In a new statewide ranking of public schools that we published yesterday, the Dallas Independent School District boasts seven of the top 25 high schools but also 18 in the bottom quartile. Not surprisingly, the best ones have a small student population, while the worst ones are megacampuses — an example of a larger trend in school rankings data.
Smaller is Better
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State Government
TribBlog: Traffic Surcharges Attacked
Criminal justice advocates today told the Texas Public Safety Commission that their proposal to fix the broken Driver Responsibility Program fell far short of the comprehensive approach needed to help more than 1.2 million Texans who have lost their licenses because of the program’s steep surcharges.
Posted inState Government
2010: The Debate Delay
Setting a date for a tete-a-tete between Gov. Rick Perry and Democrat Bill White will take awhile. The Perry camp is refusing to debate White until the former Houston mayor releases more of his income tax returns.
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Demographics
TribBlog: Lt. Gov. Dewhurst Dispatches from the Border
Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst went to El Paso today, talked with state, local and federal police, took an aerial tour over the dangerous borderlands and pronounced that Mexico’s drug war is a “very serious threat” to all Texans — a threat the feds aren’t protecting you from.
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Health care
TribBlog: Dog Days at DSHS
It’s an email you’d expect to see taped up at a coffee shop, not sent out from the Department of State Health Services: “Missing Puppy Found!”
Posted inState Government
The Brief: April 26, 2010
The Arizona immigration bill and Texas, earmarks for Kay and the dropout debacle.
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Criminal Justice
Data App: 5,800+ Schools Ranked
We’ve built a searchable database of public school rankings based on data collected by the Houston-based nonprofit Children At Risk. In contrast to the Texas Education Agency’s “ratings,” which rely almost entirely on the percentage of students passing the TAKS test, the rankings blend 12 different measures for elementary schools, 10 for middle schools and 14 for high schools — including TAKS results, ACT and SAT scores, AP exams, attendance rates, graduation rates and the percentage of economically disadvantaged students on every campus. How does your school stack up?
Posted in
Transportation
A Conversation with Deirdre Delisi
For the seventh event in our TribLive series, I interviewed the chair of the Texas Transportation Commission on the size of the road funding hole, the toll-versus-tax debate and whether the governor she once served as chief of staff is really not running for president.
Posted in
Criminal Justice
The Big Stall
Since his appointment, the alternately amiable and peevish, typically cowboy-boot-shod chairman of the Texas Forensic Science Commission has comported himself as a virtuoso of the bureaucratic dawdle. With the commission’s investigation of the now-notorious Cameron Todd Willingham case “still in its infancy,” John Bradley has this to say about when it might conclude its review: “However long it takes, that’s however long it takes.”
