Category: DMN | Education

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. […]

Read More… from Column: It’s time youths’ votes be counted

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. […]

Read More… from School bus company to fire four employees Dallas County: Student safety not involved, spokeswoman says

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 […]

Read More… from U.S. Justice allows dissolution of W-H district; Scandal-plagued district is set to merge with DISD schools July 1

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

By Holly K. Hacker and Joshua Benton Staff Writers Page 17A The mixed ruling from the Texas Supreme Court on Tuesday prompted equally mixed reactions from Dallas-area school districts. As to how the Texas Supreme Court’s ruling will affect classrooms, stay tuned. The court ruled that part of the state’s $30 billion-a-year school finance system […]

Read More… from Districts wanted more from court; While some thrilled, many fear funding won’t be boosted

By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 1B The TAKS test is only three years old, so it may seem a bit young to be starting a family. But the state’s main standardized test is preparing to welcome three new tests into the world: TAKS-I, TAKS-M and TAKS-Alt. And you thought there were already enough acronyms […]

Read More… from TAKS welcomes three new additions to the family; Tests are state’s attempt to satisfy federal special-ed requirements

By Joshua Benton Staff Writer Page 1B More than 20,000 copies of state tests – supposedly kept under lock and key – disappeared from Texas schools this spring, according to state data. Dallas schools lost more than 7,000 test documents, more than any other district in the state. State officials say they are reconsidering their […]

Read More… from Missing: 20,000 standardized tests; Of statewide total, DISD leads in exams lost, mostly TAKS

By Joshua Benton, Scott Farwell, and Kristen Holland Staff Writers Page 1B Students at Highland Park High School dressed as gang members, rap stars, maids and yard workers this month during homecoming week – a tradition one Dallas civil-rights leader says is racially insensitive. On senior Thug Day, students wore Afro wigs, fake gold teeth […]

Read More… from Students: Dress not offensive; Some say high school’s theme days crossed racial line