Category: News

Philanthropists Abby and Todd Williams to receive 92nd Linz Award for contributions to Dallas education

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Few people are as persuasive, effective and data-driven in the realm of service in North Texas as Abby and Todd Williams, the couple’s colleagues say.

Since the early 2000s, the two have founded a K-12 public school that primarily serves low-income families in northwest Dallas, have successfully advocated in the Texas Legislature for investments in education and have sponsored hundreds of scholarships to increase college accessibility for local students.

But the Williamses believe the spotlight shouldn’t be on them. It belongs on the teachers, principals, superintendents and educators who labor every day, they said.

“It’s funny to hear the words

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Students take up the cause to push for more financial education

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As financial literacy advocates push for more personal finance education in schools, students are also joining the cause.

Only 21 states require personal finance coursework to graduate high school, with just a handful mandating a stand-alone class, according to the Council for Economic Education. Yet research shows that those who have some financial education typically have lower credit card balances, higher credit scores and take out smaller private loans for college.

“The economy has been fluctuating up and down,” said 15-year-old Zoe McCall. “We need to know these things.”

The high school sophomore lives in Maryland, one of the states

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Teacher Certification — What’s Wrong with Our Education Schools?

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A teacher, wearing a protecive face mask, teaches to schoolchildren in France. April 2, 2021. (Stephane Mahe/Reuters)

The way we train teachers (most of them, anyway), has long been a problem. Writers including Rita Kramer, Thomas Sowell, and Heather Mac Donald have argued that what students learn in the education-school courses they must take to become certified is a waste of time, or worse. “Progressive” educational fads prevail. Knowledge is sneered at. Mac Donald entitled one of her essays “Anything But Knowledge.”

Another ed school critic is Professor Lucien Ellington of the University of Tennessee – Chattanooga and in today’s

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$19 Billion in Federal Stimulus Money For Texas Public Education But Schools Have Yet to See an Extra Dime

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This article is published in partnership with TexasTribune.org.

For more than a year, the federal government has been pumping billions of dollars into school districts across the country to help them meet the demands of the pandemic. Most states have used that pot of stimulus funds as Congress intended: buying personal protective equipment for students and teachers, laptops for kids learning from home, improved ventilation systems for school buildings to prevent virus transmission and covering other costs.

But in Texas, local schools have yet to see an extra dime from the more than $19 billion in federal stimulus

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On Yom HaShoah, let us reexamine and fix Holocaust education

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On the Jewish calendar, Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) is on Thursday. As a grandson of Holocaust survivors, I say that Holocaust education needs to be fixed.

A survey released last September showed, among adults under the age of 40, a “worrying lack of basic Holocaust knowledge.” The 50-state survey of Holocaust knowledge among millennials and Generation Z showed 63% of respondents not knowing that 6 million Jews were massacred in history’s darkest hour, and 48% of those surveyed could not name a single ghetto or concentration camp. Additionally, the survey showed 36% of respondents thought that “two million or

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