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No Child Left Behind or More Children Left Behind?

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/ar...1/drop181.shtml

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Houston's 'Zero Dropout' Fall 2003 By Michael Winerip Robert Kimball, an assistant principal at Sharpstown High School, sat smack in the middle of the "Texas miracle." His poor, mostly minority high school of 1,650 students had a freshman class of 1,000 that dwindled to fewer than 300 students by senior year. And yet � and this is the miracle � not one dropout to report! Nor was zero an unusual dropout rate in this school district that both President Bush and Secretary of Education Rod Paige have held up as the national showcase for accountability and the model for the federal No Child Left Behind law. Westside High here had 2,308 students and no reported dropouts; Wheatley High 731 students, no dropouts. A dozen of the city's poorest schools reported dropout rates under one percent. Now, Dr. Kimball has witnessed many amazing things in his 58 years. Before he was an educator, he spent 24 years in the Army, fighting in Vietnam, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel and touring the world. But never had he seen an urban high school with no dropouts. "Impossible," he said. "Someone will get pregnant, go to jail, get killed." Elsewhere in the nation, urban high schools report dropout rates of 20 percent to 40 percent. A miracle? "A fantasy land," said Dr. Kimball. "They want the data to look wonderful and exciting. They don't tell you how to do it; they just say, 'Do it.'" In February, with the help of Dr. Kimball, the local television station KHOU broke the news that Sharpstown High had falsified its dropout data. That led to a state audit of 16 Houston schools, which found that of 5,500 teenagers surveyed who had left school, 3,000 should have been counted as dropouts but were not. In early August, the state appointed a monitor to oversee the district's data collection and downgraded 14 audited schools to the state's lowest rating. Not very miraculous sounding, but here is the intriguing question: How did it get to the point that veteran principals felt they could actually claim zero dropouts? "You need to understand the atmosphere in Houston," Dr. Kimball said. "People are afraid. The superintendent has frequent meetings with principals. Before they go in, the principals are really, really scared. Panicky. They have to make their numbers." Pressure? Some compare it to working under the old Soviet system of five-year plans. In January, just before the scandal broke, Abelardo Saavedra, deputy superintendent, unveiled Houston's latest mandates for the new year. "The districtwide student attendance rate will increase from 94.6 percent to 95 percent," he wrote. "The districtwide annual dropout rate will decrease from 1.5 percent to 1.3 percent." Dropouts are notoriously difficult to track, particularly at a heavily Latino school like Sharpstown, with immigrants going back and forth to Mexico. Dr. Kimball said that Sharpstown shared one truant officer with several schools. Even so, Houston officials would not allow principals to write that the whereabouts of a departed student were "unknown." Last fall, Margaret Stroud, deputy superintendent, sent a memorandum warning principals to "make sure that you do not have any students coded '99,' whereabouts unknown." Too many "unknowns," she wrote, could prompt a state audit � the last thing Houston leaders wanted. A shortage of resources to track departing students? No "unknowns" allowed? What to do? "Make it up," Dr. Kimball said. "The principals who survive are the yes men." As for those who fail to make their numbers, it is termination time, one of many innovations championed by Dr. Paige as superintendent here from 1994 to 2001. He got rid of tenure for principals and mandated that they sign one-year contracts that allowed dismissal "without cause" and without a hearing. On the other hand, for principals who make their numbers, it is bonus time. Principals can earn a $5,000 bonus, district administrators up to $20,000. At Sharpstown High alone, Dr. Kimball said, $75,000 in bonus money was issued last year, before the fictitious numbers were exposed. Dr. Paige's spokesman, Dan Langan, referred dropout questions to Houston officials, but said that the secretary was proud of the accountability system he established here, that it got results and that principals freely signed those contracts. Terry Abbott, a Houston district spokesman, agreed that both Dr. Paige and the current superintendent, Kaye Stripling, pressured principals to make district goals. "Secretary Paige said, and rightfully so, the public has a right to expect us to get this job done," Mr. Abbott said. The principals were not cowed, he said, declaring, "They thrive on it." Every administrator under Dr. Paige and Dr. Stripling, Mr. Abbott said, has understood "failure is not an option" and "that failure to do our jobs can mean that we could lose those jobs � and that's exactly the way it should be." As for adequate resources for truant officers to verify dropouts, he said individual schools decided how to use their resources, but added, "Money is not the problem, and money by itself won't solve the issues we deal with every day." To skeptics like Dr. Kimball, the parallels to No Child Left Behind are depressing. The federal law mandates that every child in America pass reading and math proficiency tests by 2014 � a goal many educators believe is as impossible as zero dropouts. And like Houston's dropout program, President Bush's education budget has been criticized as an underfinanced mandate, proposing $12 billion this year for Title 1, $6 billion below what the No Child Left Behind law permits. "This isn't about educating children," Dr. Kimball said. "It's about public relations." If Houston officials were interested in accountability, he said, they would assign him to a high school to monitor the dropout data that he has come to understand so well. Instead, after he blew the whistle on Sharpstown High, he was reassigned, for four months, to sit in a windowless room with no work to do. More recently, he has been serving as the second assistant principal at a primary school, where, he said, he is not really needed. "I expect when my contract is up next January, I'll be fired," he said. "That's how it works here." Michael Winerip is the education columnist for the New York Times. Reprinted with permission. Fall 2003

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/7221021.htm

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Houston school district's accountability questioned By Michael Dobbs The Washington Post U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige places great stock in the credibility of an accountability system that demands quantifiable results from administrators, teachers and children. 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 pompon-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 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 involved in a growing 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 called 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 Rod Paige. He was school superintendent there 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 school district's 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 Anglo and minority students -- rest on false or manipulated data. They have raised questions about the validity of test results purporting 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 that 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 then-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 measurements 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 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. 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 this year, when local TV 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 2001-02 school year. The station tracked down one such student, Juana Juarez, behind the counter of a Wendy's restaurant. 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 shows that at least 14 other Houston high schools, including Austin, reported unusually low dropout rates in 2000-01, 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.

Dropouts? Bring 'Em On!

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