By Morgan Smith
More than 100,000 fifth- and eighth-graders failed the state exams in reading and math that are required to move on to the next grade last year.
Most of them probably advanced anyway.
State law bans social promotion, or the practice of allowing students to continue to the next grade regardless of their academic achievement. But few of the students who failed the test will actually repeat a grade because a provision in the law allowing local school...
RIO GRANDE VALLEY, TX — IDEA Public Schools, a nationally-recognized charter school network, has been awarded $15 million through the competitive Charter School Programs (CSP) Replication and Expansion of High-Quality Charter Schools grant by the US Department of Education. IDEA is one of two charter school networks in Texas to receive this award.
The CSP grant award is designed to assist high-performing, non-profit charter management organizations replicate and expand. Over the next...
By Andrew Kreighbaum
Officials at the Texas Education Agency believe a new testing system, introduced in 2012, will mitigate issues with the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test revealed by investigations into cheating at El Paso Independent School District and other districts.
State law previously required only that students pass the 11-grade TAKS test in order to graduate, meaning districts could manipulate student grade classification for the 10th-grade test that...
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Austin's public school population has dropped by nearly 2,000 students over the past two years and school district officials say it's the first consecutive-year decline in at least two decades.
The city's public school district census this year is 84,791 — down 735 from a year ago. It was down some 1,200 students in 2013.
The Austin American-Statesman reports (http://bit.ly/1s2ujGo ) demographers believe the decline...
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - A fund Texas uses to buy instructional materials and cover some local school districts' costs is now worth nearly $38 billion, making it the nation's largest educational endowment.
State officials credited a booming natural gas industry for growing the Permanent School Fund, which was worth about $37.7 billion as of June 30.
It was worth just $2 million when it was created in 1854.
The fund gets proceeds from the sale of state land and mineral...
