In education, Texas has been a source of both controversy and innovation. According to Don McAdams, founder and president of the Houston-based school-board training and consulting firm Center for the Reform of School Systems, every state is different and unique in its education system, but Texas is one state that is really different and unique.…

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 movement. Archival material, state curricular documents, and conversations with policymakers show an increasing focus on core subject areas of…

In this longitudinal study of one region in the state of Texas, there was an examination of district leadership and the sustaining of high student achievement for their districts. The results of this study suggest that sustained improvement of student achievement is very difficult. The districts that had sustained improvement had stable district…

"Race, ethnicity, and poverty are poor excuses for low expectations" (Monroe 1997, 111). Negro educators who forged an academic haven for secondary students in the early twentieth century held as strongly to this belief as did Monroe, an urban Black educator, a century and a half later. Whereas the American high school movement gained…

This article describes the rise, diminution, and reorganization of East Texas Oilfield schools which was defined by the socio-economic conditions of the oil era, from the mid-nineteenth century until the third quarter of the twentieth century. Citizens of East Texas seized the opportunity at the time of oil discovery to provide superior school…