Whooping cranes, the Endangered Species Act and property rights clash on the Texas Coast.
state agencies
Posted in
Public Education
The SBOE Gets Medieval
When State Board of Education members ventured into world history curriculum at Wednesday’s meeting, they carried their modern-day political agendas with them.
Posted in
Public Education
TribBlog: TEA Rips Fox News
“Highly inaccurate” news reports on changes to the social studies standards raised the ire of conservatives.
Posted in
Public Education
TribBlog: History Hearings Off to Hot Start
Public testimony on the state’s social studies curriculum has started here State Board of Education meeting. It’s easy to tell from the banks of cameras and scribes, college students with bright yellow “Save Our History” t-shirts on and people from civil rights and conservative groups itching to testify.
Posted in
Economy
Bamboozled by the Establishment
The big-government crowd in Washington and elsewhere are bankrupting our country. And Republicans are just as culpable as Democrats in treating our taxpayer dollars as “other people’s money” to be spent as they and the special interests decide.
Posted in
Public Education
The Revision Thing
Two months after their controversial meetings about proposed changes to the social studies curriculum, State Board of Education members meet today to resume their deliberations. To help you follow along as the SBOE’s ideological blocs scrap over a flood of amendments, we’ve produced this annotated version of the high school history standards.
Posted in
State Government
2010: Montague Mystery Solved
Inquiring minds wanted to know: What’s so different about Montague County, the one county Bill White failed to win in the primary? Turns out, nothing — it’s just like all the rest of them.
Posted in
State Government
TribBlog: Leaders OK Capitol Security Upgrades
The big three state leaders approved seven new security measures for the Capitol, and none of them are X-ray machines or metal detectors that the director of the top Texas police agency said are critical to keep the pink dome safe from armed intruders.
Posted in
Health care
DNA Destruction
In the weeks before state health officials incinerated more than 5 million baby blood samples that they stored without consent, privacy advocates, parents and legislators reached a last-ditch accord to save them but couldn’t convince the Department of State Health Services to sign on. A Texas Tribune investigation found that the agency had turned hundreds of such samples over to a federal Armed Forces lab to build a DNA database — and hadn’t been upfront about it with lawmakers or the public.
Posted in
State Government
Potties, Pickups and Preparedness
Local governments, Native American tribes and nonprofit groups in Texas hauled in more than $298 million in federal homeland security grants from 2003 through 2008 and made more than 30,000 purchases, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of a Texas Department of Public Safety database. Much of the money has gone to improve local emergency response and to beef up police and fire departments — critical safety measures that taxpayers might not have been able to afford without assistance from Washington. But it’s unclear how some of the expenditures have made the state, or the nation, more resistant to terror attacks.
