As chairman of the Select Committee of Public Education in the ’80s, Ross Perot took on high school athletics hammer and tongs: “If the people of Texas want Friday night entertainment instead of education,” he said, “let’s find out about it.” An excerpt from the forthcoming How Things Really Work: Lessons from a Life in Politics.
Texas Education Agency
Posted in
Demographics
The Huddled Masses
Five years after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana exiles have fundamentally changed Houston, and vice-versa. The uneasy arrangement was a shotgun marriage: Many evacuees had no choice in whether or where they went, and Houstonians had no choice, for humanity’s sake, but to take them in.
Posted in
Public Education
The New Sex Ed
Students are heading back to school this week, and some of them will begin learning about the birds and the bees. The Texas Education Code requires that abstinence be the focus of any sex education curriculum — but as Nathan Bernier of KUT News reports, there are some changes this year to how sex ed is being taught.
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Demographics
TribWeek: In Case You Missed It
Galbraith on grass, federal money and efforts to prevent another dust bowl, Ergenbright on school suspensions and who gets punished; Aguilar’s interview with Alan Bersin, whose job is to keep the U.S./Mexico border secure, M. Smith on why it would be harder than you think to ditch the 14th Amendment, Adler and me on whether controversy is politically contagious, Ramshaw on the flap over funding for the state’s institutions for the disabled (it’s not about the money), my meditation on the state’s fiscal woes (including a $1.3 billion deficit in the current budget), Philpott on proposed cuts to the state’s food stamp program, Grissom on the push by Hidalgo County officials for a special election that might not be legal; Hamilton on the seven Texas universities that are making a play for Tier One status and Stiles on the mid-year cash-on-hand numbers reported by campaigns and political action committees: The best of our best from August 16 to 23, 2010.
Posted in
Public Education
Special Treatment
Special education students in Texas are nearly twice as likely to be suspended as students in the general population, according to the Texas Education Agency — and though they make up just 10 percent of the overall enrollment, they account for 21 percent of expulsions.
Posted in
Public Education
GOP to Doggett: “Doggone It!”
The state’s GOP leaders say the strings attached to $800 million in federal education funding by U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, are not only too restrictive — they could be unconstitutional. Ben Philpott of KUT News and the Tribune has this report.
Posted in
Politics
The Weekly TribCast: Episode 41
Ben, Ross, Evan and Matt talk about President Obama’s visit to Texas and who didn’t want to be seen with him, the battle over strings attached to federal education money, Bill White’s donor-appointees and the legal and political definitions of residency.
Posted in
Public Education
Special Needs
After a decade in which Texas has seen a 400 percent increase in the number of children with autism, lawmakers are wrestling with how best to educate the afflicted — and how to pay for it.
Posted in
State Government
The New Math
Despite just-released ratings that show huge improvements, a Texas Tribune analysis finds that the performance of the state’s public schools — when decoupled from the controversial Texas Projection Measure — is little changed from 2008, the year before the accountability formula took effect.
Posted in
State Government
TribBlog: Texas Schools Fixed!
In new public school ratings released this afternoon, three-fourths of the state’s public schools — graded under a controversial formula called the Texas Projection Measure — now rank “exemplary” or “recognized,” the highest two of four categories of performance. Less than two percent of schools are ranked “unacceptable.”
