Archive for July 2025

Gone are the days of eager new recruits, ready to leap into the classroom. Nationwide, 79 percent of public schools reported difficulty hiring teachers last year. Texas has also borne the brunt of this trend. Between fall 2021 and fall 2022, the state saw a record 13.4 percent attrition rate, and the proportion of newly hired teachers without a state-sanctioned certification or permit in the following school year rose to nearly 30 percent. In May, Governor Greg Abbott signed a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in all classrooms.

No burial records. No headstones. No memorials. Nothing until 2014, when an amateur historian uncovered evidence of a mass grave, potentially in a former sewage tank, believed to contain hundreds of babies in Tuam, County Galway, in the west of Ireland. Now, investigators have moved their diggers onto the nondescript patch of grass next to a children’s playground on a housing estate in the town…. The area was once where St Mary’s children’s home stood, a church-run institution that housed thousands of women and children between 1925 and 1961.

President Linda Livingstone (above) has rescinded a $643,000 grant awarded to the Diana Garland School of Social Work from the John and Eula Mae Baugh Foundation. That grant was for an academic study on LGBTQ inclusion in the church and how to address loneliness…. The LGBTQ debate has been a flashpoint at Baylor that Livingstone previously tried to navigate carefully. This time, however, it appears she has ceded control to conservatives both on the board of regents and in the larger far-right evangelical community.

Public housing towers in Melbourne