After news broke on how the newly revamped SAT will look in 2016, I heard many people asking these two questions: what is the correlation between the controversial Common Core standards and new SAT, and, will students living in states that have opted out of the Common Core be negativelyRead More

At the beginning of January, the Texas Education Agency issued its new statewide summary of schools that failed to meet state standards for 2013 and whose students are eligible to seek transfer under the state Public Education Grant program. The feature of the summary that grabbed the most headlines wasRead More

During his fifth State-of-the-Union address on Jan. 28, President Obama announced no major new educational initiatives. Instead, he spent the modest amount of time he dedicated to education highlighting and defending his existing record on education, Obama also announced several modest expansions of existing programs and encouraged Congress to takeRead More

The 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress Scores for math and reading are in, and the results for Houston are definitely mixed. Locally, the conventional wisdom is that Houston continues its steady improvement in math, but lags behind in reading. HISD Superintendent Terry Grier is working with administrators and (presumably)Read More

When the Houston Independent School District Board of Trustees tentatively voted to ban the use of racially based mascots and nicknames at its schools during its Dec. 15 meeting, its actions joined a several-decade old trend of American schools and sports franchises de-emphasizing or eliminating logos and nicknames associated withRead More

Recently, major national news sources covered topics which Thesis has been following for some time now: teacher evaluations and national standardized testing norms.  First, on December 18th,  Al Jazeera America drew its readership’s attention to how schools all over the country have had to postpone (or even sacrifice) designing andRead More

On November 14th, Assistant Secretary of Education Deborah Delisle issued a letter which drastically reduces obligations for those states which previously sought and received waivers on implementing key tenets of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. As Thesis previously reported, the national government absolved Texas, together with 41 other statesRead More

Not one. The annual award which “…celebrates high-performing schools and schools with a high percentage of students from disadvantaged backgrounds that significantly improve whole-school test scores and student subgroup test scores,” according to the Department of Education website, did not select a single school in Texas out of 286 nationwideRead More

Ever since standardized test results became tied to school success and teacher performance, there has been a correlating rise of complaint that teachers are only teaching to the test. What exactly does teaching to the test mean and is it a bad thing? Teaching to the test means that curriculumRead More

As of September 30, Texas public schools are no longer subject to provisions of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act that govern student performance on standardized tests.  Previously, legislation stipulated that if 90% of students in a given school or district did not meet established thresholds on statewideRead More

Texas researchers have just released a groundbreaking study on school discipline.  The study, “Breaking Schools’ Rules” looked at 1 million Texas 7th graders and followed them for six years (when they should have all graduated).  It found that 60 percent of those students were suspended or expelled at least oneRead More