Battle-hardened Houston union chief Gayle Fallon argues HISD’s new policy to fire teachers over test scores will make its top talent avoid its toughest assignments.
Brian Thevenot
Brian Thevenot was an education editor at the Tribune in 2009-10. Previously he spent a dozen years at The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, most recently as special projects editor. As part of a team that covered the worst of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, Thevenot contributed multiple bylines to two winning entries for Pulitzer Prizes in breaking news and public service. His Katrina reporting also won the Mongerson Prize for Investigative Reporting on the News from Northwestern University, and the Medal of Valor from the National Association of Minority Media Executives. In 2009, an eight-part series Thevenot edited, chronicling the investigation into an all-too-routine murder of a New Orleans teenager, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in local reporting. In 2005, just before Katrina, Thevenot spent a month reporting on Louisiana soldiers in Baghdad and produced a three-part deadline narrative about squad of soldiers hit by a deadly roadside bomb, which was a finalist for Livingston Award. In 2003, he won a National Headliner Award for education reporting for his 2002 five-part narrative tracking an eighth-grader's struggle to pass Louisiana’s high-stakes standardized test. Before joining the Times-Picayune, Thevenot worked as a suburban reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Oklahoma City, Thevenot has a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Posted in
Public Education
The Firing Line
After years of fiddling with merit-pay schemes, the Houston ISD is tying student test scores to the decision to ax teachers. Not surprisingly, the move — on the cutting edge of reforms nationally — has teachers howling in protest.
Posted in
Public Education
TribBlog: NYT Mag on SBOE’s “Christian Nation”
It seems the social conservatives on the State Board of Education may be on their way to getting more ink than any other politicians in modern Texas history, a cause that will be helped in this Sunday’s printing of The New York Times Magazine.
Posted in
Economy
From Bust to Boom
The recession has caused a spike in enrollment at two-year schools like Austin Community College, which now educates more than 40,000 students — within striking distance of the great behemoth, the University of Texas at Austin.
Posted in
Criminal Justice
Reform Follows Function
The federal push for accountability at “persistently low-achieving” schools across Texas is running smack into the hard, slow work of improvement at the local level.
Posted in
Public Education
TribBlog: States Echoing Texas on National Standards
State school leaders from across the West are complaining of too much federal intrusion into local curriculum decisions, along with inflexible rules – including that national standards be adopted “word for word.”
Posted in
Economy
Burned Orange
A clash over a beloved campus music club at UT-Austin portends the gnashing of teeth at schools statewide as a budgetary winter threatens to envelop higher education.
Posted in
Higher Education
A Matter of Degrees
Community colleges pitch themselves as the gateway to prosperity for lower-income students who’ve been historically shut out of higher education. Trouble is, despite increasing enrollment numbers, few of them graduate.
Posted in
Public Education
Charter Churn
Teachers quit Texas charter schools at nearly three times the rate of traditional public school districts, according to state data. Dozens of individual schools lost well over half their teachers in the latest year.
Posted in
Higher Education
TribBlog: Paycheck U.
A new study gives a window into the wide variety of ways college presidents get paid. Think houses, cars, deferred comp — and private monies supplementing public funds.