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 that governs the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired votes Friday morning on an audit of how the school investigates abuse and neglect complaints against its own staff — then, later the same day, amends the policy that audit examined.
The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts has funded 85,344 education savings accounts for the coming school year and left more than 121,000 students on a waiting list, according to the first annual demographic report on the Texas Education Freedom Accounts program.
The last piece of the 2026 STAAR picture is finally public.
The four state agencies that each regulate a piece of Texas child care meet Tuesday to hear the first review a new commission has ever finished.
Governor Greg Abbott announced more than $2.5 million in grants to help rural Texas school districts build college and career pathways for their students.
The Texas Education Agency is due to release the last missing piece of this year's standardized-test results on Thursday — the grade 5 and grade 8 science scores from the spring STAAR exam — closing out a 2026 results cycle the state broke into stages for the first time.
When Texas overhauled how it funds community colleges in 2023, the state made a bet: pay for results — credentials earned, students transferred, workforce needs met — instead of enrollment.
The oldest and largest of the endowments that bankroll Texas’ public research universities was built into the state constitution to benefit two university systems — and on Wednesday the Senate Committee on Higher Education spent much of its day probing whether that century-old arrangement still distributes the money the right way.
The man who wrote Texas’ sweeping higher-education governance law came back to the committee that produced it Tuesday — this time as a witness, not a senator — to report that the campuses he now helps run are moving faster than the statute requires.
Governor Greg Abbott announced that Texas is extending the application period for the new federal Workforce Pell Grant program, giving colleges and technical schools more time to submit eligible short-term training programs.
Two of the biggest tests of Texas public education policy arrive within weeks of each other this August, and together they will frame how the state judges its schools heading into the 2027 legislative session.
The Texas Senate Committee on Higher Education will hear invited testimony July 29 on the distribution methods for the Permanent University Fund and the newer Texas University Fund, and whether either needs reform as more campuses seek research dollars.