Death of a Salesman
January 5th, 2004 — Education, Federal, Unspin
President Bush sold his education credentials to America by selling Secretary of Education Roderick Paige and his "Houston Miracle." Like all miracles, the one in Houston isn’t holding up under scruitny, and it ought to call into question the basic policies of No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
The Houston Miracle started unraveling when the contradictions between the official reports and the real world became too big to ignore. An assistant principal named Robert Kimball, for example, noticed that his school’s official dropout rate was zero. That would catch people’s attention at any big high school in the country. It caught Kimball’s attention because he had personally spoken to students who told him they were dropping out.
Kimball poked around a bit and discovered the secret behind the official dropout rate of zero: it was a lie. And it wasn’t the only one. Turns out that falsifying about the number of dropouts had become an almost official policy in the Houston School District.
And false reporting wasn’t the only way schools burnished their records. Some schemes were downright ingenious. An investigation uncovered a system schools used to keep some kids from ever taking the critical 10th grade standardized tests. They would hold them back as 9th graders, in some cases for years. Then, when they couldn’t plausibly keep them in 9th grade any longer, they would promote them right past 10th grade and into 11th grade. That led to an odd contradiction between student performance as measured by the state tests and the performance measured by national tests.
It gets worse.
Back in 2001 people in Houston read news reports about a horrible incident at a high school. One student forced another student, a disabled girl, into a boys bathroom, dragged from her wheelchair and raped her. It’s the kind of horrifying, violent crime that sticks in people’s memories. People, that is, who didn’t work for the school district. The school reported, and the district accepted, a perfect record of no violent incidents that year. A former teacher in the district says her principal didn’t want any incidents reported because it would "make the school look bad."
Under the policies Paige put into effect, looking bad had consequences: principals could lose performance bonuses worth thousands of dollars and, instead, get fired.
A state audit has uncovered all kinds of lies and deceptions — enough to entirely discredit Paige’s Houston Miracle. After factoring in the truth, the audit recommended lowering the quality rank of 14 out of 16 top-rated schools in Houston. The recommendation is to drop them from the best rating to the worst.
Falsifying records is bad, there’s no question about that. But from a strictly amoral point of view, Paige did achieve something startling in Houston. The phony data came from a lot of people spread over dozens of schools. The absurdity of the reports couldn’t have escaped administrators in the central office. How did Paige get them all working together to create the big lie?
For the answer to that, we can turn to another Houston disaster: Enron. Make the rewards big enough and the penalties harsh enough and people will report whatever you want them to. It’s not right, but it’s inevitable. Of course it helps to hear what you want to hear without questioning even the most outlandish claims.
All of this is, of course, awful for Houston. It might end there, but George W. Bush got elected president and put Paige in charge of education policy for all of America. That’s led to a series of unfortunate events. The lies and deceptions in Paige’s district became the Houston Miracle. The Houston Miracle became the evidence supporting No Child Left Behind and now NCLB is the law for every school district in America.
That means what happened in Houston will likely happen all across the country. The same policies often yield the same results. And the results from policies like those in NCLB are remarkably consistent.
The education commissioner in New York City has been getting praise for improving student performance with the same kind of no-nonsense policies Paige used in Houston. The dropout rate has dropped considerably. Unfortunately, just like in Houston, the number of students leaving school hasn’t changed, just the reporting. New York is doing it with with a special category of former students. In addition to graduates and dropouts, the district has "pushouts": students who are told to leave school and not come back. It’s harsh, but it looks good on paper. When it comes to rating schools in New York, graduates are good, dropouts are bad and, as a matter of policy, pushouts don’t show up in the data..
We use high-stakes testing here in Colorado. Does that mean we’re getting deceptive reports too? I’d like to think not, but that would be a miracle.
1 comment
[...] schools while he was superintendent. The excitement cooled when people discovered that the incredible results lacked credibility. All Paige had done was induce his underlings to falsify results and lie; he did it by [...]
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