I was reading the Washington Post this AM and saw this article. I have a legal question for any of you attorney's out there, especially Texas
District Attorney's.
“And the Houston Independent School District -- showcase of the "Texas educational miracle" that President Bush has touted as a model for the rest of the nation -- is fending off accusations that it inflated its achievements through fuzzy math.
“Austin is one of more than a dozen Houston high schools caught up in a burgeoning scandal about the reliability of their dropout statistics…. routinely, as many as half of Austin students failed to graduate, the school's reported dropout rate fell from 14.4 percent to 0.3 percent. Even a Houston school board member calls the statistic "baloney."
“If this were any other school district in the nation, few people would pay much attention. But Houston is the political springboard for U.S. Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige….(who) formed a political alliance with Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who became an ardent advocate of accountability and high-stakes testing.”Then, the article says this:
“…in 1996, …voters
turned down a proposed $390 million education bond issue.
Two years later, with the help of …public goodwill generated by steadily
improving test scores, Paige secured voter approval for
$678 million in new loans to rebuild many of the district's decrepit schools.”
I’m not a lawyer, but how is this different from a flim-flam operation? Paige used false data, and scammed the voter out of $678 million that they did not want to pay. The article is right when one comments,
"It is all phony; it's just like Enron".
Don’t you go to jail for this?
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14117-2003Nov7.html>