By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 1A For a newborn college, the road to respectability runs through accreditation. It can take a school up to a decade to earn the nation’s official mark of quality. But last year some Dallas investors, keen to quickly launch a profitable revolution in higher education, found a shortcut to […]
About one in 12 Texas schools had unusual TAKS results that suggest cheating occurred last year, according to a consultant hired by the Texas Education Agency.
The consultant, a Utah test security firm named Caveon, was hired after a Dallas Morning News series found suspicious scores in nearly 400 schools statewide, based on 2003 and 2004 testing results.
Caveon’s analysis, using 2005 TAKS results, found even more: 609 schools, or 8.6 percent of the state’s campuses.
But state officials say even those numbers are not a sign of cheating in Texas schools.
“Given the size of this program and the size of this state, yes, we had 600 campuses identified,” said Gloria Zyskowski, TEA’s director of test administration. “But we have over 5,000 campuses where the test was administered.
“While we take very seriously any allegations of cheating – we don’t take any of that lightly – I believe that for the most part these tests are being administered according to the guidelines provided by the state.” […]
Three education stories that caught my eye this week:
Item: Federal officials announce that not one single state will meet a key requirement of the No Child Left Behind law: that all teachers in core academic subjects will be deemed “highly qualified” by this fall.
This comes as a surprise to no one. The teacher-quality portion of the law is among its most ridiculed, since its strange network of rules says some tremendous 20-year veterans aren’t good enough to teach but declares many rookies “highly qualified” before they’ve ever set foot in a classroom.
Item: A group called the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has come up with a process designed to recognize top-notch teachers: a much-touted credential it calls National Board Certification.
Hundreds of millions of public dollars have been spent promoting it.
So the board hires a noted researcher to prove that National Board teachers really produce better results in their students.
But the researcher finds the opposite: Kids whose teachers had National Board certification didn’t score any higher than anyone else. […]
Read More… from Column: U.S. a failure at evaluating teachers
They can march on City Hall, they can hold rallies and they can give speeches.
But if the high school students who have been up in arms about immigration policy tried to exercise the most basic political right – if they tried to vote – they’d be turned away for being too young.
“We allow the most ignorant, self-absorbed, irrational, immature people to vote at age 25 or 50 or 79,” Mike Cummings told me the other day. “We don’t require adults to demonstrate any sort of political virtue for the right to vote. But people under the age of 18 are automatically disqualified without any rationale.”
Mike’s a political science professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, and he believes young people should have the same voting rights he does. And around the world, there are pockets of people who are starting to agree with him. […]
I got an e-mail the other day from a man named Ted. Ted lives in suburban Cincinnati, and his bosses want to transfer him to the Dallas area in a few months. He’s got a first-grader and a fifth-grader and wants to know what the good schools are in North Texas.
E-mails like Ted’s show up in my inbox all the time. (It’s the price you pay for being first on the alphabetical list of columnists on DallasNews.com’s education page.)
He got my standard reply: Find a house you like, and chances are awfully good the schools will be fine.
That’s not an answer I’d give everywhere. I used to work in Ted’s current state of Ohio, for instance, and school quality there varies wildly from town to town, depending mostly on their tax bases and the orneriness of local voters. In Chicago, some suburbs spend twice as much on their schools as the central city can afford. But in Texas, because of a series of decisions by people in Austin, most schools are an awful lot like one another. […]
Read More… from Column: For better or worse, schools mostly alike
Four more Dallas County Schools employees will be fired today as a result of an investigation on how bus drivers are paid in the southeastern part of the county.
The four, all drivers, join two supervisors who were fired last week. All were based at the Kleburg bus center, which serves as the headquarters for routes in parts of Dallas ISD and the former Wilmer-Hutchins district.
Deanne Hullender, the DCS spokeswoman, said that she could not detail what the fired employees are alleged to have done, but that it involved “misconduct and mismanagement of DCS employees and resources.” The allegations do not involve student safety, she said. […]
Lobbyists are hired for their connections. But as Washington sorts through a growing lobbying scandal, the past connections of two lobbyists hired last fall by Locke Liddell & Sapp are bringing unwanted attention to the powerful Dallas law firm.
The two men, Roy Coffee and David DiStefano, have been connected to a foreign company’s attempt to work around U.S. sanctions against Iran and sell airplane parts to that nation – an attempt that centered on U.S. Rep. Bob Ney, an Ohio Republican accused in lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s recent plea agreement of accepting bribes.
The two lobbyists were hired in 2003 by a pair of businessmen with résumés out of a James Bond movie. One, a Syrian gambler nicknamed “The Fat Man,” made his fortune in Middle East arms deals. The other, a felon, was banned from East Coast racetracks in the 1980s for his connections to organized crime and has a Tennessee rap sheet for trying to defraud Elvis Presley. […]
The more I write about schools, the more convinced I get that the answers to our education problems lie far from campus. Teens spend seven hours a day in school, 180 days a year. But let’s be honest: That’s about a third the time they spend playing Grand Theft Auto.
But just because some problem in a kid’s life develops outside the classroom doesn’t mean schools are powerless to fix things. Today’s example: sleep.
Teenagers are always accused of staying up too late and being too lazy to get up in the morning. Frazzled parents know how hard it can be to rouse a 16-year-old from slumber in time for the bus.
But there’s an established body of research that says teenagers aren’t lazy because of any sort of moral weakness. Their bodies just aren’t designed the same way adults’ are. (Or younger kids’ are, for that matter.) They can’t help it. […]
Read More… from Column: For a fresher start, push back the bell
By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 8B The Wilmer-Hutchins schools have lost the final appeal of their death sentence. The U.S. Department of Justice, in a letter to state officials Monday, said it would not object to the permanent dissolution of Wilmer-Hutchins. That clears the way for the district to be dissolved into Dallas ISD […]
By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 1B While other kids sat in their classrooms this fall, Roger’s 13-year-old granddaughter was roaming around the West Coast with her mother, staying up late and following their favorite band on tour. “I think they’re still somewhere around California,” he told me a few days ago. “I think they […]
Read More… from Column: If home-schooling counts, make it accountable