Education 'miracle' has a math problem

[candy331]

might be dupe

Are all the books cooked now a days? Will it soon come to the point where we can't believe anything anymore? Who cooked these books?


Top Stories - washingtonpost.com

Education 'Miracle' Has a Math Problem
Sat Nov 8, 6:31 AM ET Add Top Stories - washingtonpost.com to My Yahoo!


By Michael Dobbs, Washington Post Staff Writer

HOUSTON -- When the state of Texas bestowed "exemplary" status on Austin High School in August 2002, ecstatic administrators compared the honor to winning the Super Bowl. There was more cheering and pompom-waving a few weeks later when a private foundation honored Houston for having the nation's best urban school district.

Just a year later, the high school has been downgraded to "low-performing," the lowest possible rating. And the Houston Independent School District -- showcase of the "Texas educational miracle" that President Bush (news - web sites) 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. During a decade in which, 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. He was school
superintendent here before moving to Washington, and what originally
began as an argument over dropout data has expanded into a debate about the administration's entire approach to educational reform.

Opponents of the Houston system of business-style accountability have seized on the dropout scandal as evidence that some of Paige's most
cherished accomplishments -- including narrowing the "achievement gap" between white and minority students -- rest on false or
manipulated data. They have raised questions about the validity of test results that purport to show spectacular progress by Houston students in reading, writing and arithmetic.

"It is all phony; it's just like Enron," said Linda McNeil, a
professor of education at Houston's Rice University, referring to the bankrupt Houston-based energy services company that boosted its stock price by covering up losses. "Enron was concerned about appearances, not real economic results. That pretty much describes what we have
been doing to our children in Houston."



Paige, in an interview, called such remarks

more

[papau]

1. The Bush do not improve education - just avoid "social promotion" scam

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14117-2003Nov7.html

First they change the drop out rate by saying kids are transferring to private schools:

Sharpstown administrators had changed the withdrawal codes for at least 30 students to make it appear that no one had dropped out in the 2001-2002 school year. The television station tracked down one such student, Juana Juarez, behind the counter of a local Wendy's. Juarez had informed Sharpstown officials that she was leaving school to find work, but they changed her record to show she had transferred to a private school.

Then reward as President the Houston School Superintendent con man, Paige, who found a way to move test scores - In 1995, at the end of the first year of Paige's tenure as superintendent, only 26 percent of Austin's 10th-grade students passed the Texas math test. By 2000-2001, the year Paige retired, 99 percent of 10th-graders were passing.

And the way to do this is not to teach better - just do not let kids that may not pass take the test - all in the name of avoiding "social promotion".

..the Texas test is administered in the sophomore year - Austin High, had 1,160 students in the ninth grade and 281 in the 10th grade. In the 2001-2002 school year, the size of the ninth-grade class in Texas was 1.6 times the size of the 12th-grade class. In Houston (Bush buddy Paige's district) - there were 21/2 times as many ninth-graders as 12th-graders. The alternative, said district spokesman Terry Abbott, is the discredited system of "social promotion" that pushes students "through a pipeline until they fall out the other end."