Category — Articles

Texas made a strong showing in Newsweek’s 2013 list of America’s best high schools, with a focus on those preparing students for college. Use the sorting tool to find the schools in the state and in your area:

America’s Best High Schools | Newsweek

Last week one group saying it represents Texas business leaders spoke up to oppose recommended changes to the state’s new STAAR accountability system.  The next day another speaker said that he had found widespread support among business leaders for fixing the accountability system he called “broken.”

Read their comments here and here.

Over the past few months, parents, educators, and various organizations have called for changes to the state’s new STAAR accountability system.  In particular, there has been a call to repeal the statutory requirement that the EOC exam counts as 15 percent of a student’s final course grade.  Commissioner of Education Robert Scott gave schools permission to waive that requirement this year.

The Houston Chronicle ran a guest column today that calls for public schools to be run more efficiently.  That’s a topic that Texas school districts have been actively working on for some time.

If you’ve been wondering about “efficiency” and how it relates to public education, the Texas Association of School Boards just printed this article in its Texas Lone Star magazine that touches on issues ranging from efficiency in school finance to best practices within school districts.

Back to the guest column in the Houston newspaper, it claims that only 65 percent of ninth graders graduate in four years to make the case that districts are not efficiently using taxpayer dollars.  However, Grade 9 longitudinal data from the Texas Education Agency show that:

• 84.3 percent of the class of 2010 graduated;
• 7.2 percent continued in school the following year;
• 1.3 percent received a GED; and
• 7.3 percent dropped out.

This video from the Be Proud Texas campaign notes that Texas graduation rates, when broken down by ethnicity of students, rank highly when compared to similar student populations across the country.

In this guest column for The San Antonio Express-News, Texas Comptroller Susan Combs writes:

In Texas over the past decade, spending on public education has risen more than three times as fast as enrollment.

Many students will soon be paying a little more for their school meals due to a federal law that requires school districts to charge students the same price that the U.S. government reimburses districts for meals served to students who qualify for free meals.

This story highlights the local impact this federal mandate will have on the students of Victoria ISD.

 Also from the Washington Post article referenced Wednesday:

 The very strongest educational data available shows a huge correlation between poverty and student achievement. Poverty impacts student achievement in many ways. As unemployment takes hold on a community, and more families lack food security, housing and health care, the impact is felt in the classroom. Students become more transient, because their housing is unstable. They do not have a place to do homework, because they are crashing on someone’s couch. They come to school late because they do not have transportation any more. They eat corn chips for breakfast because they do not have someone helping them get ready for school. And they worry! They are preoccupied with fear and insecurity, and that makes it hard to focus on academics.

This is especially important in Texas where the number of economically disadvantaged students continues to grow.

Find the whole article here.

In today’s Austin American Statesman, an article explores the possible benefits of consolidating small school districts in Texas, but concludes that those consolidations would save little.

Read the article.

Although there is no information about when it will begin meeting, a 22-member joint interim committee has been appointed to work on school finance.  Here’s a recent report from the Austin Chronicle on what’s going on.

 Just when four lawsuits seemed like a lot . . .   now a 5th lawsuit has been filed in Austin by a group called Texans for Real Efficiency and Equity in Education (TREE).  The suit focuses  on efficiency. 

Here are two articles about this new lawsuit:   

first article and second article.

According to Terrence Stutz, writing on the Dallas Morning News site:

Spending on public school students in Texas has dropped sharply this year and the already large gap between the state and the national average has widened, according to new comparisons by the National Education Association. Texas schools are spending $8,908 per student in the current school year, well under the national average of $11,463 and also below the estimate cited by Gov. Rick Perry – $10,000 – in an interview with The Dallas Morning News this week.

Read the article.