I hope that Sandy Kress reads this article about what happened in El Paso.

When I was in Austin, Texas, a few days ago, Kress wrote an article in the local newspaper extolling the virtues of No Child Left Behind. He boasted of dramatic test score increases since 1992 (ten years before NCLB was signed into law).

Since I am a well-known critic of that law, it may or may not have been coincidence that the article appeared on the day that I was scheduled to speak to the state’s school board members and administrators.

Sandy Kress was one of the architects of NCLB; he is currently a lobbyist for the testing giant Pearson. He was not identified as such in the newspaper.

The scandal in El Paso is shocking. Administrators pushed kids out of school to protect their test scores. In the instance described in the article, three brothers were told to drop out.

Here is an excerpt:

“In the short term, the strategy worked. Test scores improved at eight of 11 high schools. The district’s overall rating improved from “academically acceptable” in 2005 to “recognized” in 2010 – the second-highest rating possible.

“But the achievements came amid startling enrollment declines for sophomores.

“Austin High School, for instance, had 615 freshmen in 2005, but that number had dropped 40 percent by the time accountability tests were given the following school year. With the next batch of 571 freshmen, only about half were still enrolled by the time the tests were administered.

“Students with bad grades, low attendance or limited English proficiency would be held in the ninth grade and then promoted to the 11th grade. Or if they were old enough, they might be told to seek other options such as attending a charter school or obtaining their GED elsewhere. Many of them had recently transferred from nearby Juarez, Mexico.

“The whole idea, said former state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, was to make those students ‘disappear’ so they would not be counted among the students who were tested.”

Should we celebrate cheating and gaming the system? Should we give bonuses to those who cheat and don’t get caught? Do we want more of this?

NCLB is a disaster. It should be repealed before more lives are damaged. High-stakes testing is warping education.