctions for accusations that members of the Longhorns’ basketball teams cheated in several classes. That’s the takeaway from an independent report commissioned by the university to investigate the claims of academic impropriety — at least if you believe…
Zachary Akins is small for his age. He’s 15 and slightly built, with nerdy-chic horn-rimmed glasses that swallow half his face. He prefers playing video games to sports and keeps a bottle of hand sanitizer on his desk at school. He’s also into art. When we met at a Starbucks…
The popularity of Lakewood Elementary has effectively warped the East Dallas real-estate market as upper-middle-class-to-rich families outbid one another for homes within the school’s attendance boundaries. This makes a certain amount of sense, as Lakewood is a really good school that the surrounding community is heavily invested in, but it’s also…
Monday, Dallas ISD trustee Mike Morath was appointed Texas Education Commissioner by Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Abbott touted Morath’s reform work within Dallas ISD, their shared commitment to early childhood education and Morath’s mountain-climbing experience in announcing the appointment. Basically everyone, including Dallas Mayor Mike Rawling and former School Board…
Mike Morath, the reform-minded former Mike Miles ally who currently sits in the District 2 seat on the Dallas ISD school board, is now the highest ranking education official in the state of Texas. Since being elected to the school board in 2011, Morath, along with former superintendent Miles and…
There comes a time in all Dallas parents’ lives when they must decide whether their iron-clad commitment to city living is really clad in enough iron to see them through a dozen years of DISD. The crisis point often arrives with the letter from Dealey or Harry Stone Montessori informing…
Thankful is what I am. But being thankful always worries me. Maybe something terrible is about to happen. I am truly thankful that Dallas right now is pretty much at the forefront of the national school reform movement because of its comprehensive merit pay system for teachers. The Dallas Independent…
It’s not “balanced” journalism if you compare the right big toe to the left big toe but neglect to mention the elephant. The elephant in the room of school reform here and nationwide has always been seniority pay. With distinguished intellectual defenders like author Diane Ravitch as their standard-bearers and…
