Erica Edmonds fears that her son’s trip to Europe could have ended much worse, maybe with something like what happened in New York City last summer to Leiby Kletzky, who was kidnapped and murdered on his way home from a summer day camp. But what 13-year-old Julius Hill allegedly went…
The New York Times this morning has a piece arguing that the Chicago teachers strike is a window on the nation’s heart over the last few years, where education is concerned. I would say it’s been 15 years at least, and in a weird way a lot of it started…
Saying someone throws like a girl is not generally acceptable, at least in the age of Title IX and political correctness. Such pronouncements reek of paternalism; certainly we’re sophisticated enough to know that gender differences that seem to be innate are really learned, the product of a lifetime of social…
Last Saturday, a few hours before SMU’s football team kicked off its season with a miserable loss to Baylor, I was driving down Lovers when I noticed scattered yard signs proclaiming “SMU is Dallas, Texas.” I scratched my head at why the school had chosen such a terrible slogan, since…
WFAA’s Brett Shipp went out to the football practice yesterday of Prime Prep Academy, the charter school co-founded by former Cowboy Deion Sanders. What happened was dangerous, awkward, embarrassing, and yet another example of why Sanders shouldn’t have a school, and why this state should spend a few more shekels…
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…
