Apologies for the gap between posts. It’s been a busy last week or so, primarily because my grandfather, Howard Paul Benton, died last Tuesday. He was Mazie’s husband from 1956 on, although they separated when I was in high school. He was a very good man, and the closest approximation of a father I had.

November’s been quite a month.

In obligatory story news, I had a so-so column that ran Monday:

One of the concepts newspaper readers sometimes have trouble with is the divide between the editorial staff and the news staff.

The folks who write our editorials, on the fourth floor here at The Dallas Morning News, are good people. But they don’t have any say in what I write, and I don’t have any say in what they write.

It won’t surprise you that we sometimes disagree. So excuse me while I get out my bone-picking tools.

And a pretty good story on the front page today:

For fifth-graders having trouble with the TAKS test, everything comes down to a familiar factor: Location, location, location.

Texas’ law against social promotion is supposed to set uniform standards, requiring students to pass both the math and reading TAKS to be promoted to the sixth grade. But districts are given wide leeway in deciding who actually gets held back, and – according to newly released data from 2005, the most recent available – they use it in vastly different ways.

For instance, the Klein school district in suburban Houston promoted 98.5 percent of its fifth-graders who had failed the TAKS reading test repeatedly. Wichita Falls schools, in contrast, promoted just 4.8 percent.

29 November 2006

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