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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—which will end up being $12 billion because our comptrollers always lie about deficits. Or tell the truth in $300 million increments. 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 percent 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 percent 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 percent 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 percent 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 retakes. 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.*