Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [35]
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.
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 text scores. Everything from replacing good curriculum with text 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