Prime Prep Academy’s most famous backer was there in person when the Texas State Board of Education voted to approve its charter application in September, and he greeted the news enthusiastically: More…
Looking to steer his presidential campaign past a rough debate performance last week, Gov. Rick Perry unveiled a slew of major reform proposals to shrink the federal government — even beyond the three departments he famously announced he wanted shutter last week. More…
The Texas Department of Motor Vehicles board’s much-anticipated More… vote on a custom license plate featuring the Confederate flag wasn’t quite the nail-biter it had been billed as.
Two weeks after a deadline for local police departments to count their untested rape kits and report back to the state, fewer than five percent of the agencies in the state delivered their totals to the Texas Department of Public Safety, as required by a new state law. More…
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin say there’s no evidence of a direct link between hydraulic fracturing and groundwater contamination, but the controversial production method does come with more contamination risks on the surface. More…
8:26 a.m. Wednesday: “According to complete but unofficial results,” the Houston Chronicle reported, Rodriguez edged out Fonseca More… by just 24 votes.
In the last days of his reelection campaign for a Houston school board seat, Houston ISD Trustee Manuel Rodriguez Jr. mailed out campaign materials contrasting his record as a
More…It may not have the glamour, scandal or never-ending debate season of the run-up to next year’s vote, but Tuesday is Election Day 2011, and there’s plenty of business to take care of at the polls here in Texas.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is still sitting on a handful of oil companies’ requests for tax refunds on new pollution control equipment — money that would come straight out of the budgets of school districts near the refineries More… — but on Wednesday, some residents told TCEQ they don’t
Most of the criticism dogging Gov. Rick Perry’s tax plan for the country focuses on the monster tax breaks it would deal to wealthiest Americans, or for the huge revenue cuts More… it would bring.
But Phyllis Schlafly, the religious-right icon who, like Perry, was featured at this year’s Values Voter
The Texas Department of Motor Vehicles board will consider approving custom license plate designs featuring the Confederate Flag, and three crosses on a hill, at its meeting in Austin next week. More…
In a story we published Tuesday, state Rep. Scott Hochberg (D-Houston) told the Texas Independent More… he’s concerned about a lack of quality control in the state’s full-time online K-12 schools, and more generally in the Texas Virtual School Network, a statewide clearinghouse for online courses for K-12 students.
The Texas Independent first mentioned El Paso pastor Tom Brown More… in August, when El Paso’s district attorney announced an investigation into Brown’s efforts to recall mayor John Cook and two City Council members.
More…In 2007, the Texas Legislature created a new clearinghouse for online classes, a place where a large school districts around the state could offer specialized courses remotely to rural students, kids with special needs, or even students serving time in juvenile detention.
When the University of Texas System made an unusual $10 million investment in a student technology startup called MyEdu, regents failed to disclose that a former system chancellor, and associates of Gov. Rick Perry, have major stakes in the company. More…
Reforming faculty tenure remains a major plank in many plans for the future of Texas’ public universities, from the “seven breakthrough solutions” backed, until recently, by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, to the University of Texas System’s new framework for reform More…, introduced in August by Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa.
