An interview with Arlene Wohlgemuth of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Public Education
Explore The Texas Tribune’s coverage of public education, from K-12 schools and funding to teachers, students, and policies shaping classrooms across Texas.
Posted in
Economy
Size Matters
How big is the state’s budget shortfall? It all depends on who’s doing the math. A big number means the coming session will be all about what’s cut — what programs and services won’t be offered. A smaller one puts lawmakers in the position of deciding, in hard times, what they can add to current spending.
Posted in
Public Education
TribBlog: Study: Better Health = Better Grades
According to Stuck in the Middle: The False Choice Between Health and Education in Texas Middle Schools, school administrators are choosing between improving academic performance and improving fitness — and sacrificing both as a consequence.
Posted in
Public Education
TribBlog: HISD Leaving Girls Sports Behind?
The largest school district in Texas isn’t providing enough opportunities for high school girls to play sports, according to a Title IX complaint filed by the National Women’s Law Center today.
Posted in
Public Education
Going Head to Head
Whether reconditioned football helmets sufficiently protect young players from concussions and other serious injuries has become a subject of fierce debate. Texas parents are torn between the desire of their kids to play and increasingly hard-to-ignore studies about the relationship between football and long-term brain damage. Coaches struggle to balance safety with fans’ cries for harder hits, bigger players and crushing wins. And at least one upstart manufacturer is contributing to the public’s unease by challenging the industry’s long-standing practice of refurbishing old helmets.
Posted in
Politics
TribWeek: In Case You Missed It
Our wall-to-wall Election Day coverage — complete results up and down the ballot and county by county, the all-hands-on-deck Trib team on the Republican tsunami, my conversation with George W. Bush’s media adviser and Rick Perry’s pollster about what happened on Tuesday, Stiles and Ramsey on what 194 candidates spent per vote this election cycle, Hu on how the GOP rout will affect the substance of the next legislative session, Hamilton on the Texas Democratic Trust’s unhappy end, Ramshaw and Stiles profile the new arrivals at the Capitol in January, M. Smith on what’s next for Chet Edwards and Ramsey and me on six matters of politics and policy we’re thinking about going forward — plus Thevenot and Butrymowicz on a possible solution to the high school dropout problem: The best of our best from Nov. 1 to 5, 2010.
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Public Education
Solving the Dropout Problem?
Across Texas, credit-recovery courses — self-paced online makeups offered to any student who fails — are expanding rapidly. In the spring and summer, 6,127 students in the Houston Independent School District earned nearly 10,000 credits in such courses, and another 2,500 are taking them this fall. Austin ISD and Dallas ISD enrolled about 4,000 students last year. For districts, they’re a cost-effective way to bolster graduation rates, but questions remain over whether the digital curriculum offers the same quality of education as traditional courses. Little research exists on how much, or how little, learning is actually going on.
Posted in
Economy
Majority Rules
Whether you call it a wave, a rout or a tsunami, one thing is clear: Republicans in the Texas House won a massive mandate for conservative bills — and budgeting — in the coming legislative session.
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Public Education
TribBlog: War of Attrition Rates
A new study by the nonprofit education advocacy group Intercultural Development Research Association says 29 percent of Texas students who enter high school as freshmen do not graduate. The attrition rate is the lowest in the 25 years since the IDRA began performing the annual study. But the group notes that while the trend is declining, millions more Texans will drop out by 2040.
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Public Education
Audio: TT Interview With Mike Feinberg
An interview with the co-founder of the KIPP charter school network.