Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [36]
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.
“We disappear our kids,” McNeil said, a usage normally heard in connection with Central American death squads. Many children—far more than 50 percent 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 percent. But the conservative Manhattan Institute came up with a dropout rate of 52 percent. 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 percent, 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