George P. Bush, son of Jeb Bush, was elected Texas Land Commissioner last fall, starting his political career as the third generation of the family. He spoke at a school choice rally in January and said that “a majority of our students are trapped in underperforming schools.”
Charles Johnson of the Pastors for Texas Children asked Politifact to check the facts. They did and said young Bush was wrong.
Apparently he assumed that Texas needed a waiver from NCLB because very few schools had 100% proficiency. He didn’t know that every other state had the same problem. By NCLB metrics, almost every public school is a failing school.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Fourth generation–his great grandfather Prescott Bush was a Senator from Connecticut
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Beat me to it
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Maybe Texans count only the generations in Texas political careers–
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Dr. Ravitch,
I believe he’s actually a fourth generation Bush politician since Prescott Bush, George H.W. Bush’s father, was a US Senator for about 10 years.
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Wait, I thought we don’t have dynasties in the US?
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Barbara said it best…we’ve already had enough Bushes.
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He’s also the direct descendant of President Franklin Pierce (through Barbara Bush’s lineage).
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Aaargh, another Bush! To paraphrase Cicero, “Famiglia Arbustus delenda est!”
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Yes Prescott Bush was in the U.S. Senate.
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How about this blast from the past?
How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power (referring to the aforementioned Prescott)
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar
Apples never fall far…
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“Bushes all the way down”
The World sits in a Bush
And that sits in another
If shove should come to push
The other has a brother
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Don’t beat around the Bush hiding in the Bushes.
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Actually George P Bush is the 4th generation. Going backwards a generation at a time, you have Jeb and George W. The generation before that you have “Poppy” – George H. S. Bush. But don’t forget his father, Sen. Prescott Bush of CT, a Republican who was one of the first to openly stand up to Joe McCarthy.
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Wait..wait..wait.. I thought Uncle George performed the TEXAS MIRACLE and made all Texas Public Schools great? Isn’t that the selling point of NCLB? That Uncle George SAVED Texas??? Little George P. is messing with Texas and Uncle George’s legacy.
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Thanks, John, for reminding us of the Texas MIRACLE. How could the majority of Texas kids be in failing schools post-NCLB?
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Most all K-12 schools in all states are failing the NCLB law mandate for at least two reasons.(1) K-12 students are not promoted by proficiency, as the NCLB law mandates. By the way, high stakes tests are simply tests that promote students by proficiency, which the public and tax-payers expect, but the K-12 system does not seem to understand nor know how to deliver.
(2)The K-12 system is not using the many of the latest innovations required by the NCLB law. Some of these include diagnostic-prescriptive, norm and criterion reference exams with printouts; learning textbooks, the RISC model of promoting students by proficiency independent of age, the Khan Academy Internet model, and the Kumon mastery math/ English learning model, to name a few. If many of these innovations were understood and applied effectively, at the K-12 levels, all K-12 students could be promoted by proficiency as the NCLB mandates. Unfortunately the state of Texas also omits these innovations and therefore also fails the law.
Obviously, a new model is needed for K-12 based upon the latest innovations that allows promotion by proficiency CHOICES independent of age and attendance. However, it seems no one is really serious about educating all K-12 students using these innovations- at least this is what current K-12 practices and blogs suggest.
Unfortunately currently there does not seem to be a mechanism to formally debate this discussion in public and include replication opportunities to support the above comments. Former Ron Reagan made a rather interesting and insightful comment in this regard:
” Trust, but verify” ekangas @juno.com.
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Schools and teachers don’t “underperform” students do, and maybe because the metric used to “judge” them is invalid, unreliable, and unrealistic. As a teacher I “can lead a horse to water, but cannot make it drink”, so too is the school’s ability to “make” a student do well on any assessment that they themselves put little value to. Many students are not motivated to do well on broad standardized tests because they see little relevance in them, or realize if they do poorly that does not mean that they are “losers”, or the school is “underperforming”, and that they can still move forward and be successful in life, regardless of their test scores.
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