Texas Education Agency
Because they don’t like it
Rejection of math textbook sparks debate on state board’s authority | Dallas Morning News | News for Dallas, Texas | Latest News The state Board of Education’s unusual decision to reject a math textbook used by Dallas and 70 other Texas school districts has evolved into a power struggle over the approval of classroom materials [...]
Start checking your kindergartner’s credit report
A new database will be collecting kindergartner’s social security numbers. Company gets kindergartners’ Social Security numbers, data | Dallas Morning News | News for Dallas, Texas | Latest News The new database for kindergarten test scores also includes sections for children’s names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, gender, school identification numbers and parents’ names [...]
Texas SBOE does not support teaching of evolution
In case you haven’t heard, the Texas Education Agency has fired the agency’s director of science, Christine Castillo Comer, for forwarding an email about a talk on evolution. It also looks like the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board is seriously considering approving a program that offers a Masters Degree in Creation Science. And if you [...]
Who’s cheating now?
Remember all the controversy around TAKS scores and the Caveon analysis about possible cheating in 2006? Everybody Does It / Academic cheating is at an all-time high. Can anything be done to stop it? It used to be that cheating was done by the few, and most often they were the weaker students who couldn’t [...]
Looking at numbers
Study finds inequality in Texas education funding – Houston Business Journal: High schools also tended to receive 18 percent more funding than elementary or middle schools, as did schools with more senior teachers. So what do you think accounts for the 18% difference? A need to pay teachers more for teaching advanced subjects like physics [...]
Schools–education and so much more
Another example of education not being the only concern of public schools: Mexia Daily News – District pulls 4-day school week proposal The Lancaster school board voted 5-1 last month to allow Lewis to seek a waiver exempting the district from the required 180-day school calendar. Under the proposal, the 6,000-student district south of Dallas [...]
Preventing increases in the rate of deaths among high school students
Given the obscure definitions used by the Texas Education Agency to calculate the high school dropout rate, I can understand why the legislature might feel the need to explicitly define who is a dropout. But I have to wonder about the following requirement: 80(R) HB 3621 – Introduced version – Bill Text: (e) Each school [...]
No, really?
MySA.com: State Government: At least half of all high school students in the state’s major cities are dropping out of school, creating a crisis that state leaders are not doing enough to address, some education experts say. This was true when I did my masters report in the 1980′s. This problem spans generations in terms [...]
Good news for Kerrville
Kerrville Daily Times: The Texas Education Agency has reversed an earlier rating and given an “academically acceptable” rating to Tivy High School and the Kerrville Independent School District, according to a KISD news release. This was a case of counting students who were assigned to Tivy High School because they were housed at the Kerr [...]
What’s wrong with this picture?
Kerrville Daily Times: Tivy High received a preliminary unacceptable rating from the Texas Education Agency. The rating did not reflect the performance of Tivy High School students, but was given as a result of completion rates at Kerr County Juvenile Facility.