The Lie of the Texas Miracle

So, the Nation's Report Card for 2005 has just been released.
The most striking thing about the national report card is how it is just total bullshit.
Additionally, the politicians that employ these so-called measures of accountability are cynically exploiting schoolchildren to pad their accomplishments, as was seen in Virginia in the last decade. First you introduce a bullshit test that no one is prepared for. All the results are totally crappy, and the politician who introduced says, "Look at the state of our schools! The previous administration failed Our Children! Blah blah blah!" The next year teachers teach to the test (and/or they weaken the standards) and scores dramatically improve. The politician then says, "It's an education miracle! Look at what my administration did!" Meanwhile, by any meaningful metric of success nothing significant has changed, except the kids have gotten better at taking pointless standardized tests.
This is the source of the so-called "Texas Education Miracle" that Bush used in 2000 to represent himself as a champion of education. In fact, the Texas educational miracle was one of the greater frauds perpetuated against the American people by a state government. Bush's accountability scheme, rather than actually changing anything, focused on pointless measurement and threats of loss of funding rather than real improvement. The result? Texas schools hide their massive dropout rates rather than honestly addressing them. Bush claims a reduction in drop-outs from 40% to 1% in 4 years, but they couldn't hide the data for long. An independent study of graduation rates by the conservative Manhattan Institute found the real graduation rate in Texas is somewhere between 57-67%. Real success in education usually takes a decade to appear, and any claim to the contrary should be immediately suspect.
Check out this map of a real metric of educational success. The lesson? Try to educate your kids in the hard-core red states and there is a high probability they will never graduate.


Also see: Michael
Dobbs, Education Miracle Has a Math Problem:Bush Critics Cite Disputed Houston Data, The Washington Post, November 8, 2003.
And Dan Rather, The Texas Miracle™, 60 Minutes II, August 25th, 2004.
posted by Rev. Dr. at 8:41 PM, permalink,