Zachary Akins is small for his age. He’s 15 and slightly built, with nerdy-chic horn-rimmed glasses that swallow half his face. He prefers playing video games to sports and keeps a bottle of hand sanitizer on his desk at school. He’s also into art. When we met at a Starbucks…
The popularity of Lakewood Elementary has effectively warped the East Dallas real-estate market as upper-middle-class-to-rich families outbid one another for homes within the school’s attendance boundaries. This makes a certain amount of sense, as Lakewood is a really good school that the surrounding community is heavily invested in, but it’s also…
Monday, Dallas ISD trustee Mike Morath was appointed Texas Education Commissioner by Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Abbott touted Morath’s reform work within Dallas ISD, their shared commitment to early childhood education and Morath’s mountain-climbing experience in announcing the appointment. Basically everyone, including Dallas Mayor Mike Rawling and former School Board…
Mike Morath, the reform-minded former Mike Miles ally who currently sits in the District 2 seat on the Dallas ISD school board, is now the highest ranking education official in the state of Texas. Since being elected to the school board in 2011, Morath, along with former superintendent Miles and…
There comes a time in all Dallas parents’ lives when they must decide whether their iron-clad commitment to city living is really clad in enough iron to see them through a dozen years of DISD. The crisis point often arrives with the letter from Dealey or Harry Stone Montessori informing…
Thankful is what I am. But being thankful always worries me. Maybe something terrible is about to happen. I am truly thankful that Dallas right now is pretty much at the forefront of the national school reform movement because of its comprehensive merit pay system for teachers. The Dallas Independent…
It’s not “balanced” journalism if you compare the right big toe to the left big toe but neglect to mention the elephant. The elephant in the room of school reform here and nationwide has always been seniority pay. With distinguished intellectual defenders like author Diane Ravitch as their standard-bearers and…
You can glean many lessons from the recent tension at the University of Missouri, the most trenchant being that life for minority students on many college campuses sucks, which college administrators seem ill-equipped to understand. And then there’s this: A new generation of social-media apps has emerged that provide young people…
On paper, Edwin J. Kiest Elementary in East Dallas’ Casa View neighborhood and Paul Laurence Dunbar Elementary in South Dallas/Fair Park, seem about the same, poverty-wise. Dallas ISD counts 96.1 percent of students at Kiest as “economically disadvantaged,” compared with 99.7 percent at Dunbar. Both are overwhelmingly, distressingly poor. On the ground, the…
Dallas ISD’s Bonham Elementary was a gem. The school reliably received an exemplary rating from the Texas Education Agency plus an impressive number of accolades for one of DISD’s workaday neighborhood schools. In 2009, it was one of 11 campuses nationwide to receive a National Excellence in Urban Education Award…
Every eye in American higher education is about to be on Austin again. Next Monday, the University of Texas will file a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in the latest Abigail Fisher anti-affirmative action case, to be heard by the court in December. The Fisher case — supposed to…
Whatever you think is wrong with lazy stupid modern equivalency journalism — “This guy says chattel slavery is a bad thing, but this other guy says it’s great” — just watch out. We hacks are just the canary. The same syndrome is taking place deep in the coal mine of…
When our older son began kindergarten last fall, my wife and I rejoiced. Some of our joy naturally sprung from watching him pass such a key childhood milestone — OMG, the little guy’s starting school! — but most of it admittedly came from the game-changing impact it had on our budget…
The Texas State Board of Education, the body that decides what millions of Texas schoolchildren should and shouldn’t learn, is the frequent subject and ridicule, and rightly so, what with its penchant for pushing creationism into science curricula, identifying Moses as an architect of the U.S. Constitution, chalking up the…
That didn’t take long. What, a millisecond? The door-slam was still reverberating behind departed Dallas schools chief Mike Miles — supposedly the very devil incarnate, author of all ills, according to the teachers unions — when they went after merit pay, their real target all along. In a press release,…
Yesterday I told you White House cabinet member Julian Castro, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), had slipped into town under the radar the day before to chat with Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings. Rawlings’ spokesperson said after the meeting, “The secretary challenged the mayor to push…
The fight started on the third floor right before fifth period, when the kids were still buzzing from lunch and hardest to manage. Jennifer Duggins, a Spanish teacher, was monitoring the hallway outside her classroom when a surge of students rushed passed her and disappeared around the corner into an…
The tenure of ex-University of Texas Athletic Director Steve Patterson was a barely mitigated disaster. On the job less than two years, Patterson resigned under duress September 15. When he quit, Patterson still had about four years left on his contract, worth $1.4 million annually. He’s not going to get…
A year ago, South Dallas’ Billy Earl Dade MIddle School was in disarray. Things there were so glaringly bad that, on an impromptu visit in mid-October, six weeks into last school year, Superintendent Mike Miles got rid of Principal MIchael Jones and 10 teachers on the spot. The following Monday,…
Stressing the need for stability, the Dallas ISD board of trustees voted 8-1 Tuesday to name former Superintendent Michael Hinojosa as the sole finalist for the district’s vacant superintendent job. Hinojosa previously served as superintendent from 2005 to 2011 and will become the first person to have been hired for…
Money — i.e. making more of it — isn’t the only reason to go to college. The pursuit of knowledge, the opportunity for self-discovery, the chance to test the hardiness of one’s liver are also important benefits. But for people who have to make a living, college is in large…
Tell me that again. Texas school districts, you say, are in state court in Austin telling a judge they need more money because of “the Legislature’s increased demands for standardized testing and curriculum requirements to graduate high school.” Wait. I’m a libtard. I always want the schools to get more…
