Month: <span>August 2010</span>

Kissing the ring and fueling public policy

Anyone out there want to meet Gov. Rick Perry? Want to spend a few seconds of quality time with the longest serving governor in Texas history? Maybe compare notes on the quality of rental houses? Or pick up a couple of pointers about how to blow away a coyote? Well, if you don’t have anything […]

Read More

Perry postures, Waco raises teacher pay

Gov. Rick Perry hasn’t said, at least publicly, whether he will apply for the $830 million in emergency education jobs money that the federal government has set aside for Texas, but at least one local school board already has budgeted part of the money to grant teacher pay raises. The Waco ISD board this week […]

Read More

Slicing another piece of charter pie

The jury may still be out on the overall effectiveness of charter schools, as a major, recent study concluded, but a large chunk of the public still has a pieinthesky attitude about them. According to a poll released today, public support of President Obama’s education agenda has slipped during the past year – only 34 […]

Read More

The budgetary politics of school bus seatbelts

Under a 2007 law from which Gov. Rick Perry milked a lot of favorable publicity, this school year was the deadline for school districts in Texas to comply with a requirement that all new school buses have passenger seatbelts. But guess what? Some districts are complying, but many, including Houston ISD, the state’s largest, aren’t. […]

Read More