This charter-school editorial dates back to last Dec. 29th (2020) when former IDEA Public Schools CEO Tom Torkelson wrote an op/ed in the Dallas Morning News (DMN) claiming that the arrival of IDEA in the RGV in the 1990s was one of the major stimuli used to increase educational opportunities for students here by forcing local school districts to up their game if they wanted to stop losing students to IDEA. Before IDEA, educators down here, save a few like Daniel King (former PSJA supe) and Shirley Reed (South Texas College president), according to Torkelson, were blind to school problems because ...