The Texas Education Agency will go ahead with a new performance rating system, Education Commissioner Michael Williams announced on Tuesday. The new system will score schools on an A to F scale in hopes of closing the achievement gap between white and minority students. “I have heard the criticism of…
Six years ago, wooing a high-profile commencement speaker was the last thing on Paul Quinn College’s to-do list. The southern Dallas school, the city’s only historically black college, was in disrepair, physically and academically, after years of mismanagement. With its accreditation set to be revoked, the entire institution was about…
A week ago, the Washington Post came out with its annual list of the country’s best public schools. This week, it’s U.S. News’ turn. The two lists take a fundamentally different approach to evaluating schools. The Post takes into account only the number of AP, IB and Advanced International Certificate…
Someday, technology will become so pervasive, such an ingrained part of existence, that it will erase the markers that once distinguished individual human beings and merge them into a single consciousness floating somewhere in the cloud. It’s inevitable, really. Just a matter of when. Working to usher in that era…
Until Tuesday, beloved Sunset High School Principal Anthony Tovar intended to resign at the end of this school year, a development seized by critics of Dallas ISD who say so-called reforms are driving away top talent. But then Tovar rescinded, saying he would stay on as principal. All was well…
State Representative Bill Zedler’s legislative career can be summed up as a quixotic attempt to foist his puritanical worldview onto the state’s 26 million residents. Backdoor abortion bans, stripper licensing, Sharia law bans, making life unnecessarily difficult for gay college kids. Whatever your right-wing hobby horse, Zedler’s filed a bill…
It’s tradition by now. Every year, Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews crunches the numbers and comes up with a list of the country’s top public schools, and every year Dallas ISD’s cohabitating School of Science and Engineering and TAG Magnet are near the top. This year is no different. Mathews…
Update on April 16: The Morning News reports that Tovar will not, in fact, be resigning. No reason given yet for the change of heart. Original post: What’s happened at Sunset High School over the last seven years has been, if not quite a miracle, than at least proof that…
Up to 50 Dallas ISD schools could have a changing of the guard next year, as principals announce their resignation or retirement. Superintendent Mike Miles has placed heavy emphasis on principal reform, including replacing those who underperform. But around a dozen principals are not going quietly into that good night…
Congratulations, Texas! After a lot of hard work and many long nights, we’re number one in the nation for repeat teen births. According to the Centers for Disease Control, which released a new report on April 2, in 2010, 22 percent of Texas teenagers aged 15-19 who gave birth were…
Sometimes the Internet is excessively dumb, like yesterday when half of Twitter was announcing #NowThatchersDead and the other half was heartbroken because they thought it was #NowThatChersDead. And other times the Internet can be pretty heartwarming. A good example of the heartwarming Internet is Thomas C. Marsh Middle School’s College…
Ron Paul’s final speech in Congress, delivered on the eve of his November retirement from the House, was a libertarian call to arms. The American public has sunk into unconscionable complacency, he said, and allowed themselves to be entranced by material progress while their hard-won liberties were snatched away. The…
Yesterday morning, things seemed grim for Texas’ gay and transgendered college students, particularly those fortunate to call themselves Aggies. They faced an assault from two fronts. On the one hand, you had the A&M student senate passing a bill allowing students to opt out of funding the school’s GLBT Resource…
Yesterday the State House of Representatives passed Senate Bill 1, a new state budget of $193.8 billion, by a lop-sided vote of 135-12. One of the more surprising parts of the bill’s passage is the approval of an anti-private school voucher amendment, passed by a vote of 103-43. The amendment,…
Watch Emmanual Mudiay on the court and it’s not hard to see how the junior point guard came to be ESPN’s No. 3 recruit in the country, or why University of Kentucky head coach John Calipari would take such a keen interest. He’s big, for one, 6-foot-4 and almost 200…
Texas has never played around when it comes to its standardized tests, and the STAAR exam, the new assessment whose rigor is currently the center of debate in the state legislature, is no different. As one of the primary ways the state evaluates educational outcomes, and thus ensures accountability, the…
Richard Railey is definitely not an idiotic, racist troll. Nope, he’s just your average 56-year-old community college student, pursuing an associates degree in IT security while trying to form a White Student Union at Tarrant County College. Burnt Orange Report wrote about Railey’s quest this morning, and also referred to…
Police say that a February prank by members of the SMU chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon crossed the line from run-of-the-mill college-kid stupid to illegal, criminally stupid when they held a rival frat member against his will for more than four hours, punching and kicking him and, according to the…
State Senator Dan Patrick, R-Houston, took to his Facebook page on Sunday to defend his proposed legislation to alter the core curriculum requirements of Texas and American history at public colleges and universities. (h/t Texas Tribune) SB 1128 would make history courses on “singular topics,” like race, gender and class,…
Teenagers, volatile bundles of hormones that they are, are going to have sex. That’s an iron law of nature, as unchangeable as the fact that lions like to eat zebras. It’s also a fair bet that, unless they are taught otherwise, these teenagers are going to have sex in an…
By the time she died in December 2011, Kathlyn Gilliam’s reputation as a pioneering civil rights advocate had been tarnished somewhat by her role, cemented during 23 years on the DISD board of trustees, in establishing the race-obsessed bureaucracy that has long since stopped benefiting the district or its students…
Sometimes it seems like all we ever do here at Unfair Park is bitch about the dastardly and frivolous legislation our elected representatives concoct down at the capitol. But not every bill sends us lunging for the bottle. Take this measure, filed by Sen. Bob Deuell of Greenville, barring State…
