Public education

The State Board of Education likely won't be quite as much of a Christian Conservative flash point any more. What it will be, however, is anybody’s guess.

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With all precincts reporting, State Board of Education member Geraldine "Tincy" Miller has lost her seat to challenger George Clayton in the GOP primary for District 12.

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Tim Tuggey conceded the race for the GOP nomination to incumbent Ken Mercer in State Board of Education District 5.

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With all precincts reporting, State Board of Education incumbent Don McLeroy has lost to challenger Thomas Ratliff in the race for District 9 by a razor thin margin — less than 1,000 votes.

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Ramshaw on the state's quiet sharing of infant blood samples with the military and on the things Rick Perry's opponents aren't saying about him, Grissom on Farouk Shami's surprising popularity in El Paso, Philpott on the political advantages of a job creation fund and how Debra Medina's supporters are reacting to her "truther" comments, Hu on Debra Medina in the latest installment of Stump Interrupted, Thevenot on how the kids feel about the federal option of closing bad high schools, Rapoport on the newest mutation of the state's pay-as-you-go transportation philosophy, and our roundup of party primaries in the last week before the election: Rapoport on HD-7, Ramsey on HD-11, Aguilar on HD-36 and HD-43, Philpott on HD-47, Thevenot on HD-52 and SD-5, Kreighbaum on HD-105 and one Supreme Court race, M. Smith on another, and Hamilton on the colorful Democratic candidates for Agriculture Commissioner. The best of our best from February 22 to 26, 2010.

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"Teachers should be chasing us around," the Texas high school senior told the official from the U.S. Department of Education. "We shouldn't be chasing them. But that doesn't always happen here."

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As Texas education officials predicted when objecting to federal Race to the Top grant rules, the feds may now be moving to tie billions more in federal funds to the adoption of national curriculum standards, according to an Education Week report.

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Since 1999, the number of "dual-credit" students — those who take college courses while still in high school — across Texas has ballooned from fewer than 12,000 to more than 91,000. It's a trend that's likely to continue as state and local policymakers search for ways to better align curricula and to push more kids to continue their education. “Schools have started to look at it as great for kids who might not have thought they were college material,” says an official at the Higher Education Coordinating Board. “It’s both a gifted-and-talented program and a college-accessibility program.”

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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.

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Whatever his job might be, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro says he would have applied for the federal government's Race to the Top education grants, which could have been worth $700 million to the state's schools.

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Nearly a third of Texans believe humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time, according to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

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The Texas Workforce Commission spent nearly $50 million during the last two years on day care centers and in-home childcare providers with troubled track records — including sexual and physical abuse, kidnapping, and leaving infants to suffocate and die in their cribs. A Texas Tribune review found that at least 135 subsidized facilities had their licenses revoked or denied by the Department of Family and Protective Services in 2008 and 2009 and had their funding immediately suspended.

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Hu, Philpott, and Ramsey on the Democratic gubernatorial debate, the pre-game, the post-game, and the highlight reel. Thevenot on the push for accountability in persistently low-performing schools. M. Smith on the Republican assault on sitting Republican appellate judge. Hamilton on a county with more than one Tea Party trying to claim conservative voters. With lawmakers staring down a growing budget crunch, Aguilar looks back at the last one for instruction. Grissom finds that U.S. Border Patrol has quietly stopped a program to deport illegal immigrants through Presidio. Ramshaw reports on a West Texas nurse who got into and out of criminal trouble for complaining about a doctor she worked with. The second University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll finds Rick Perry and Bill White with big leads in their respective party primaries. Rapoport found herself in the eye of the storm, traveling with Debra Medina on the day the candidate unexpectedly and disastrously made national news when Glenn Beck asked her on his radio shows about the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11. The best of our best from February 8 to 12, 2010.

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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.

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The Dallas mayor left a hugely successful private sector career to lead the country’s ninth-largest city through an economic meltdown and the aftermath of a City Hall corruption scandal. And he doesn’t regret a minute of it. Here, he talks about fighting a sky-high crime rate, how he keeps party politics from his office, and every urban area's Achilles' heel: education.

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Paging Dr. Doug Ross. Debra Medina may soon be endangering your popularity.

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In their first and probably only televised debate, Bill White sounded experienced, as you'd expect of a three-term mayor of Houston, while wealthy hair care magnate Farouk Shami was more passionate, more animated, and much more prone to political mistakes.

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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.

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The Obama administration — which is one of the ways Mark Sanford and Rick Perry are not alike.

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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.”

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