Cloaking Inequity

Story by Luke Quinton that ran today on KUT NPR about the passage of HB5 in Texas. Listen here. Text of story quoted below. When Gov. Rick Perry signed House Bill 5 this week, it signaled that the waves of complaints from parents opposed to high stakes testing, had caught hold. But one irony is […]

In our last segment of the The Teat, we discussed how education reformers have exploded 501(c)3 organizations to push corporate education reform.  Now we’ll focus on its big bad cousin: 501(c)4 organizations. But first, as is tradition, our cow haiku: Two cows in pasture A steak and a glass of milk Dinner is served now […]

There have been several articles describing the “Don’t Mess with Texas Revolt” against its own approach to high-stakes testing and accountability that was legislated in No Child Left Behind. Many Texans, regardless of their political stripes, are fed up with the current approach to high-stakes testing and accountability birthed here in the Lone Star State. There […]

Is that the theme music from the horror film Halloween? Perfect!

Join KLRU for the live taping of Blackademics: Education, Performance and Youth Empowerment Date: Wednesday February 13, 2013 Time: 7 pm (doors open at 6:30 pm) Location: KLRU Studio 6A (map) RSVP: Event is free, but RSVP is required. RSVP now Join us for a live recording of nationally and internationally renowned black studies scholars as […]

Sandy Kress wrote a Sept. 29 column for the Austin American-Statesman entitled “Kress: The Facts on School Accountability.” Sandy Kress is known as a key architect of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education reform passed in 2002 and is now a handsomely paid lobbyist for Pearson Education. Pearson is a testing company which gets […]

I am giddy!! I had writer’s block all summer. I owed Professor Rich Milner and two co-authors (Dr. Muhummed Khalifa and Dr. Linda Tillman) my portion of a chapter for the upcoming Handbook of Urban Education to be published by Routledge. We were asked to write on a “direction for future work (and needs) in the field of […]

Today we are pleased to release the report Is Texas leading its peers and the nation?: A Decadal Analysis of Educational Data. The Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin commissioned a policy this report in the spring of 2012 to examine education data for the state of Texas, […]

 In this article, Julian Vasquez Heilig, Keffrelyn Brown, and Anthony Brown offer findings from a close textual analysis of how the Texas social studies standards address race, racism, and communities of color. Using the lens of Critical Race Theory, the authors uncover the sometimes subtle ways that the standards can appear to adequately address race while […]

Vasquez Heilig, J., Cole, H. & Aguilar, A. (2010). From Dewey to No Child Left Behind: The evolution and devolution of public arts education. Arts Education Policy Review, 111(4), 136-145. This historical narrative tracks the evolution and devolution of visual arts education from Dewey’s progressive era pedagogy and the theory of the arts as experience through the modern accountability […]

Vasquez Heilig, J. (2011). As good as advertised?: Tracking urban student progress through high school in an environment of accountability. American Secondary Education, 39(3), 17-41. No Child Left Behind’s mandated high-stakes testing and accountability policies have pervaded districts and schools nationwide. To examine student progress and graduation in the midst of first generation Texas-style accountability, this study tracked individuals […]

Vasquez Heilig, J., Young, M. & Williams, A. (2012). At-risk student averse: Risk management and accountability. Journal of Educational Administration, 50(5). The prevailing theory of action underlying accountability is that holding schools and students accountable will increase educational output. While accountability’s theory of action intuitively seemed plausible, at the point of No Child Left Behind’s national implementation, little empirical […]