Reporting on Texas schools, universities, and education policy -- funding fights, school choice, and university governance.
Gary VanDeaver, the former rural superintendent who fought private school vouchers in 2023 who was one of only two House Republicans to vote no when they passed in 2025, will take over the Texas Association of School Boards on Oct. 1.
Heights Elementary School in Texas City Independent School District has been designated a 2026 Texas Lone Star Ribbon School, one of just 25 public schools in the state to receive the honor this year, according to a Sept. 22 news release from the office of state Rep. Terri Leo Wilson.
The board of Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, the third-largest school system in Texas, is scheduled to decide Sept. 14 whether sixteen of its teachers quit without good cause — a finding that would send each of their names to the state agency that can suspend a teaching certificate.
Texas State University announced on Sept. 4 that it had enrolled a record 47,513 students, and its president used the moment to talk about price.
The Texas Workforce Investment Council will vote Sept. 11 on its plan for the coming year, a year that ends about the time the council is scheduled to go out of existence.
Texas Southern University's regents will vote Sept. 10 on a code of ethics for themselves, an 11-page appendix to the board's bylaws that would make each regent certify in writing every year that they have read it, and would bar any regent from acting for the board outside a meeting.
Nineteen Texas school districts serving 60,697 students were rated "substandard achievement" on the state's annual financial report card this year, and ten of them let the deadline to challenge that rating pass without filing anything, according to the Texas Education Agency's public ratings database, checked Sept. 8.
The Texas Education Agency announced Sept. 3 that 329 public schools have earned the Purple Star Campus Designation for the 2026-27 school year, a state recognition awarded to campuses that demonstrate sustained support for students from military families.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality announced Sept. 3 that 18 educators have been selected for the third year of the Take Care of Texas Ambassador Program, a teacher-focused effort to widen the reach of the agency's environmental education materials.
The Texas Workforce Commission has awarded three Jobs and Education for Texans grants totaling $872,543 to three Central Texas schools, Governor Greg Abbott and the agency announced Sept. 3.
A school district that shuts down an early college high school in Texas would have to wait three years before it could start another one under a rule the Texas Education Agency proposed Sept. 4, and a campus already running a program the state has flagged as falling short would be barred from opening a second one at all.
The Texas State Board of Education takes its final vote Sept. 4 on rewritten standards for four high school social studies courses, after sitting as a committee of all 15 members and advancing them earlier in the week.
Austin ISD plans to borrow $140 million this fall to cover paychecks until property tax money arrives, after its own budget office told trustees the district finished last school year $86 million in the red — $67 million worse than the deficit the board adopted — and with two campuses now failing long enough to put the district in line for state intervention.
The state commission that works against antisemitism and teaches Holocaust history meets Sept. 3 in Dallas to vote on how to divide as much as $300,000 among Texas nonprofits.