Hey, I’m a historian and it’s my job to have a long memory, but I know that many people don’t remember how the whole nation got stuck with this crazy No Child Left Behind law.
Back in 2000, when George W. Bush was running for president, he talked about the Texas miracle. There was a secret formula, he said, and it was really simple: Test every child every year. If scores go up, the school gets honored, maybe even a bonus. And if the scores drop or go flat, the school is humiliated.
How easy. Testing! Accountability! And look what happened, or so he said: The test scores went up, the dropout rate went down, and the achievement gap was closing.
That sounded so totally wonderful (and almost cost-free except for buying lots more tests) that Congress decided everyone should do it and they passed NCLB. The law ended up on President Bush’s desk in January 2002, and he proudly signed it, with Democrats and Republicans together behind him.
True bipartisanship.
Now we look around at the wreckage and we see that lots of children are still left behind.
What happened? Here is a good place to find out. There was no Texas miracle.
When I was growing up in Houston, we used to read a funny little book called “Texas Brags,” which contained all the crazy boasts that Texans made, not expecting anyone to believe them. You know, we’re the biggest and the best and we have the most and the largest of everything. And you better believe it!
Hey, folks, here’s the inside scoop. We were not serious! It was a tall tale.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thanks, posted link on FaceBook. I keep wondering when people will finally understand that the “policy-makers” who cook up this farce are sending their children to private schools that don’t engage in farce. We’re eating our seed-corm.
I live in Texas, so you are ‘preaching to the choir”. I can’t stand living in ‘Bush’ country and people need to realize how he royally screwed up our country and our kids. I’ve only lived here 8.5 years, and I actually became a certified EC-6 teacher in this state, but I haven’t been hired in the 20 months I’ve been certified. I am sorry I moved my kids from NJ to TX. Thankfully I’m teaching them the things that are lacking here.
Thanks for bringing up the fact that NCLB was bipartisan legislation. Ted Kennedy was a major sponsor, and I read a column from him which implied that his only problem with the legislation was that it was underfunded. I think we are a little late in realizing that many Democrats had a role in what we are experiencing today as well. We have to educate politicians on both sides and not make the assumption that they will be on our side because they once were on our side.
Diane, after you suggested it this week, I Googled Michael Marder and examined his visualizations of education, but I saw a lot of graphs demonstrating increasing test scores in Texas, without any mention of the decreased rigor of tests and lower pass scores. Shouldn’t people be advised to view that info through this lens?
Been a lot of tall tales on the supposed success of the reformists efforts to improve education. Bet there is more than a shelf full.
Wasn’t this the guy who “cherry-picked” intelligence? When will people STOP trusting the Govt. and put the trust back in the parents and educators?
Keep allowing the govt. to dictate and mandate education in this country and what do you really expect?
Ah, yes…I remember it well. The federal legislation that spawned New Jersey’s HQT (Highly Qualified Teacher) requirements were built on a fairy tale. It’s kind of like “The Texas Miracle” was the educational equivalent of “Weapons of Mass Destruction” except that this time, WMDs really existed.
Diane I need to see this article that you refer to in this blog and the link is no longer working. Please can you reply with the exact url. When I click on this link it goes nowhere.
Thanks
The link works for me.
Here is the article:
Slouching Toward Bethlehem – Part 1
Posted on July 30, 2012 by SARASWATI – 1 Comment ↓
NCLB – the brain child of former Houston ISD superintendent Ron Paige and former Dallas ISD board president Sandy Kress – might never have been forced on the nation if the true dropout rates of either of these “reformers” had been exposed when they were still presiding over the largest school districts in Texas. As Houston ISD Superintendent, Paige cowed his principals by tying their jobs and potential bonuses to campus dropout numbers, numbers which principals promptly faked. The Houston Miracle evaporated when it became known that 5500 Houston kids had been disappeared during Paige’s term, but the practice of payola for test scores stayed around and so did massive cheating, making its latest appearances in Washington, D.C., Atlanta and El Paso.
Kress, crowning himself the Dallas king of school data, didn’t notice from the vantage point of his board seat in 1995 that only 4,674 Dallas seniors graduated when the freshmen class contained 13,553 students. Soon to be school board president Kress, always the master of the known universe, saw nothing strange in Dallas ISD’s reported dropout figure of 3.1%. Not to be outdone by the Houston Miracle, Dallas ISD’s reported dropout figure took another drop in 1996 to only 1.8% when the ninth grade class was just as large and the number of graduating seniors just as small. No one at Texas Education Agency read the Dallas dropout figures and called them out as a hoax. The Dallas Morning News, always the helpful daily Babbitt, gleefully reported the lowered dropout rate without even blushing.
No credible educator would have devised a rating system for American schools where every public school had a decade to make 100% of their students “proficient” in reading/language arts and math as demonstrated on state tests given once a year. Nationally normed tests that have traditionally measured on-level math and reading would never give those results, so each state made their own versions of skills tests and maintained the ability to sit behind the curtain and make Oz work by pressing various leavers of difficulty and pass rates. The endeavor from the onset was illogical and open to massive cheating and manipulation. As students move through educational systems, they become more different, not more similar.
After a decade of black box metrics, the accountability train ran most low income students straight off an educational cliff. They were not college ready nor did they have any particular set of workplace skills. Middle class parents, foaming over the loss of control of instructional practices in their neighborhood schools, knew their kids were being forced into the same educational practices that retard the growth of low income students. Upper class parents simply wrote a check and escaped to privates that gave their kids another leg up the social ladder.
Mandating state tests that could be manipulated to build a politician’s reputation (Bloomberg), pushing gifted students to regress to an average established by the state, and completely disregarding the individual needs of individual studentsis the federal system known as No Child Left Behind, measured in part by AYP or Adequate Yearly Progress. By government decree, based on the hucksterism of two career politicos, all public school children will be the same by the year 2014.
No one except those fueled by pure hubris, delusion or kickbacks from Pearson would tie federal aid to poor children to results from a test bank that generates the same questions for special education students, students who may have English as a second language, the homeless, and the wealthiest of the academically gifted. No thinking person would give these shabbily constructed tests the power to crater not only public schools but their neighborhoods. No ethical attorney would foist a half dead company, on the edge of bankruptcy in the UK, into the role of arbitrator of a flaky ratings system that endangers public education.
Developing test banks of drill and kill questions to measure “proficiency” for the student with an 80 I.Q. while feeding the same questions to the student with an I.Q. of 160 is an academic Orwellian nightmare. No sane person would argue that public schools need to shut down for a month each year to create a revenue stream for Pearson. And no smell test would ever have allowed the self-ordained father of accountability any credibility in school reform while he totes water for Pearson, but tote he did and still does.
Empowered with phony dropout data and state tests correlated to little actual academic growth, Paige and Kress convinced politicians who were not known for deep thinking that standardized testing once a year, with children categorized on racial or ethnic or special education or low income or limited English demographics, would lead to equal educational outcomes. This notion, ridiculous but unquestioned, has now burrowed so deeply into the psyches of career politicians that it resembles a late stage brain parasite.
Politicians and the press were equally feeble in raising the skirts on the original Miracle. Texas, with its flim flam data, became the model for federal legislation that would require all public schools to test their students annually from third to eighth grade and once in high school on math and reading/language arts to meet AYP or Adequate Yearly Progress. That one day of testing would determine the worth each public school and later, each child, and yet later, the worth and integrity of their teachers. In addition, each elementary school had to meet attendance standards. Each secondary school had to meet graduation rates which all states fudged until 2007 when the feds started counting bodies walking across graduation stages. A sudden uptick in Dallas seniors completing high school was the result of the new AYP guidelines and had nothing to do with the former superintendent or letters locked in vaults.
TEA, the earliest player in the data game, knew developing easy state tests would make it more likely that Texas schools could “meet AYP” each year, even if the federal government demanded a higher passing rate for each school than TEA demanded for an Acceptable state rating. TEA held another ace because the Agency determined the cut rate for passing on each state test. A couple of years ago, the Agency decided counting kids who might have the potential to pass at some point (as counted by their passing a test totally unrelated) would be a step toward a student growth model and a way of falsely boosting their numbers. Pearson, brought under the taxpayer tent by Kress, made millions on the bogus model of projecting test success in later years. The state legislature put an end to that fiasco in the last session, but Pearson’s positioning itself as America’s version of education equity continues sucking billions annually from taxpayer dollars. Kress, his own children tucked away in private schools which are unsoiled by NCLB, continues to lobby for Pearson because he believes in state accountability testing—for other people’s children.
AYP in Texas was based on reading and math TAKS scores at grades 3-8 and in grade 10, but the passing rates on state tests to meet AYP scaled faster than the TEA pass rates to be labeled an Acceptable school. Neither TEA nor any state politician has the federal expectation of 100% of students on level in math and reading by 2014, aside from the dishonesty inherent in the design of state tests and their measurement of “on level.” At this late stage in the AYP game, most schools in many states will not be able to meet AYP because they are out of runway. The end is near. Robert Scott, on his way out of the matrix, acknowledged that Texas was ground zero for creating the monster that now must be fed with extravagant amounts of money and school time and teachers and students. Pearson inhales larger and larger sums of the country’s educational resources because no politician has the guts to simply call time out. Pearson is not God or country or the American flag or freedom or democracy or the Constitution.
Arne Duncan is currently in a dither passing out AYP waivers for new accountability systems in many states, even those not adopting the federal Common Core standards. Texas has a data system in place to meet federal guidelines for these waivers and get off the AYP treadmill, but none of the major players has even considered the obvious. American education has gone down the rabbit hole and digging a deeper hole is insanity. Only a wise, talented group of Texas superintendents has demonstrated the integrity to publically insist there is something both sinister and stupid in what will become over time a trillion dollar fiasco that accomplishes very little.
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‹ That Which Will Not Be NamedSlouching Toward Bethlehem – Part 2 ›
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Martha V. Bowman
I’ve always known this, but at the time of enactment of NCLB (as I call it-No Child Left Untested), most people just accepted what was published with no thought to investigating these ‘wonderful’ statistics. Those who did investigate were ignored because this was a new idea and it sounded good. Teachers know that formal testing is NOT the only measurement. Not all children work the same, nor test the same. As a former (retired) teacher, I know of many children who are very intelligent, but who are petrified of testing and consequently fail each and every time. They fall by the wayside and cause ‘failure’ in schools in spite of being able to contribute significantly to society. And what about the children in Special classes? To test them on chronological levels rather than cognitive levels is a disservice to everyone. They are in those special classes because they have significant disabilities. The dropout rate as discussed in the article was something deliberately and willfully ignored to the detriment of all children in this country when testing as prescribed by Paige and Bush became the law of the land. The only winners in that game were the testing companies who had free rein to develop the tests and sell them to school districts. By the way, the development of those test is another nightmare scenario, as they had little to do with appropriate grade level testing of different subject areas.
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The Inside Scoop on the Texas Miracle « Diane Ravitch’s blog says:
August 11, 2012 at 5:56 am
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