Leave No Child Behind

[Carol Holst <kceh@airmail.net>]

http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2003-10-03/pols_feature.html

HOME: OCTOBER  3, 2003: NEWS: LEAVE NO CHILD BEHIND

Leave No Child Behind
Education policy in George Bush's America

BY LOU DUBOSE, AND  MOLLY IVINS


illustration by Doug Potter

You teach a child to read and he or her will be able to pass a literacy 
test.

-- George W. Bush,  Tennessee, Feb. 21, 2001

Where did this idea come from -- that everybody deserves free 
education? ... It's like free groceries. It comes from Moscow. From 
Russia. Straight out of the pit of hell.

-- Representative Debbie Riddle,  Austin, March 5, 2003

OK, so we're not real partial to public education in Texas.

And we got fooled. Maybe more than twice.

So did you.

Here's how it happened.

Between GeeDubya Bush's second legislative session in 1997 and the 
official beginning of his run for the presidency in 1999, the state of 
Texas pissed away much of a $6 billion surplus. A surplus in Austin is 
like the hundred-year flood in Amarillo: it comes about every eight 
hundred years. You want to make full use of everything you can get out 
of it.

Governor Bush made good use of the surplus, at least for his own 
political purposes. In a state known for low taxes and no income tax, he 
gave a big chunk of the surplus back to taxpayers. Then he ran for 
president saying, "I passed the largest tax break in the history of the 
state of Texas." And why not? The economy was booming. Enron stock was 
going to hit $100 and split. Streets were filled with trucks laying 
fiber-optic cable. If you could get a table near the lean and hungry 
venture capitalists at the Mezzaluna restaurant in downtown Austin, you 
might hear one of them mention "the next killer app." Then you could 
call your broker, sell Agillion, and buy Tivoli. The boom was like 
Robert Earl Keen's song "The Road Goes on Forever and the Party Never 
Ends."

Dubya Bush arrived as governor after the party started. By the time it 
ended, he had ridden the Texas tech boom all the way to the White House. 
The first big Austin campaign bash in the summer of 1999 featured bad 
country music and a stump speech heavy on Bushonomic blather: "... the 
largest tax cut in the history of the state of Texas ... give tax 
dollars to the people who earned them ... ," etc. Bush budget director 
Albert Hawkins, who had just left the state's payroll to join the 
campaign, stood at the back of the crowd. Hawkins is a veteran capitol 
numbers-cruncher who knew better. Asked why none of the record surplus 
was banked in the state's rainy day fund, Hawkins dismissed the 
question. The state's finances were in good shape, he said. "We didn't 
see any need to put any money in the fund."

Then the stock market tanked, the Supreme Court named Bush president, 
tax revenues disappeared, and Texas went broke. As we write, we're 
looking at a $10 billion deficit in Texas ... It's raining in Texas. Six 
or seven billion dollars in the Texas rainy day fund would be right 
useful to legislators slashing programs in a state that's always in a 
dead heat with Mississippi for last place in government spending. As 
Bush rolled out his second big tax cut in Washington in 2002, the state 
he left behind was being ravaged by the deficits he created.

One casualty of the post-Bush budget crash in Texas is the state's 
public schools. That's how Odell Edwards -- along with all but 8% of his 
African-American classmates at Houston's Phillis Wheatley High School -- 
really got fooled. As Odell started tenth grade, his school district 
faced a $160 million deficit. His campus was rated as "low-performing." 
And there was a 92% chance that in two years he would fail the 
"high-stakes" test required by President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" 
education-reform law.

Odell gets Bushwhacked twice.

Governor Bush's tax cuts in Texas put Odell's school district in a 
financial bind. President Bush's No Child Left Behind law puts Odell 
himself in a bind, almost guaranteeing he will be left behind. Sitting 
in a McDonald's in southeast Houston, this wiry kid full of nervous 
energy seems unaware of the odds he faces when he gets his first crack 
at the high school exit exam next year. His odds are bad because the 
Texas Education Agency has done something extraordinary. It created a 
high-stakes exit exam that almost perfectly predicts one thing: race. 
Edwards is African-American. According to field tests of the Texas 
Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, he has an 8% chance of passing. His 
grade-point average could be 95 (he admits that it's "mostly B's and 
C's"), but in a trial run of the test 92% of black kids failed. As a 
result, the test is being tweaked and scores will ultimately be curved. 
The trial tests predicted a disaster for black kids. And if Odell fails 
the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, he doesn't get out of 
Wheatley High. He gets a couple of re-takes. But what are the odds that 
a kid officially designated a failure after eleven, then twelve, then 
twelve and a half years of public education will come back for that 
third test in the summer after high school?

Odell works twenty-five to thirty hours a week at McDonald's and lives 
with his mother and stepsister. He'd like to get out of fast food but 
likes the money. He wants to buy a car and says maybe he'll go to 
Houston Community College -- at a campus that just opened in an 
abandoned strip mall on Martin Luther King Drive.

It's the American teenage dream, on a modest scale.

Here's a young African-American man of limited means who's always 
attended public schools where his minority was the majority. He's the 
guy George Bush must have had in mind when he talked about "the soft 
bigotry of low expectations." Bush can say what he wants to about ending 
that invisible bigotry, but he has helped stack the deck against Odell 
Edwards. Odell's school faces budget and staff cuts -- at the same time 
that President W.'s education law is demanding much more from Odell.

He'd have a better shot if he lived in Massachusetts. They spend money 
on public education there. In Texas we do schools on the cheap. "You 
can't say throwing money at public education won't work," an East Texas 
senator used to say. "Because we've never tried it."

It's going to take a heroic effort for Odell Edwards to cut loose from 
fast-food counter culture at McDonald's.

Enron Education

Here's how the rest of you got fooled.

You were told the No Child Left Behind law is the Texas model of 
competency testing gone national. That's not exactly true, and if it 
were, it wouldn't be good. For decades the Great State has served as the 
National Laboratory for Bad Policy.

In truth, the No Child Left Behind Act Bush got passed in January 2002 
is not the Texas education model imposed on the nation. It's the Texas 
model with bells added to bring on the far right and whistles added to 
attract congressional liberals, and insufficient money to pay for any of 
it. And it was signed into law at a time when our public schools are 
being slammed by huge state-budget deficits.

As full-time residents of the state that gave you tort reform, H. Ross 
Perot, and penis-enlargement options on executive health plans, we're 
obliged to warn you that if Dubya Bush had exported "the Texas Miracle," 
the country would be in deep shit. In public education there was no 
Texas miracle. The last Lone Star miracle we know of was the time the 
face of Jesus appeared on a screen door in Port Neches, and that's been 
more than thirty years.

Linda McNeil is a professor at Rice University, codirector of the Rice 
Center for Education, former high school English teacher, a past vice 
president of the American Educational Research Association, and author 
of Contradictions of School Reform and numerous papers published in 
scholarly journals. In other words, not the sort of person the Bushies 
want meddling in public-education policy. After all, she has never 
published anything advocating phonics, and she has no real ties to the 
corporate world.

McNeil does use a corporate metaphor when talking about education reform 
in Texas -- in particular when describing the system the Texas Education 
Agency uses to track progress on the standardized tests our state's kids 
have been taking for about ten years. This is the system that supposedly 
authenticated the miracle in Texas public ed. McNeil likens it to a 
local company housed in a sleek corporate tower a few miles north of the 
ivory towers at Rice University.

"Enron," she said.

"You've seen newspaper accounts that explain how Enron used a single 
indicator to show how well the company was performing," McNeil said. She 
went on to explain that the average scores on Texas' standardized tests 
are like Enron's stock price -- inflated and manipulated. Profits and 
successes were reflected in stock price. Debts and losses were carried 
on a different set of books. McNeil believes that placing so much 
emphasis on kids' scores, and linking the scores to the jobs and cash 
bonuses of school administrators, corrupted the system. Just as Enron's 
focus on stock price corrupted the company by encouraging every employee 
to do everything possible to keep the stock price climbing, school 
administrators were pressured to use "any means necessary" to pump up 
test scores. Everything from replacing good curriculum with test 
practice drills to dumping weak students likely to be a liability to the 
school's ratings.

McNeil has worked with two other professors. Angela Valenzuela teaches 
in the College of Education at the University of Texas. Walt Haney is a 
displaced Texan from Corpus Christi, now on the faculty of Boston 
College. The three profs are persistent empiricists, always citing 
statistics about academic performance, always studying the effect of 
policy on the children in the classroom. (It does seem odd that Bush's 
first Texas education commissioner, Mike Moses, has taken up with these 
three education Cassandras, running around the state screaming, "The 
scores are falling!" Moses is now superintendent of schools in Dallas, a 
minority school district about to be overwhelmed by the high-stakes test 
mandated by the education law Bush pushed through Congress.)

Working together, the three professors of education found that bogus 
test scores are only one of two ugly truths about education reform in 
Texas. The other, linked to test scores, is the dropout rate -- one of 
the highest in the nation.

They started by asking why scores on the tests controlled by the Texas 
Education Agency steadily increased, while scores on national tests not 
controlled by the agency barely moved. If the state's standardized-test 
scores climbed over ten years, then scores on the Scholastic Aptitude 
Test (SAT) and the American College Testing Program (ACT) should have 
increased with them.

They didn't.

Average scores on the state standardized tests showed healthy gains. 
Average scores on the college-board SAT and ACT showed meager gains. By 
2002, after ten years of testing, students in Texas were doing great on 
the state tests. But they ranked forty-seventh nationally on 
college-exam scores. (We beat out North Carolina, Georgia, South 
Carolina, and the District of Columbia.)

The SAT and ACT scores would be even lower if the weakest students 
didn't drop out of Texas high schools.

Disappearing Children

"We disappear our kids," McNeil said, a usage normally heard in 
connection with Central American death squads. Many children -- far more 
than 50% in the cities -- who enroll in the first year of high school in 
Texas don't make it to graduation. There's an institutional incentive 
for them to leave. If test scores are low, schools are rated 
low-performing. In low-performing schools, principals lose their jobs. 
Tests as a single criterion to evaluate schools provide an incentive for 
principals to disappear weak students to keep their campus test scores 
high. (This is not just about job security and money. Most public-school 
faculties in Texas will jump at the chance to push an incompetent 
principal out the door, but teachers will also fight a system that 
drives away dedicated, competent principals working with limited 
resources and against great odds.)


The low-performing students encouraged to go quietly are mostly Latino, 
African-American, and students with limited English proficiency (LEP). 
After they leave, the Texas Education Agency cooks the books. In 2001 
the agency released dropout figures -- all under 4%. But the 
conservative Manhattan Institute came up with a dropout rate of 52%. The 
Intercultural Development Research Association, a liberal 
education-advocacy group based in San Antonio, has tracked dropout 
numbers for ten years. It says the rate is 40%, which translates into 
more than 75,000 teenagers each year. A state senator from Corpus 
Christi calls the TEA dropout numbers "treasonous." The Dallas Morning 
News reports that the feds threatened to cut dropout-prevention funds 
because the Texas formula for calculating dropouts is so inaccurate.

McNeil and her Rice University researchers found a Texas Education 
Agency accounting system that would have done Arthur Andersen proud. 
Principals desperate to keep kids away from tenth-grade exit exams 
discovered a Never-Never Land, a special place where kids never make it 
to the tenth grade and never take standard exams. All they need is a 
waiver from the state to allow kids who failed one course in the ninth 
grade to stay there. These "technical ninth-graders" sometimes stay on 
ninth-grade enrollment ledgers for three years -- if they stay in 
school. Sometimes, McNeil wrote, they're discouraged from taking the 
course they failed, which would allow them to advance.

In one Houston high school with a student body of 3,000 only 296 kids 
took the tenth-grade test. Barring fluctuating fertility rates, there 
should have been between 700 and 750 students in the tenth grade. "All 
our children will be tested. No one will be excluded," claimed Houston 
superintendent Rod Paige, the year before Bush named him secretary of 
education.

The kids who stick around for the tests aren't exactly reading Faulkner 
and solving quadratic equations. Listen to almost any teacher in the 
state of Texas and you'll hear a story about valuable classroom time 
lost to drills that prep students for the test. About art teachers 
compelled to drill a half hour each day for the test. About English 
teachers required to start every class with a drill that teaches 
students to underline the central ideas in short paragraphs. About 
testing consultants who charge a stiff fee to help principals get campus 
scores up by telling teachers to focus all their drilling efforts on 
"the bubble kids" -- the ones in the small "bubble" of scores just below 
passing. (Forget the children at the bottom -- you'll never get their 
scores anywhere close to the magic passing number.) About a small school 
district spending $20,000 on prep handbooks for the TAAS, the recently 
replaced Texas Assessment of Academic Skills.

Heard about Guerrilla TAAS ? A neat little test-attack-skill handbook 
with a camouflage cover. "Cool," say the kids. "Cami."

There's more.

The guerrilla consultants show up at schools to lead Guerrilla TAAS pep 
rallies. They wear camouflage combat fatigues. Even the principal and 
assistant principals get to suit out in camouflage -- all included in 
the price of the Guerrilla TAAS package.

"Hey, guys, we're going to teach you how to kick this test's butt."

Some miracle, huh?

Is there a papal nuncio in the house?
From BUSHWHACKED by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose
Copyright © 2003 by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose.
Published by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of Random House 
Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc.