Education in Texas

Teacher supply and demand issues are of critical importance as our society enters the 21st century. Over the next decade, about two million new teachers will be needed largely because of a dramatic increase in enrollments and high attrition rates as an ag

This collection of essays is a case study of a major educational reform enacted in Texas in 1987: an effort to test all entering college students to gauge their basic skills. It chronicles how legislators, staff and educators designed the test, program, and necessary policies to support the reform. This book presents a model for other states to emulate, and is valuable to students and teachers of education, policy analysis and psychometric testing, as well as to agencies and legislators involved in state-level educational reform.

When faced with the Supreme Court's order for "all deliberate speed" in achieving school desegregation, a fearful Houston school board member urged the city to "make haste slowly".

Houston, Texas, had what may have been the largest racially segregated public school system in the United States when the Supreme Court declared the practice unconstitutional in 1954. Ultimately, helped by members of its business community, Houston did desegregate its public schools and did so peacefully, without making the city a battleground of racial violence.

In Make Haste Slowly, William Henry Kellar provides the first extensive examination of Houston's racially segregated public school system, the long fight for desegregation, and the roles played by community groups in one of the most significant stories of the civil rights era.

Drawing on archival records, HISD School Board minutes, interviews with participants in the process, and the oral history collection of the Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Kellar shows that, while Houston desegregated its public school system peacefully, the limited integration that originally occurred served only to delay equal access to HISD schools. Houstonians shifted from a strategy of "massive resistance" to one of "massive retreat". White flight and resegregation transformed both the community and its public schools.

Kellar concludes that forty years after the Brown decision, many of the aspirations that landmark ruling inspired have proven elusive, but the impact of the ruling on Houston has changed the face of that city and the nature of its public education dramatically and in unanticipated ways.