By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 10H It’s the question every parent wants answered: How good is my child’s school? Unfortunately, the experts you might ask – the principal, for example – often have a vested interest in making things look as positive as possible. So parents look for objective sources, such as hard data. […]
Read More… from Where to find data on your school: 3 sites provide it free
By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 6H Navigating the bureaucracy of the public school system is difficult with any child, but it can be truly intimidating if your child has special needs. The great news is that there’s plenty of help out there for you. In 1975, Congress passed what is now called the Individuals […]
By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 11H Once a child enters third grade in Texas, his parents get an objective, annual look at how he’s doing: the state standardized test. Tests have changed over the years – from TABS to TEAMS to TAAS to TAKS – but since the 1980s there have been hard data […]
By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 35A If you want your child to attend St. Rita Catholic School this fall, be prepared to answer a few tough questions. For the first time, the northern Dallas school is asking all of its parents to undergo a background check before the school year starts. Other area Catholic […]
By Terrence Stutz and Joshua Benton Staff Writers Page 1A Performance ratings for Texas school districts declined for the first time in several years in 2002 as middle-school students came up short in their knowledge of government and history. But collective marks for individual campuses were up over last year as a record number of […]
By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 1A Education research has been a punching bag for decades – largely for good reason. Streams of studies serve up contradictory facts. Anecdotes and hearsay are often as prominent as hard data. And some scholars, motivated by ideology, seem to reach their conclusions before the research even starts. “When […]
By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 41A When the Education Commission of the States moved offices not long ago, Kathy Christie came across an old storage box and a lot of bad memories. “The entire box will filled with nothing but information on state dropout prevention efforts from the 1980s,” said Ms. Christie, vice president […]
By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 41A Not long ago, a woman in her late 20s came up to Paul Cruz, the Laredo school superintendent. She wanted to say thanks. Thanks for the teachers who had taken an interest in her, years after she dropped out of high school. The teachers who had persuaded her […]
By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 23A This time, Lee Jackson got the job. The Dallas County judge had been up for top education posts three times before: twice for superintendent of Dallas’ school system and once for Texas education commissioner. Each time, the job went to someone with more experience in education. But the […]
By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 17A Ten thousand members of America’s largest teachers union are in Dallas this week. But if they start looking for the union label, they could be searching a while. That’s because Texas’ teachers unions are among the nation’s weakest. A combination of state laws and large nonunion competitors has […]