This past spring, Dallas ISD rolled out a generally successful push for eligible families to sign their 4-year-olds up for pre-k. Early registration more than doubled, from 3,288 to 6,905, and while the increase in the number of kids who ultimately enrolled was slightly less impressive — from about 9,000…
How many times in college did you call your parents in a panic because you found out you needed a graphing calculator the day before your math final? Or bombed an exam and called your mom to gripe? Or brought a bag full of laundry home for Christmas break? For…
There’s plenty of money to be made in public education. You just need to be in the right job to make it. And once you’re in that job, it helps if you can get fired. Take Walter Dansby. The former superintendent of the Fort Worth Independent School District, Dansby resigned…
There was a time, not long ago, when police routinely issued tickets to Texas middle and high school students for chewing gum, wearing skirts a little too short and turning their desktops into pillows. Students who swore were ticketed for disorderly conduct. An 11-year-old Galveston boy even faced criminal assault…
No one — not her teacher, not her mom, not the school nurse, not the paramedics — could initially explain why Meaghan Levy, an otherwise healthy kindergartener at Frisco’s Corbell Elementary, suddenly collapsed to the floor as her class walked to the library on the morning of December 12. She…
The Supreme Court’s landmark school-desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education, handed down 60 years ago this week, had little immediate impact on Dallas ISD. Schools remained officially segregated for years and de facto segregated for decades, as district officials slow-walked integration and white families fled to the suburbs…
A decade ago, the Duncanville Independent School District kicked off the 2003-04 school year by suspending 700 kids for dress code violations. The crackdown made headlines, but the first didn’t appear until late September, more than a month after the district began booting kids from class for infractions as minor…
At first glance, the March 23 murder of Wilmer-Hutchins High School basketball standout Troy Causey Jr. was the result of the cruel stupidity of undersupervised teenagers. According to police, Causey and a crosstown rival, Madison High’s Johnathan Turner, started started arguing over a video game. Words turned to punches, and…
UT Dallas has always been a university, i.e. an institution of higher learning where one can take classes and learn things and get an accredited degree. But it’s never really been a college, in the sense of a vibrant campus-centered community. When I graduated five years ago, the ghetto of…
It was a sad day — for reporters at least — when North Richland Hills’ Lady Theresa Thombs lost her bid for a seat on the State Board of Education. Between her outrageously padded resume (she claims to be an “international ambassador” and carrier of “diplomatic papers”), her seeming inability…
On Tuesday, the White House released a report — and a star-studded public service announcement — aimed at reducing the estimated one in five women who is sexually assaulted during her college career. “Colleges and universities can no longer turn a blind eye or pretend rape and sexual assault doesn’t…
Yesterday, the nonprofit Children at Risk released its annual rankings of North Texas public and charter schools. Dallas ISD performed incredibly well, its magnets snatching seven of the top 10 slots in the high school rankings. Newly minted educator Deion Sanders fared considerably worse. The Fort Worth campus of Sanders’…
For the second time in three weeks, the SMU student body has shot down a proposal to add an LGBT student senate seat. Students voted on the measure on Wednesday and Thursday — a re-vote after an initial attempt fell a few hundred votes shy of the two-thirds majority required…
Now that the bogeyman of home rule has transformed some of Dallas ISD Superintendent Mike Miles’ fiercest outside critics into his ardent supporters, the time seems ripe to formally mend fences with the school board. Easier said than done. Though things have calmed in recent months, Miles’ relationship with his…
For the past six years, apparently, El Centro College has been planning a rooftop wind farm for its Downtown Dallas campus. On Tuesday afternoon — Earth Day — the project went live as students watched on a student union video feed. It’s a relatively modest effort as far as wind…
For all the roiling arguments surrounding Dallas ISD — over governance and closing achievement gaps and teacher pay and whatever else two adults might possibly disagree on — there’s one topic over which there is little debate: Dallas ISD does magnet schools right. Just in case you needed a reminder,…
CORRECTION: A previous version of this post stated incorrectly that the teacher leading one of Conrad high’s autism units, Aimee Kelly, had been fired for alleged misconduct toward a student. She has not been fired, but is on paid administrative leave and her boss has recommended that she be fired…
There’s a reason you find so many charter schools in decrepit strip centers and old Walmarts. Decent, school-appropriate real estate is hard to come by. When it is available, it’s expensive, and charter operators, who don’t get facilities funding from the state like public schools do, are often forced to…
You know the debate over public schools in Dallas has gone squirrely when retired teacher and education activist advocate Bill Betzen stands before the City Council and offers implicit approval of Mike Miles’ tenure as DISD superintendent. Betzen, speaking in advance of a council discussion on the home-rule proposal for…
Garland ISD’s foreign teachers aren’t in danger of being sent back to their native countries because the human resources director might have been taking all-expense paid trips to the Philippines, or pocketing fees he wasn’t supposed to be charging in the first place, or illegally funneling business to his step-kids,…
Garland ISD trustee Scott Luna typically has a clear path to victory. Three times he’s been up for election, three times his name has been the only one on the ballot. Not this time. He has a challenger, 21-year-old Lawrence Billy Jones III, and now Luna’s become embroiled in a…
High school students in Texas can take, and get credit toward, electives like floral arrangement, team sport officiating, and turf-grass management. But not for Mexican-American studies, something activists, education groups, and several dozen state lawmakers are pushing to change. They came out in force for Tuesday’s State Board of Education…
