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D Magazine readers may recognize the name Melissa Chessher from the November issue. Her column, titled “It’s Always Sunny in Dallas,” chronicled her return to Dallas from Syracuse, where she was the chair, professor and interim associate dean at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. At SMU, she’s effectively leading the journalism department and sports a more direct title: the Belo Foundation Distinguished Chair in Journalism.

She also goes way back with Tim Rogers, who worked with her at American Way, the now-grounded in-flight magazine for American Airlines. Expect a spirited chat that eventually digs into some interesting questions about the state of journalism in North Texas and beyond.

It sure sounds like SMU’s journalism students are in good hands. Listen below.

Despite plenty discussion at school board meetings, in news coverage, and on social media, how many parents actually went through the formal process to object to specific books in their child’s school library?

We asked three school districts to provide all parent objections submitted for books for the 2021-2022 school year, and this school year so far. At least in Dallas ISD, Richardson ISD, and Highland Park ISD, it seems like all the bluster had little correlation with how many formally objected to a book through their district’s review process.

Dallas ISD—the second largest in the state—provided one parent request, submitted July 19, 2022, For Girl Haven by Lilah Sturges. The parent objected because it discusses LGBTQ+ children and (among other objections) serves as an “introduction to sexual confusion,” and preys “on vulnerable children at school without parental knowledge.”

Richardson ISD provided one request as well, dated February 10, 2021, for a book called When Aidan Became a Brother, written by Kyle Lukoff. The objection was that the book discusses a child born a girl coming out as transgender, and it was written for readers ages 3-7. In its place, the parents suggested the books Made by Raffi by Craig Pomranz, How to be a Lion by Ed Vere, I Am a Cat by Gaila Bernstein, or One of a Kind by Chris Gorman.

Highland Park ISD had three requests, including an undated objection to Girl Haven. Two requests, dated September 1, 2021 and August 22, 2021, pertained to teacher-provided reading lists for classwork. Parents objected to their children reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Columbine by Dave Cullen, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.

Interestingly, both objections to Girl Haven contain the exact same language and cite the same excerpts.

In Texas, as the start of the school year loomed, the loss of teachers—and figuring out how to stop them from leaving—became so dominant in the conversation that Gov. Greg Abbott created a task force to examine the issue. 

A recent survey released by the Charles Butt Foundation gives us more clues as to why it’s happening. It polled almost 1,300 Texas public school teachers last spring and found that 77 percent were seriously considering leaving the profession in 2022, compared to 58 percent in 2020.

“Regression analysis finds that women and teachers who live in urban areas are, on average, more apt than men and those in suburban areas to have seriously considered leaving their position, holding other demographic factors constant,” the report said. “Seriously considering leaving is not independently predicted by salary, tenure, educational attainment, or race/ethnicity; rather, it is a widespread phenomenon throughout these groups.”

But that’s not the data point that gives us the answer to why teachers are leaving.

Mike Hixenbaugh is one half of the team (along with Antonia Hylton) that brought us the great Southlake podcast, about the intersection of race, education, and money in that Dallas burb. He just dropped another banger today titled “How a Far-right, Christian Cellphone Company ‘Took Over’ Four Texas School Boards.” This is a must-read. A taste:

“‘The school boards are the key that picks the lock,’ [former Trump advisor Steve] Bannon said during an interview with Patriot Mobile’s president, Glenn Story, from the floor of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Dallas on August 6. ‘Tell us about what you did.’

“Story turned to the camera and said, ‘We went out and found 11 candidates last cycle and we supported them, and we won every seat. We took over four school boards.’

“‘Eleven seats on school boards, took over four!’ Bannon shouted as a crowd of CPAC attendees erupted in applause.

“It was a moment of celebration for an upstart company whose leaders say they are on a mission from God to restore conservative Christian values at all levels of government—especially in public schools.”

I hasten to add that Hixenbaugh and NBC are doing this great reporting and storytelling without the aid of an education lab. Bookmark it. Read it. Think about the fact that Patriot Mobile funded a PAC with $600,000 to win those 11 school board seats.

When Michael Hinojosa announced in January that he planned to resign as superintendent of Dallas ISD, he had run the state’s second-largest school district for 13 years over two stints. By most accounts, he’d done it well. Before the pandemic hit, the Dallas Morning News editorial board said DISD was “poised to be the best urban district in the country,” and a year later H-E-B named it the top large district in the state. Finding the next superintendent would be critical to continuing that success. And pretty much everyone in town who follows education thought they knew who would get the job. Hinojosa himself had hired her. 

Hinojosa’s last contract, negotiated in 2019, contained a clause that required him to make his “best reasonable efforts to identify and mentor one or more qualified individuals” who could be considered by the board of trustees as his replacement—or, as he’d later say, someone “who could take over in case I got run over by a DART bus.”

In November 2020, he hired Susana Cordova away from the top job at Denver Public Schools to serve as his deputy superintendent. A News headline a few months later called her a “ ‘rock star’ who might well be Dallas ISD’s next superintendent.” In that story, Hinojosa said, “I love this job, but while I’ve never felt comfortable leaving for another opportunity, now it’s different because of Susana.”

So that was that. Right? Susana Cordova, second in command, former superintendent. She would take over when Hinojosa formally stepped down. 

Apparently the nine trustees on DISD’s board don’t read the paper. Four months after Hinojosa made his announcement, the board revealed that it had chosen a lone finalist for the job, and—surprise!—it wasn’t Cordova. That finalist must have been, if not surprised, a bit dizzied by how quickly everything had happened. 

A couple weeks ago, we published a story about Dallas ISD’s preliminary State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (or STAAR) scores, which indicated that the district had either reversed learning loss or came really close to doing so in a lot of subjects.

But then more schools across the country started posting their results to statewide testing. And they were much the same. Districts like Richardson ISD also posted positive results. Then Friday, the Texas Education Agency released the results for the 3-8 grade STAAR tests, and they were also extremely promising.

I talked to new Dallas ISD superintendent Stephanie Elizalde Friday morning—which was also her first official day on the job—about how sustainable pandemic-recovery measures would be moving forward, especially after federal funding for pandemic learning runs out. (Dallas ISD, like every district, was able to obtain monies from a federal grant program called ESSER, Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief.)

The long and the short of it is this: The district has a plan for that, and isn’t going to let its foot off the gas. Elizalde says there’s no reason why the district can’t continue to post double-digit gains in core subjects, and it’s well-positioned to do that funding-wise, too. Our conversation is below, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Dallas ISD Deputy Superintendent Susana Cordova will be leaving the district this summer, according to an update then superintendent Michael Hinojosa provided to the board of trustees before his departure. Her last day will be August 5, according to that update, which did not identify Cordova’s future plans. D Magazine has reached out to Cordova for comment. “We want to recognize and thank Susana for her significant contributions to the district,” the update added.

Newly installed Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde said she had been made aware of Cordova’s impending departure. “I’ve been notified that Susana has decided to take something somewhere else,” she said in a phone call.

Cordova was hired after Elizalde left to become the superintendent at Austin ISD in 2019. (Elizalde had been Dallas ISD’s chief of school leadership.) Cordova was also hired after the board added a clause to Hinojosa’s contract that same year, which required him to use his “best reasonable efforts to identify and mentor one or more qualified individuals” who could be considered by the board of trustees to be his successor. In May 2021, Hinojosa said this could be someone “who could take over in case I got run over by a DART bus.”

That timing, along with several statements Hinojosa made publicly and privately to individuals we spoke to, led many to believe that Cordova was next in line. However, the clause also explicitly said the tasks of searching for and choosing the next superintendent were the responsibilities of the board of trustees.

After the pandemic showed horrific learning loss among students, this year’s preliminary State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) results have Dallas ISD officials surprised and optimistic. Really optimistic.

In last week’s school board briefing, Deputy Superintendent Susana Cordova revealed an early glimpse of this year’s STAAR and high school end-of-course exam results. They showed a surprising turnaround for a district that posted reading and math declines across all tested grades in elementary and middle school last year. 

In fact, in some grades and subjects this year, the district’s gains have surpassed pre-pandemic results from 2019. (The STAAR was canceled in 2019-2020 because of the pandemic.)

This is the earliest that the district has ever had results, largely because nearly all students took the test online. District staff told the board that an informal survey of other urban districts in the state revealed that they may have had the highest percentage of students taking the STAAR test online this year, with many districts still doing a mix of paper and online testing.

Cordova stressed that while these results were encouraging, there was a lot of data they didn’t have yet. She’s looking for things like state benchmark levels and the results of other urban districts. 

A few days ago, an intriguing tweet from former Little Elm superintendent Daniel Gallagher appeared in my Twitter feed.

In the tweet, Gallagher shared a story about the Louisiana state House committee unanimously advancing a resolution that would require state representatives to volunteer as substitute teachers.

“We need our Texas State Legislators to volunteer as substitute teachers,” Gallagher tweeted. “This will provide them some insight into the challenges our teachers face before their next vote on educational laws.”

And that’s what the resolution’s authors felt, too. But I wondered, how much exactly could a lawmaker glean from a few volunteer hours in a classroom, pre-arranged with carefully selected students?

So we assembled a panel of local educators and asked them to read the article, and then give their unvarnished thoughts on the whole idea. Allen ISD teacher Angela Barretto, Dallas ISD teacher Melody Townsel, Irving ISD teacher Bernadette Blakely, and elementary school speech pathologist Jamie Stone stepped up to give their impressions.

Maybe a week after a mass shooting at a school and two years deep into pandemic teaching was a bad time to ask a panel of teachers how they felt about this—or maybe it was a perfect time. 

Last year Lake Highlands High’s valedictorian, Paxton Smith, went viral by delivering an unapproved speech at graduation. She spoke forcefully about a woman’s right to have control over her own body, and she decried the restrictive abortion bill that Gov. Greg Abbott had just signed into law. We posted a video of her speech on FrontBurner. It now has more than half a million views on YouTube, and Smith’s speech made headlines from the New York Times to the BBC.

So that happened.

This year Richardson ISD decided to try something different. Rather than let the LHH valedictorian deliver a live address, the district is forcing her to pre-record it. Sara Shelton told the Lake Highlands Advocate: “I’ve been thinking since elementary school that I might get to speak at graduation, and it’s just sad. I’ve been waiting years to speak—it’s such a cool thing. I even asked if I could go up to the podium [live] and say thank you. They said no. Even our class vice president is introducing Ms. Jones, our principal, and they are making her pre-record it.”

What a cowardly decision by the district.

This move sends a clear message that the district is afraid of one of its smartest, hardest-working, most accomplished student. And what, exactly, might they fear? That one of the brightest young people in our community might say something that not everyone agrees with? I don’t know this young woman’s views. Maybe she thinks Biden stole the election and Elon Musk should be the king of Texas after the state secedes from the union. Or maybe she thinks Gov. Abbott isn’t serving Texans well when he says school shootings are a mental health issue, not a gun control issue, while Texas ranks last in the country in access to mental health care and he himself in April cut $211 million from the department that oversees the state’s mental health programs.

I don’t know. But I do know that Shelton earned the privilege of speaking her mind at graduation. As long as she doesn’t use vulgar language or call for violence, she should be able to address her classmates on a live mic.

Read that Advocate story. You can tell how thoughtful and mature she is. My guess: this final lesson from Richardson ISD won’t be lost on Sara Shelton.

UPDATE (5/31/22) A friend of mine has a kid who graduated from LHH. At that kid’s graduation party over the weekend, I got to meet Sara Shelton. I can confirm that she is a wonderful person and a credit to her school. A real shame that the district was so scared of her.

This week, elementary school students in Dallas begin taking the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, test. 

For many, like my fifth-grader, it’s for the very first time.

In third grade, just as students began preparing in earnest, everyone left for spring break and never came back, thanks to COVID-19. The state canceled the test that year and didn’t issue any school or district accountability ratings (which are based in part on STAAR results).

In fourth grade, we kept our son home all year. He is autistic. He does extremely well most days, and we’ve worked with him since he was four (with the help of a whole lot of professionals) to teach him how to advocate for himself. 

When schools closed their doors two years ago, my husband and I knew that we’d likely be required to work from home. We gave the small human the choice — go back to school with his friends (but he’d need to wear a mask diligently and wash his hands well) or learn at home.

He thought about it for a good 24 hours, then came back to us.