Penny-pinchers at the State Board of Education opted to incorporate changes to the high school science curriculum via lower-cost electronic supplements to existing textbooks instead of spending up to $500 million to have new ones printed. Trouble is, many schools lack the technological capability to use them.
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.
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Inside Intelligence
Inside Intelligence: The Budget Will Be Balanced By…
For this week’s installment of our non-scientific survey of political and policy insiders on issues of the moment, we focused on the budget. Specifically, we asked how big the shortfall is going to be, how the Legislature will close the gap and which areas of the budget are most likely to be cut.
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Public Education
No New Textbooks?
The State Board of Education is scheduled to vote Friday on approving the purchase of new textbooks at a cost of almost half a billion dollars. But state legislators are facing a budget gap of as much as $28 billion in the next biennium, and some observers fear that textbook spending could be on the chopping block. Nathan Bernier of KUT News reports.
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Economy
Audio: An Interview With Arlene Wohlgemuth
An interview with Arlene Wohlgemuth of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.