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-- Children Being Left Behind Yet?
Children Being Left Behind Yet?
Seems that Bush Co. doesn't find his education programs are interesting enough to keep them funded:
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| The Kids Left Behind By BOB HERBERT He was going to be the education president, and during the campaign in 2000 he hugged kids from coast to coast, crowing about the education miracle in Texas and promising to spread the Texas model nationwide. He said he was a different kind of Republican, a man of honor and compassion who would look out for the kids. It was all smoke, of course � photo-ops in a cynical campaign. You knew it was smoke when the "compassionate" George W. Bush put Dick Cheney on the ticket, a former congressman who had voted against funding for Head Start, against subsidizing school lunches and against federal aid for college students. In other words, against kids. Next week the Senate will take up the education budget proposed for next year by the White House and Senate Republicans. From the perspective of those who are pro-children, it's loaded with bad news. Not only does the bill fall far short of the photo-op promises Mr. Bush made to provide funding for programs to improve public education, but it would actually cut $200 million from the president's very own (and relentlessly touted) No Child Left Behind Act. We're talking about a real cut � $200 million less than is being spent on this already underfunded initiative. The proposed cuts, according to Congressional officials who have studied the budget proposal, would eliminate a high school dropout prevention program, would prevent more than 32,000 children with limited proficiency in English from participating in federally supported English instruction programs, would drastically cut high school equivalency and college assistance for migrant children, and would end the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship program. The proposal would also cut more than 20,000 teachers from professional training programs, despite Mr. Bush's promise that teachers would "get the training they need to raise educational standards." And it would completely eliminate training for teachers in computer technology. Among those who are steaming over the proposal is Senator Edward Kennedy, one of a number of Democrats who gave the president the kind of good-faith, high-profile, bipartisan support that was crucial to the passage of No Child Left Behind. Here is what Senator Kennedy will say on the Senate floor next week: "The bill before us contains harsh and unacceptable cuts to education that will hurt families, students, schools and teachers throughout the country. The president and Congress promised to reform and improve public education . . . but if we pass the legislation before us as is, the message again to parents and teachers and schools will be, `You're on your own.' " Senator Kennedy also plans to stress that the president is prone to making promises that are never kept: "A pattern is emerging. Each year the president picks a large area to work in a bipartisan fashion and promise compassion and help. In the past that area has been education. This year, it is the global AIDS crisis, and we hope that the promised support will happen. But on education, the promises made consistently have been broken." It's hard to believe the president ever intended to adequately fund the No Child Left Behind Act. Mr. Bush fights ferociously for the things he really cares about : enormous tax cuts for the wealthy, for example, or launching a war against Iraq. He has never showed a similar passion for improving the public schools. The administration tried to cut funding for the No Child Left Behind Act less than two weeks after the president signed it into law. The tax cuts and the ever-increasing costs of the war are submerging the nation in a sea of red ink, and the hopes of millions of school-age youngsters are sinking right along with it. As for the Texas education miracle � more smoke. The largest and most frequently praised district, Houston, is being monitored by the state after an audit showed that more than half of the 5,500 students who left school in the 2000-2001 year should have been counted as dropouts, but were not. President Bush was apparently serious about bringing the Texas model to the nation. He made the superintendent of the Houston school district the nation's education secretary. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/28/o...print&position= |
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| "I find it difficult to comprehend how you reach 100 percent proficiency," said Kansas state Sen. John Vratil. The Republican sharply questioned the law's goals of ensuring that all students meet new standards by 2014, particularly when it comes to students with developmental disabilities or poor English skills. |
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| Gains in Houston Schools: How Real Are They? By Diana Jean Schemo and Ford Fesseden New York Times Wednesday 03 December 2003 As a student at Jefferson Davis High here, Rosa Arevelo seemed the "Texas miracle" in motion. After years of classroom drills, she passed the high school exam required for graduation on her first try. A program of college prep courses earned her the designation "Texas scholar." At the University of Houston, though, Ms. Arevelo discovered the distance between what Texas public schools called success and what she needed to know. Trained to write five-paragraph "persuasive essays" for the state exam, she was stumped by her first writing assignment. She failed the college entrance exam in math twice, even with a year of remedial algebra. At 19, she gave up and went to trade school. "I had good grades in high school, so I thought I could do well in college," Ms. Arevelo said. "I thought I was getting a good education. I was shocked." In recent years, Texas has trumpeted the academic gains of Ms. Arevelo and millions more students largely on the basis of a state test, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, or TAAS. As a presidential candidate, Texas's former governor, George W. Bush, contended that Texas's methods of holding schools responsible for student performance had brought huge improvements in passing rates and remarkable strides in eliminating the gap between white and minority children. The claims catapulted Houston's superintendent, Rod Paige, to Washington as education secretary and made Texas a model for the country. The education law signed by President Bush in January 2002, No Child Left Behind, gives public schools 12 years to match Houston's success and bring virtually all children to academic proficiency. But an examination of the performance of students in Houston by The New York Times raises serious doubts about the magnitude of those gains. Scores on a national exam that Houston students took alongside the Texas exam from 1999 to 2002 showed much smaller gains and falling scores in high school reading. Compared with the rest of the country, Houston's gains on the national exam, the Stanford Achievement Test, were modest. The improvements in middle and elementary school were a fraction of those depicted by the Texas test and were similar to those posted on the Stanford test by students in Los Angeles. Over all, a comparison of the performance of Houston students who took the Stanford exam in 2002 and in 1999 showed most did not advance in relation to their counterparts across the nation. More than half of them either remained in the same place or lost ground in reading and math. "Is it better or worse than what's going on anywhere else?" said Edward H. Haertel, a professor of education at Stanford University. "On average it looks like it's not." Stanford University has no relationship to the test. In an interview, Dr. Paige defended Texas's system, saying that it had gradually raised the standards for success over the last 20 years. "Texas measures far more than minimal skills," he said. "The bar is far above what other districts use." But questions about Houston's accomplishments are increasing. In June, the Texas Education Agency found rampant undercounting of school dropouts. Houston school officials have also been accused of overstating how many high school graduates were college bound and of failing to report violent crimes in schools to state authorities. The Houston officials strenuously defend the district's record. Kathryn Sanchez, head of assessment for Houston's schools, said students were doing well on both the Texas exam and the Stanford test, given the city's large number of poor and minority students. Ms. Sanchez said that Houston students had also done well on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally mandated test widely referred to as "the nation's report card." On that test, fourth graders in Houston and New York outdid children in four other cities in writing, to score at the national average. Fourth graders in New York and Houston also led children in other cities in reading, yet fell short of the national average. Of all six cities, however, Houston excluded the most children with limited English from taking the national assessment, and some researchers suggest that removing such students may have helped raise Houston's score. But in interviews, Houston school officials acknowledge that the progress in the elementary grades peters out in high school. About 13,600 eighth graders in 1998 dwindled to fewer than 8,000 high school graduates. Though 88 percent of Houston's student body is black and Latino, only a few hundred minority students leave high school "college ready," according to state figures. Miracle or Mirage? With its own exam to measure pupil achievement, Texas managed to show educational progress over the last decade on a scale rarely, if ever, achieved before. But as the state's paradigm for school accountability became law for the rest of the nation, the authenticity of Texas's accomplishments has become a major question in education policy. The Stanford test provides a useful contrast to the state exam, at least for Houston. More than 75,000 students in grades 3 through 8 and grade 10 took the state exam as well as the Stanford test from 1999 to 2002. The Times analyzed performances on these tests, excluding students in special education, and had educational testing experts review the results. The data were obtained under the state's open records act by George Scott, president of the Tax Research Association of Houston and Harris County, a taxpayers group. "I don't think there was a miracle," said Robert L. Linn, co-director of the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at the University of Colorado, who reviewed the calculations. "There were some good positive results, but not extraordinary results like TAAS seemed to show." The modest improvements in Houston have implications for the national debate. "If you anticipate that you can have the gains shown on TAAS � and that's what No Child Left Behind would be requiring in many states � that's not going to be likely to happen, based on this," Dr. Linn said. The Times analysis of performance on the Stanford Achievement Test and the Texas exam shows this: Houston students improved from 1999 to 2002 in most grades, but at only a fraction of the rate portrayed by the state exam. Using a widely employed statistical measure that allows different kinds of tests to be compared called effect size, the gains in the average scores on the Stanford test were about a third of the average gain in the TAAS scores. Even students with the poorest skills posted high scores on the Texas test. In reading, a passing score of 70 on the test was the equivalent to scores below the 30th percentile in national ranking on the Stanford test in every grade. In 10th grade, passing the state exam was equivalent to the fifth percentile in the national ranking. While the Houston gains on the Stanford test in some grades were large enough to be considered significant in educational testing, the city was not making much headway when compared with national averages. Some 57 percent of Houston students who took the math test in 1999 and 2002, and 51 percent of those who took the reading test, saw their standing relative to children around the country either fall or remain the same. On the Stanford tests, the average reading scores for Houston students of all races in grades 9 through 11 have actually dropped since 1999. By contrast, the reading scores for 10th graders on the Texas exam � the only high school grade in which the state test is given � showed a large gain over the same period. The achievement gap between whites and minorities, which Houston authorities have argued has nearly disappeared on the Texas exam, remains huge on the Stanford test. The ranking of the average white student was 36 points higher than that of the average black student in 1999 and fell slightly, to 34 points, in 2002. "This says that the progress on TAAS is probably overstated, possibly by quite a margin," said Daniel Koretz of the Harvard School of Education, who also reviewed The Times's analysis, "And when all is said and done, Houston looks average or below average." Tougher Texas Test While Texas minority students have made gains on the federal government's mandated national assessment test of reading and math, they were already largely ahead of the average scores of minority students from around the country before the current Texas accountability system began in 1993. In Houston, the share of college-bound high school graduates that the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board deemed "college ready" fell to 28.5 percent, or 977 students in 2001, from 33.7 percent, or 1,155 students, in 2000, according to the latest figures available. The board counts only graduates who seek admission to public institutions of higher education in Texas, and says another 10 to 15 percent may seek admission elsewhere. But many here saw the replacement of the Texas exam last spring with a tougher exam as the most stinging indictment of the test. On the new test, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS, race gaps widened, and passing rates fell. Officials here now say that TAAS was only a test of "minimal skills," paving the way for ratcheting up standards with a new exam. Dr. Paige contends that the TAAS and Stanford tests could not be compared because the Texas test gauges mastery of the Texas curriculum while the Stanford test measures a more general notion of what children should know in a given grade. But education researchers disagreed. "These two tests ought to be telling the same story, and they're telling different stories," said Dr. Haertel, of Stanford University. Dr. Paige also argued that statistical anomalies in the results on the Texas test made comparisons impossible. But testing experts who examined those anomalies said that, if anything, they would reduce the disparities between the two tests. Watching Children Struggle In one way or another, Jo Arevelo, Rosa's mother, has watched each of her children struggle through an educational system that was focused tightly on producing high test scores on state exams. Last summer, Ms. Arevelo tutored her youngest daughter, 10-year-old Angelica, in spelling. Because the state exam does not test spelling, Angelica's teacher never got to it, Ms. Arevelo said one recent afternoon. Earlier that day, her son, Joseph, took the preparatory exam for the SAT college entrance test, but like many other children that day, he left the exam in frustration � mystified by vocabulary words like parallelism and euphemism, words he had never encountered in school. Patricia Anderson, a veteran social studies teacher in Houston, said she was not surprised. Noticing that her high school students could not answer questions after reading passages in their textbooks, she began giving them a vocabulary test at the fourth grade level. Typically, she said, "They flunk it." "We're all very very frustrated, because all these great scores are coming out of the elementary schools, and when they get to high school it's not happening," Ms. Anderson said. "They do not have the skills they need." It was not always like this. Many parents welcomed the accountability system that the Houston district pioneered in the 1980's and early 1990's. It was a way, they reasoned, to force schools in poor neighborhoods not to write off their children. And in some places, it seemed to work, said Rene Barrios, lead organizer for the Metropolitan Organization, a chapter of a group that monitors public services. But in many other places, Ms. Barrios said, the system became the single most important measure of school success and the test itself, for many teachers, became the curriculum. "The whole system has been taken over by the test," she said. Rosa Arevelo, who graduated from Davis High with a B average, tried to keep pace in college. She made flash cards to help her remember what she studied. She had never learned how to take notes in high school, so at her lectures in college, she took down everything the teacher said. Her textbook looks as if it is filled with neon lights: entire paragraphs are highlighted in bars of bright pink and yellow. In the unrelenting array of information, she could not tell what mattered. "When you get to college," she said, "you're just supposed to know. But nobody ever taught us." http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...DAB0994DB404482 |
Re: Children Being Left Behind Yet?
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| Originally posted by MisterOpus1 Seems that Bush Co. doesn't find his education programs are interesting enough to keep them funded |
Re: Re: Children Being Left Behind Yet?
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| Originally posted by Yoepus I must have been mistaken, I could have sworn it was Congress's role to decide the budget. |
More consequences of NoChildLeftBehind
The foreseen consequences of No Child Left Behind - leave the low-income students behind to boost up scores for everyone else.
This is nothing shy of a travesty. It is absolutely f$cking pathetic, and it's being seen in my city and state.
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| Funding cut for low-income students Title I federal money reduced 8.5% in Lawrence By Terry Rombeck, Journal-World Wednesday, April 7, 2004 The federal government is poised to cut $4.4 million in funds for poor Kansas children even as the number of such children is skyrocketing. The decrease in Title I funds, designed to provide extra reading and math instruction to schools in poor areas, reflects new population data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Kansas is one of 11 states that will see decreases next school year, according to preliminary figures. But educators in the state say there is still great demand for Title I services, especially as the federal government strengthens its requirements on student test results. "It's a major hit in that we're trying to juxtapose that against the increasing accountability with No Child Left Behind legislation," said Janice Nicklaus, executive director of educational programming and instruction for Lawrence public schools. "This tends to water down the services and tends to reduce the capacity we have to serve these children." Overall, Kansas' share of the funds will decrease 5 percent, from $87 million to $82.7 million. The Lawrence district's cut is about 8.5 percent, from $1.79 million to $1.63 million. Nationally, Title I spending hit a record $12.3 billion for the coming year, up more than $650 million in one year. In estimates for next year's Title I funds, the U.S. Department of Education used 2000 Census data to calculate allocations to states. The numbers apparently show other states have a greater demand for the money than Kansas, said Bill Hagerman, director of state and federal programs for the Kansas Department of Education. "It's a distribution issue -- how do we sit in the distribution of poor students?" he said. "The unfortunate part of this is we're using data that's pre-9-11. There may be some changes that affect that distribution." Free use of schools may end (03-31-04) 6News video: District looks to city for possible budget help (3-29-04) In Kansas, 179,235 students, or 35 percent of total enrollment, qualified for the federal free- and reduced-lunch program this year, one measure of poverty. That's up from 130,560, or 27 percent, 10 years ago. The Lawrence district has seen a similar increase. This year, 2,944 students, or 29 percent of enrollment, are on free and reduced lunches. That's up from 2,136 students, or 27 percent, in the 1993-1994 school year. Growing gap "I think this is really a very serious thing the federal government is doing," said Gary Brunk, executive director of Kansas Action for Children. "One of the problems we need to deal with in Kansas is that there is this growing gap between low-income kids and higher-income kids. Cutting Title I money will very easily have the consequences of making that achievement gap even greater. I think this is a tragedy." The Lawrence district uses Title I money to hire at least one math and one reading teacher at seven schools in low-income areas -- New York, Kennedy, Pinckney, Woodlawn, Hillcrest and Broken Arrow elementary schools and Central Junior High School. Students with low test scores are identified to work with the teachers. Nicklaus said a cut in funds might mean some of those schools wouldn't receive all Title I services, that teachers could be laid off or that some teachers would be required to serve more than one school. Kansas lawmakers act Several federal lawmakers are lobbying the U.S. Department of Education to change its allocation of Title I money before issuing final figures in early summer. Kansas Sens. Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts, Republicans, and Rep. Dennis Moore, a Democrat, are among those who have signed a letter written by Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., urging the department to reconsider. They argue the data used by the department doesn't accurately reflect current economic situations in districts affected by the cuts. "Federal funding shortfalls combined with increased mandates are making the job of local school districts harder in a time when state budget is also facing deficits," said Christie Appelhanz, a spokeswoman for Moore. "(Moore) is greatly concerned that such drastic funding shortfalls will leave schools and students unprepared to meet the requirements of this new law and lead many schools to be unnecessarily labeled �failing,' thus undermining confidence in local schools." But Todd Jones, a budget official with the U.S. Department of Education, said he didn't think reconsideration was likely. "We have not heard from anyone who has provided a substantive explanation for why the numbers shouldn't be adopted," he said.  http://www.ljworld.com/section/schools/story/166564 |
Hmmm, seems that the above article sounds eerily familiar to Bush's Houston-based education model which NCLB was based on:
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| Education 'Miracle' Has a Math Problem Bush Critics Cite Disputed Houston Data By Michael Dobbs Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, November 8, 2003; Page A01 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 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 "inflammatory, very unfair." He vigorously defended his record as Houston school superintendent between 1994 and 2000, saying the criticism came from people who believe it is "fundamentally wrong" to measure student achievement and who have a "vested interest" in preserving a dysfunctional status quo. During his tenure, Paige formed a political alliance with Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who became an ardent advocate of accountability and high-stakes testing. After Bush was elected president, Paige's ideas became the inspiration for the administration's "No Child Left Behind" plan, aimed at raising educational standards nationwide. Schools now face penalties for failing to show improvement in such things as dropout rates and reading scores. Conceding that individual "indiscretions" may have occurred in a school system that serves more than 200,000 students, Paige described the Houston Independent School District as "the most evaluated school district in the history of America." He said he places great stock in the credibility of an accountability system that demands quantifiable results from administrators, teachers and children. "The whole system for me rode on integrity," Paige said. The Houston accountability controversy reflects a rift that cuts to the heart of the debate about the future of American education. Paige and other proponents of high-stakes testing say it is scandalous that many American children lack basic academic skills, and they contend this can be remedied by an emphasis on bottom-line results. Skeptics say Paige's reforms are causing a dumbing-down of the curriculum and douse any spark of creativity in the classroom in a flood of dubious data. Management Techniques Springtime is testing season for the 200,000 or so students who attend Houston public schools, and it is approached with the kind of enthusiasm normally reserved for sporting events. There are pep rallies and marching bands, and results are blared from billboards and bumper stickers. The tests determine whether students advance to the next grade, whether teachers are promoted and whether administrators earn annual bonuses. Although the system of high-stakes testing predated his appointment as school superintendent, Paige quickly became a symbol of the accountability movement. A former college education dean, Paige joined forces with local business leaders who favored a results-oriented approach to education that included rewards for success and penalties for failure. Soon after he became superintendent, he introduced a system of one-year contracts for school administrators, effectively tying their job security to the accomplishment of measurable goals. In revamping the school district, Paige said, he spent a lot of time studying the works of management gurus at the Houston-based American Productivity and Quality Center, which provides training courses for executives of Fortune 500 companies. By applying modern management techniques to the school system, Paige said he could explode "the conventional wisdom that big school districts could not work . . . that they were crime-ridden, underperforming and overexpensive." The low point for Houston schools came in 1996, when voters turned down a proposed $390 million education bond issue. Two years later, with the help of the business community and public goodwill generated by steadily improving test scores, Paige secured voter approval for $678 million in new loans to rebuild many of the district's decrepit schools. Even Paige's critics credit him with helping to reverse the traditional Republican disdain for public education. "He and George Bush made it acceptable in conservative circles to talk positively about public education," said Scott Hochberg, a Democratic state representative from Houston who is critical of many aspects of the accountability system. At Paige's confirmation hearing in January 2001, senators from both parties hailed him for rescuing a troubled urban school system. Last year, Houston became the first winner of the $1 million Broad Foundation prize for the best urban school district. But there were always dissenters, locally and nationally, who argued that the Houston miracle rested on skewed statistics and artful public relations. They claimed vindication earlier this year, when local television station KHOU uncovered a dropout-reporting scandal at Sharpstown High School. Under pressure to produce results, 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. Exactly who changed the dropout codes at Sharpstown High School remains a mystery. An investigation by state auditors showed that at least 14 other Houston high schools, including Austin, reported unusually low dropout rates in 2000-2001, although there is no evidence administrators falsified data. By reporting a dropout rate of less than 0.5 percent, school principals increase their chances of winning bonuses of as much as $10,000 and earning top accountability ratings for their campuses. After years of relying on dropout statistics as a key component in their annual accountability studies, school officials concede that they were worthless all along. "The annual dropout rate was a crock, and we're not [using] it anymore," said Robert R. Stockwell Jr., the district's chief academic officer. Katie Haycock, director of the Washington-based Education Trust, a nonprofit group that supports strict accountability standards, said dropout statistics are notoriously unreliable, in Houston and across the United States. "We have been lying to the public for a very long time about how many kids leave high school by using a dropout-reporting system that is crazy," she said. Officials from the Houston school district provided The Washington Post with a different set of data, based on graduation rates, which show that Houston's dropout rate fell from 19.2 percent in 1998 to 9.2 percent last year. But even those numbers paint a more positive picture than official enrollment statistics. Typically, about 13,500 students make it to the eighth grade in Houston, but fewer than 8,000 earn high school diplomas. Paige said Houston filed its dropout data according to Texas state regulations, and he expressed confidence in the integrity of the statistics collected while he was school superintendent. He said he is unable to comment on developments in Houston after he accepted the post of education secretary in December 2000. Rising Numbers at Austin Austin High, one of Houston's oldest public schools, offers a window into Paige's tenure as school superintendent, and the achievements and failings of the accountability movement. It serves a poor, predominantly Hispanic neighborhood within sight of glistening downtown skyscrapers. Nine of 10 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. Since the early 1980s, the school's enrollment area had experienced an influx of Mexican immigrants and the flight of white residents to the suburbs. Built to accommodate 2,000 students, the school was desperately overcrowded. In 1989, students staged a walkout to protest conditions. By many accounts, the atmosphere at the school improved significantly during the 1990s. A new principal, Jose Trevino, tightened discipline by introducing school uniforms and expelling troublemakers. Enron became a corporate sponsor. Two new schools opened in the neighborhood with funds generated by the school bond issue, relieving overcrowding at Austin. Academic accomplishment also shot up, at least according to annual test results. 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. In the wake of the dropout scandal, some local residents are questioning whether those results are as unreliable as the dropout statistics. They note that the Texas test is administered in the sophomore year. Austin High, like many other Houston schools, routinely holds students back in the ninth grade under a policy that effectively allows school administrators to exclude weaker students from the 10th-grade test results. In 2001, for example, there were 1,160 students in the ninth grade and 281 in the 10th grade. Perla Arredondo, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, took ninth grade three times before being moved up to 11th grade. By then, she was so discouraged she dropped out of Austin High, along with many of her friends. She regrets her decision, after discovering she needs a high school diploma even for jobs such as secretary or cashier. "I felt school was a waste of time because I had to go over the same thing over and over again and wasn't moving up," she said. Because Arredondo skipped 10th grade, she was never included in Austin High's accountability statistics. According to Robert Kimball, a former Sharpstown High assistant principal who provided KHOU with much of its information, that is common practice in Houston. "The secret of doing well in the 10th-grade tests is not to let the problem kids get to the 10th grade," he said. While declining to discuss individual cases, school district officials defend the policy of holding back students who are not ready to advance because they do not speak English well enough or cannot meet minimum academic standards. 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." "This is not a Houston phenomenon, it is a national phenomenon," Paige said of the sharp spike in ninth-grade enrollment figures, and the equally sharp drop-off in subsequent grades. "If you look at the data, every school system has a spike like that." But an analysis of ninth-grade enrollment data suggests that the spike is more pronounced in Houston than elsewhere. 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, there were 21/2 times as many ninth-graders as 12th-graders. � 2003 The Washington Post Company http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/w...anguage=printer |
i find it funny how ppl make their own "honest reporting" threads here.
Each guy seems to be really passionate about one topic, and then bombs 'his' thread with articles that articulate it very nice.
You do it with education, Melech does it most famously with honest reporting, Dave kills the fundies, Trance-X is just crazy, and Occrider lets us know the state of the economy.
Props for Occrider for getting his "honest reporting" thread to sticky status
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| Originally posted by Yoepus i find it funny how ppl make their own "honest reporting" threads here. Each guy seems to be really passionate about one topic, and then bombs 'his' thread with articles that articulate it very nice. You do it with education, Melech does it most famously with honest reporting, Dave kills the fundies, Trance-X is just crazy, and Occrider lets us know the state of the economy. Props for Occrider for getting his "honest reporting" thread to sticky status |
And everybody comes together into one big happy family when the creationists come a knockin 
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