The Baines Report
This summer I am working with Save the Children’s monitoring and evaluation team in the El Salvador office. For the past month, I have coordinated the midline evaluation of a package of programs focused on early childhood care and development. Over the last several weeks, four teams made up of surveyors and nutritionists have collected data […]
At the crack of dawn tomorrow morning, I will board a train travelling 12 hours from Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais to Linhares, Espirito Santo, Brazil. There I will begin the on-site phase of the Global Leadership Fellowship with Denver-based NGO, US-Brazil Connect (USBC). The NGO focuses on assisting Brazilian vocational and high school students with […]
President Lyndon Johnson said, “Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty.” As students at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, President Johnson’s commitment to accessible education holds particular significance for us. Without financial aid, including student loans, education would be inaccessible for many of us. Even […]
When Ross Perot embarked on his crusade to fix the Texas education system in the 1980s, he said the state’s schools excelled in only three areas: drill team, band and football. To fix this, he helped craft and lobby for a sprawling education reform package that boosted state aid to poor districts, funded prekindergarten, […]
Last week, the Statesman delivered good news for Texas: STAAR passing rates jumped after a recent round of retakes. This is a big win not only for Texas schoolchildren and teachers, but also for state policy. The State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) identified the students in need of a little extra help, […]
With school districts across Texas rallying against drastic budget cuts, many elected officials and critics of public schools have tried to cast educators as being responsible for the situation they’re currently facing. These critics charge that schools need to learn to be more efficient with the resources they have and that more competition and accountability […]
As the debt ceiling debate fades, a new reminder of a dangerous collective malady emerges with the ill-defined protests that started in New York and have spread throughout the country. The protests, despite the message the media works so diligently to construct, represent another scene in the vacuous western between employers and employees, owners and […]
Disrupting class used to land kids in the principal’s office or detention. In Texas, however, more and more children are facing criminal prosecution, criminal records and hefty fines for acting out in school. It is estimated that at least 275,000 non-traffic tickets are issued to kids in Texas each year. The vast majority of […]
We’re all aware of the beating public education took this past legislative session. A total of $5.3 billion was cut, representing the first time Texas deliberately underfunded its schools. As a result, thousands of teachers lost their jobs and hundreds of innovative programs were ended. However, a less familiar, but equally unfortunate reality of […]
Charter schools are quickly becoming an important piece of both national and state-level education reform efforts. They’ve been praised in movies like “Waiting For Superman” as one of the few hopes for improving inner-city education. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made boosting charter school enrollment on criteria for the Race to the Top grant […]