More education deception in Houston

Wouldn't you hate to have the job of being GW's official presidential historian? Unless that historian is also a premier fiction writer she or he is out of luck. Not only are the facts about everything since GW came into office constantly changing, but so are the ones from when he was Governor of Texas. It is widely known now that the Rod Paige (Secretary of Education) miracle in the Texas educatiion system was (literally) a paper tiger, but the deception goes on with new attempts to make Houston schools a model of "success." In today's NY Times, Sam Dillion has a piece - School Violence Data Under a Cloud in Houston. According to the article, there is a discrepancy of 2330 violent incidents between the Houston School District's reports and the Houston Police Department's reported school violence incidents. (Houston is not alone in its deception as the article notes that both the Roanoke, Va and Gwinnett County, Ga schools have gotten significant press for similar under-reporting.)

The Houston District is significant because it underpins GW's "No Child Left Behind Act." As noted by Dillard:

"Houston, however, has been held up as a pillar of the so-called Texas miracle in education, though it was battered earlier this year by disclosure of false school statistics: a state audit found that the authorities had failed to report properly thousands of school dropouts, giving the district an impressive-looking but fake dropout rate of just 1.5 percent."

Making school violence invisible is motivated by the same pressures as inflating standardized test scores, and "disappearing" dropouts - so-called school accountability. As also noted by Dillard:

"School violence reports have taken on new importance since President Bush made a national goal of holding schools accountable for test scores and campus crime. At his insistence, a new federal law requires states to use violence data to identify "persistently dangerous" schools, and Education Secretary Rod Paige, former schools superintendent here, is in charge of enforcing that law."

I pity the poor presidential historian that has to not only make all the "facts" match in a constantly shifting presentation of the past in federal matters, but also must make the "facts" match across broad fields of data (such a school violence reports). I wonder if there is some classified program running under DARPA that keeps track of all this stuff and throws flags whenever "inconsistencies" dictate a rewriting of history. Surely if they can monitor every moment and transaction of every person in the US, then they should be able to keep on top of a fabricated reality.

Posted by rowan at November 7, 2003 8:46 AM | TrackBack | [eMail this article!] |