New finance reports show that fundraising so far for Texas State Board of Education campaigns appears to be significantly higher than in many past elections. But fundraising totals in most races this year are still relatively small considering the size of the sprawling board districts in play. District 5 (Ken Mercer, incumbent), for example, begins in […]
Education
Something’s Rotten Here
In today’s Texas Tribune story about the State Board of Education‘s management of the Permanent School Fund (PSF), much of the focus has been on this inane quote from board member David Bradley, R-Beaumont Buna: “If you sit on the mental health commission, do you have to be retarded? If you sit on the [Texas […]
Talking Points
From today’s TFN News Clips: “Now we know that after 10 years and over $1.5 billion in abstinence-only funding, the U.S. is lurching backwards on teen sexual health.” — James Wagoner of Advocates for Youth, a Washington advocacy group, commenting on a new report that shows a rise in the rate of teen pregnancies Stay informed […]
More Evidence of Abstinence-Only Failure
A new report from the Guttmacher Institute shows that the nation’s teen pregnancy rate has increased for the first time in more than a decade. During that decade federal, state and local governments have spent billions of dollars on abstinence-0nly programs that deliberately exclude medically accurate information about contraception and other methods of responsible disease prevention. From […]
What a Paine That Might Have Been…
This month’s Texas State Board of Education meeting featured many examples of how poorly informed some board members really are. Over a two-day period, the board picked apart a proposed draft of new social studies curriculum standards that teachers, scholars and other community members had spent a year researching, discussing and debating. Often the amendments […]
