Education

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…

This week, Dallas ISD’s Ross Avenue headquarters was hit with a flurry of teacher resignations, with 279 rank-and-file educators telling the district they were calling it quits. This minor exodus had nothing to do with teachers’ well-known frustration with Superintendent Mike Miles. This was policy. Yesterday was the cutoff for…

On Valentine’s Day, the University of Texas System regents named University of Alabama-Huntsville Provost Vistasp M. Karbhari as the lone finalist to succeed James Spanioloas as president of the University of Texas at Arlington. Less than a week later, though, regents have decided their decision needs a bit more discussion…

It was intended as a creative way of showing seventh grade history students at Schrade Middle School in Rowlett how cowboys would corral wayward steers during cattle drives. But somehow, astonishingly, the teacher’s decision to actually lasso his students ended badly. It went like this, according to a WFAA report…

In the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, Dallas ISD police Chief Craig Miller wasted no time in dismissing the thought of arming teachers. In fact his recommendations for making DISD students safer, which he will present to the Board of Trustees at a briefing on Thursday, involve…

In the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the guns-in-schools debate in Texas has focused on teachers: whether to arm them; what training they should receive; whether it’s better to shoot or ask questions first; etc. But limiting the use of firearms on campus to trained, presumably…

In the predawn hours on Saturday, January 26, University of North Texas student Dustin Starks, 20, fell from the balcony of the Delta Sigma Phi fraternity house. He survived, but just barely. Nearly two weeks later, he remains at Parkland Hospital in serious condition. In the wake of the accident,…

When Mike Miles was hired last year as superintendent of Dallas ISD, he was rewarded handsomely. His base salary of $300,000 per year put him near the top of the list of the state’s highest-paid superintendents. Meet all the metrics for his possible $200,000 annual bonus, and his place at…

In 2009, science-respecting members of the State Board of Education succeeded in scrubbing the state’s science curriculum standards of a requirement to discuss the “weaknesses” of evolution, which would have opened the gates to less scientific theories, namely intelligent design and creationism. But it wasn’t a wholesale victory, as Kathy…

In Dallas, geography is destiny. That’s the unavoidable conclusion from a recent study by Stand for Children, a Texas nonprofit, which crunched incarceration and college-preparedness rates in Dallas, ZIP code by ZIP code. “It became immediately obvious that a small number of zip codes send a lot more inmates to…

Conventional wisdom and mountains of anecdotal evidence suggest that old people are really, comically bad at doing things: driving; operating those newfangled pocket telegraph thingamajigs; gauging other people’s interest in the details of their goiter surgery; continence. We can go on. This is low-hanging fruit. But researchers at the University…

Six years ago, SMU religious studies professor Mark Chancey teamed with the Texas Freedom Network to produce a report on the Bible classes that were proliferating in the state’s public school classrooms. Chancey’s not-very-surprising finding was that these classes were not so much even-handed, academically rigorous surveys of the text…

It seems like only yesterday that erstwhile DISD communications chief Jennifer Sprague blew into town alongside new superintendent Mike Miles. With a $185,000 a year salary, the 31-year-old Sprague’s name quickly became a synonym for “overpaid and under-qualified,” and after about six less-than-spectacular months on the job, she quietly left…