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…
Two years ago, SMU finally climbed off the Princeton Review’s list of the country’s most “LGBT-unfriendly” schools. The news was welcomed by administrators, who have worked hard to shed the university’s homophobic image, but it hardly meant that The Hilltop had suddenly become a bastion of progressive inclusiveness. Case in…
Dallas County Schools — the local school district with no schools or students but lots and lots of school buses — sent word last Friday that it was preparing to unveil the “School Bus of the Future,” and that this futuristic vehicle will “will revolutionize school bus transit and exponentially…
The Texas legislature’s decision to cut $5.4 billion from the public education budget three years ago had some rather predictable consequences: fewer teachers, larger class sizes and a sizable drop in the telling funding-per-pupil metric. Texas promptly dropped to 49th on the latter metric among states and Washington, D.C. This…
The way that Azleway Charter School Superintendent Steve Lenz describes it, his students wouldn’t last long at a regular old public school. Even the ones that aren’t hospitalized or in special ed are often several grades behind where they should be. They also tend to move a lot. “Some of…
Dallas ISD Trustee Mike Morath, who came forward yesterday to explain his role as the watchmaker who set into motion Support Our Public Schools, is Rain Man-like in his ability to spout off statistics. He — and Mayor Mike Rawlings and the others behind the home-rule push — have been…
Just so there’s no confusion, the White Student Union of Tarrant County College never had any official connection to Tarrant County College. The group was founded a little more than a year ago by Richard Railey, a 56-year-old white supremacist who happened taking classes there. There was nothing for the…
The folks behind Support Our Schools, the group pushing to free Dallas ISD from many state regulations by turning it into a home-rule district, have finally gotten around to explaining themselves. Their stated goals: to combat voter apathy, extend the school year and school day, woo back the middle class,…
There are plenty of very good reasons to blow up Dallas ISD’s board of trustees. Its meetings are long, petty and often unproductive. In a district that’s more than two-thirds Hispanic, just one of its nine members is the same. Choosing trustees by geographic district discourages district-wide thinking and encourages…
Last night, Spence Middle School hosted a parent meeting to talk suicide. If you don’t already know why, read Matthew Haag’s article in The Dallas Morning News over the weekend: one student dead, three others who tried to take their own lives. A few blocks away, Board President Eric Cowan…
Football is very important to the city of Allen. It’s a place where youth football coaches recruit 12-year-old players with Gatorade and Now and Laters, where anything less than a state championship is a disappointment. This passion is most fully expressed in Eagle Stadium, the state-of-the-art, $60 million football field…
Last year, the Texas Legislature passed on the chance to ban cops and security guards from using Tasers and pepper spray on students in public school. With the state’s largest police group, the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, lobbying against it (the bill “prohibits school district peace officers from…
The outcome of the federal investigation into Garland ISD’s H1-B program, which recruited dozens of bilingual teachers from foreign countries and is now sending many of them back, is uncertain. But if past federal H1-B cases involving school districts are any indication, it could cost the district. Big time. There…
It’s not entirely clear why Garland ISD turned an internal investigation into its H1-B visa program over to the feds. The district’s official line was that it “felt obligated” to tell the U.S. Department of Homeland Security based on the “recommendations of third-party legal counsel,” which was rather opaque. So…
Dallas ISD graduation rates are up. The percentage of kids dropping out keeps going down. That’s undeniably good news, but what about the bigger picture? Are local kids going on to get college degrees that will allow them to compete for decent jobs in an increasingly knowledge-based economy? The answer,…
There’s an argument to be made that Stephen A. Smith, one of ESPN’s more voluble talking heads, is qualified to talk about sports. Reasonable people can (and do) disagree, but Smith has spent two decades as a professional sports journalist and his continued employment by the country’s biggest sports network…
Last year, Dallas’ Woodrow Wilson High School received a cease-and-desist letter from the University of Arizona declaring that the school was infringing on its trademarked wildcat logo. The university agreed, reluctantly, to let Woodrow keep the big tile mosaic on the high school’s floor, but all other uses of the…
File this under State Board of Education news that isn’t depressing and won’t cause you to despair for Texas public education. The SBOE passed long-overdue rules Friday aimed at giving priority to the placement of experts and teachers with actual subject-matter expertise on textbook review panels. It’s a positive step…
