The Texas Miracle (fraud in Texas schools)

[Blue_Roses]

(CBS) It was called the “Texas Miracle,” a phrase you may remember because President Bush wanted everyone to know about it during his 2000 presidential campaign. It was an approach to education that was showing amazing results, particularly in Houston, where dropout rates plunged and test scores soared. Houston School Superintendent Rod Paige was given credit for the schools' success, by making principals and administrators accountable for how well their students did. Once he was elected president, Mr. Bush named Paige as secretary of education. And Houston became the model for the president’s “No Child Left Behind” education reform act.

Now, as Correspondent Dan Rather reported last winter, it turns out that some of those miraculous claims which Houston made were wrong.
And it all came to light when one assistant principal took a close look at his school’s phenomenally low dropout rates – and found that they were just too good to be true.

“I was shocked. I said, ‘How can that be,’” says Robert Kimball, an assistant principal at Sharpstown High School, on Houston’s West Side. His school claimed that no students – not a single one – had dropped out in 2001-2002.

--snip--

“But the teachers didn’t believe it. They knew it was cooking the books. They told me that. Parents told me that,” says Kimball. “The superintendent of schools would make the public believe it was one school. But it is in the system, it is in all of Houston.” Those low dropout rates – in Houston and all of Texas - were one of the accomplishments then-Texas Gov. George Bush cited when he campaigned to become the “Education President.”


http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/06/60II/main591676.shtml

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This is definitely one to watch. There was talk of this in the "grapevine" but never got the attention it deserves. Dan Rather nailed a damn good story with this.

[mantis49]

1. Molly Ivins wrote a long chapter on it

in "Bushwhacked." This is not new, but of course being ignored by our liberal media. <sarcasm>

[Moderator]

2. Not LBN

This was discussed last week. The article is dated August 25th.