Under its May 15 budget proposal, the Houston Independent School District recommends a 3.4 percent raise for new teachers. The plan includes smaller raises for experienced teachers and eliminates elevated salaries for advanced-degree holders. During the current school year, teachers with less than four years’ experience are in step 1Read More

The Houston Independent School District has modified a controversial proposal to standardize future magnet school funding. During the April 24 budget workshop, HISD administration proposed eliminating extra funding for Vanguard programs that serve gifted and talented students to redistribute funding more equally across non-magnet schools. On May 15, the administrationRead More

The doors on each of The Emery/Weiner School’s instructional areas say “classroom” in both English and Hebrew. Students who go through the school’s entire middle and high school curriculum will study the language for at least two years and take required coursework in Judaic studies every year. Each senior classRead More

According its recent budget proposal, The Houston Independent School District will eliminate local magnet funding for its Vanguard schools that serve gifted and talented students in the district. The $3 million will be redistributed among zoned non-magnet schools to expand programming. “There are some schools that don’t receive any fundingRead More

The Spanish Embassy has honored Wharton Elementary School’s Dual Language Program as its School of the Year for the United States and Canada in 2013. The award for academic excellence in Spanish is given by the Education Office for the U.S. and Canada, which is a technical body of theRead More

A cheating scandal at two Houston Independent School District Elementary School deepened on Thursday, May 8, as the HISD Board of Education terminated five teachers from Jefferson Elementary School accused of “improperly assisting” students on statewide standardized tests, including the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness. The five dismissalsRead More

The nation’s public high school graduation rate hit its highest level in 40 years, according to the latest version of an annual report from the magazine Education Week. The magazine’s annual study of graduation rates, Diploma Count, reported that 74.7 of students in the United States graduated with a highRead More

Sequestration cuts from the Budget Control Act of 2011 will continue to bite students and parents borrowing to pay for college, according to a report from Clare McCann at Forbes Magazine. The Federal Department for Education announced today that student loan origination fees will slightly increase for all loans takenRead More

Seven district teachers and the Houston Federation of Teachers have sued the Houston Independent School District in Federal District Court, charging that the district inappropriately uses standardized test scores in teacher evaluations. The lawsuit has national implications as federal education policy encourages districts to increase their use of standardized evaluations.Read More

A recent study has added to the research challenging the widely accepted use of homework as an education tool, this time specifically focusing on the effects of large amounts of homework on the well-being of affluent students. The article, entitled “Nonacademic Effects of Homework in Privileged, High-Performing High Schools” wasRead More

Eleven schools in the Houston Independent School District were ranked in U.S. News and World Reports prestigious list of Best High Schools in the United States.  The rankings include more than 4,700 of the top high schools in the country. Carnegie Vanguard, the district’s flagship high school for gifted andRead More

Students interested in enrolling in a specialized program for the 2014-2015 school year and their parents can examine the offerings at the Houston Independent School District Choice Fair this weekend. The fair will take place this Saturday, April 26 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Northwest Mall, 9500Read More

The process to reconstruct Lamar and Bellaire high schools with proceeds from the Houston Public School District’s 2012 Bond Issue is proceeding smoothly. “Plans are currently on schedule,” HISD Spokesperson Sheleah Reed wrote in an e-mail to Thesis on April 17. Project Advisory Teams (PATs), made up of students, parents,Read More

As of April 1, Berry Elementary School became the latest campus of the Houston Independent School District to attain coveted LEED silver status for the environmentally friendly features in the school, which was reconstructed using $14.9 million from the district’s 2007 bond issue. Berry, which opened in 2011, is aRead More

Were you able to maximize your education tax breaks this year? Sure …. Uh, actually I don’t know. All these terms like “deductions” and “non-refundable credit” kinda scare me. That’s OK – the tax code can be pretty intimidating – just like finding financial aid for college.  However, the basicRead More

Before we explore portions of the need-based financial aid universe, I need to make sure you did your homework. Did you fill out your FAFSA form, like we told you to here? Yep. Now what? Generally speaking, there are three types of need-based student aid: grants work-study loans Grants areRead More