If you can’t get enough of creepy character actor Christopher Walken, boot up The Darkening, one of this year’s CD-ROM releases from Austin’s Origin Systems. Walken, like John Hurt and Amanda Pays, plays one of the fifty characters who meet up with the game’s hero, an amnesiac who roams the
Why are so many students in Texas unable to read? The answer is obvious: because the school system has failed them.
Head of the class.
When a teacher romances a student, are school officials to blame? That’s the crux of a case that began in the small town of Taylor and ended up in the U.S. Supreme court.
Reinventing the public school.
The judge could surprise everyone, but it is no longer likely that the case of Hopwood, et al. v. Texas, et al., which concluded in Austin in late May, will change America by rewriting the law of affirmative action. For a while, the suit brought by four white applicants who
During the days of segregation, a young graduate of all-white Rice University managed to become a professor at all-black Texas Southern University.
Nearly everyone agrees that the nation’s best college jazz program is in Denton, but critics wonder if it isn’t mired in the past.
After seven years, teaching kindergarten in a community devastated by drug addiction became more than I could bear. Still, my decision to leave was fraught with mixed emotions.
A gift from James Michener enriches Texas’ student writers.
AUSTIN POLITICS ARE the nuttiest in the state. It all stems from an obsession with quality of life, and nothing quite brings out the daffiness like a threat to the city’s beloved Barton Springs. Even as a two-year legal battle continues to rage over development upstream on Barton Creek, a
I pulled more all-nighters writing other people’s papers than I did my own.
George H. W. Bush's commencement speech at Southern Methodist University was long on rhetoric and short on specifics.
Students’ attention wanders when commercials come on the tube—just like at home.
This year is the twenty-sixth anniversary of the hardest test I ever took. Then, about to graduate from college with an English degree, I had been in school for so long and had liked it so much that I had no particular yearning to go out into the world. Perhaps
A report from the front lines in the battle of the sexes—inside the Aggie corps.
Conventional wisdom about education holds that local control, a strong principal, and active, involved parents are crucial ingredients in the mix that makes a successful school. This wisdom is so pervasive that the Legislature has made local control, in the form of “site-based decision making,” a legal requirement in Texas
Are good times and fun pranks giving way to racial slurs and ritualized violence? An inside look at UT’s fraternity row.
A modest Catholic boys’ school in El Paso could teach public schools a lesson or two about how to provide a solid education on a limited budget and send 98 percent of their students off to college.
In education, Texas ranks below (gasp) Mississippi. Here’s how to turn the public schools around without throwing billions of dollars down the rathole.
When San Antonio’s Memorial Minutemen took on a crosstown rival, all they had to lose was their chance to go down in history as Texas’ worst high school football team.
Rice was created to be a “university of the first rank.” Is it? Will it ever be?
In Dallas, people call the new superintendent of schools the Messiah. Now all Marvin Edwards has to do is prove they’re right.
A kindergarten teacher tells what she learned in school.
Never say Kant, Socrates it to ’em, and other collected wisdom from Texas’ Friday-night philosophers.
Once kids did their own homework. Now ambitious parents do it for them.
Let’s hear it for Dallas’ Northwood Institute, where entrepreneurialism is second only to high society fundraising.
Everyone agreed it was time for greatness at UT. But after a nationwide search for a new president, the only man the regents could agree on was a campus insider who professed no great vision at all.
In 1883 the University of Texas got stuck with two million acres of West Texas scrubland. Then it hit oil, and the money started rolling in.
The bright-eyed, pink-cheeked cream of Texas youth aren’t scrambling on the football field. They’re playing in the high school band.
Side by side near a Texas river are dinosaur tracks and what appear to be the marks of a human foot—proof, in the creationist mind, that evolution is bunk.
Textbook watchdogs Mel and Norma Gabler are good, sincere, dedicated people, who just may be destroying your child’s education.
The university at one hundred; how good is it, really?
Multiple-choice question: UT’s Tom Philpott is (a) the best professor on campus, a selfless reformer, and the victim of an assassination attempt; (b) the worst professor on campus, a publicity hound, and a nut who staged his own shooting.
Honest.
Some kids may fail at school and it’s not their fault.
Behind the pine curtain of deep East Texas is a world trapped in the past and hidden from the future: lush woods, poor whites, the descendants of slaves, and an aristocracy still breathing the rarefied air of the Old South.
It’s not Diamond Jim Brady, Bet a Million Gates, an Arab sheik, or Liberace. It’s a library.
I escaped once, but they sent me back.
The weirdest student demonstration ever.
Behold the miracles at College Station!
The private life of a public high school.
The University of Texas is playing the same old game—politics.
Our well meaning volunteer other meets up with some hard-nosed realists in the public schools.
