When CBS's 60 Minutes presented "The 'Texas Miracle'" in 2004, many Americans heard that our new educational policy was girded on a foundation of falsified data, though it was Dan Rather's reporting of Houstan's miraculous claims in the winter of 2003 that first brought it to light outside of Texas (and not long after, the Bush administration pushed Rather off of CBS, and when his issues were finally vetted, they had Bush Sr.'s friend do the vetting). The first administrator to step forward was Robert Kimball (shown), an assistant principal from Sharpstown High School on Houston's West Side, whose high school claimed that no student had dropped out during the 2001-2002 school term, though in fact 463 students had left for a variety of reasons. Kimbell, who took his findings to CBS affiliate KHOU-TV, was denounced as incompetent by school officials, demoted, and then reassigned to an elementary school. Meanwhile, State Rep. Rick Noriega, who represents a largely Hispanic district, also began investigating Kimbell's statements. And when half of the city's regular high school attendance records were checked, investigators found that, of the 5,500 students who had left those schools, 3000 students should have been coded as dropouts, but were not. And of those who stayed in school, many were often kept from entering 10th grade by not being allowed to take the state exit exam needed for a diploma, or were told that until they passed, for example, algebra, they would have to keep taking all of their 9th grade classes again and again, and even then, still might not be given the state exit exam. And so Houstan's statewide achievement test results won national acclaim because the low-performing students who could bring down results were not allowed a place in the results.And it is on this model of mismanagement, hidden agendas, intimidation and putting the students last that George Bush became our "education president." Bush entered office on a '"major plank of domestic reform' that was to end the 'soft bigotry' of low expectations for poor, black and Hispanic children" by following the results of Houston's approach under then School Superintendent Rod Paige - later to be Education Secretary Paige. Paige, while Superintendent of Education in Texas, exceeded results by making principals and administrators accountable for how well their students did, by putting principals on one year contracts and by replacing staff when students did not show measurable test results in the subgroups of race, ethnicity and poverty level.
Accountability became the watchword, and as such, South Carolina took giant leaps, with huge expenditures of money, to stay in the top five states for teacher quality, academic standards and accountability. Next to Louisiana, we were the only state to receive an A for teacher accountability in 2006, and we have stayed first or second for several years in this same area. It took its toll on teachers, who experienced increased pressures to tutor in poor districts, to move to poor districts, to take weekly professional development sessions, to crease their education - often at their own expense - by taking another Master's degree - all to show the state had teachers who were actively learning, to drive up to 40 miles each way to underrepresented schools with no increase in salary, to deal with higher incidents of discipline issues, including outright physical attacks, with little support from administration, and to do it all because an education model in Texas had shown results, which later proved to be fabricated.
NCLB took over our lives - and we began testing four times a year, and talking about the importance of the test with students. As a direct consequence, students who were on the fringes mentally and emotionally dropped out of education - even taking tests in five minutes that should have taken over an hour, because they "owed us nothing." They felt stressed largely because we felt stressed, and the love that existed for learning has been gradually squeezed out in favor of pre- and post-testing, test prep reviews, smaller reading assignments from questionable literary canons to peak student interest, and an emphasis on testing booklets created by the state over their literature textbook, for example.
It took nearly three years after Bush entered office for people to begin questioning what teachers already knew - that it was, for example, nearly impossible to place a migrant student in a desk based on his/her age and ask for them to test on grade level in six months when there could be sizeable language and educational deficiencies before they walked onto campus. That poverty, a condition that has never been resolved or even adequately addressed in this country, could affect a student's education on a multitude of levels, and limit their placement on federal testing. And that politicians, who had failed to hold themselves accountable, looked towards the state, who looked to their department of education, who looked to their school district, who looked to their principals, who looked to their teachers, and the end result was that the teacher felt they had to generate results. Student data was put on spreadsheets to"prove" students were learning.
Yet somehow the parents and students managed to walk away with little accountability for how they had contributed - had they valued education in the home, purchased books that were used, turned off the television and computer, attended school meetings, fed their children healthy foods, eaten dinner together, instilled a love of education in their child, kept their child safe from harm, managed a functional household, opened up progress reports and report cards, asked their child to do their homework, made themselves and their child accountable too? With NCLB there have been no winners. Teachers have retired in record numbers and we lose over 50% of new teachers within the first 5 years of teaching. Retention is an issue for superintendents, principals and teachers, and school districts often recruit for hard-to-place positions from abroad or from programs that allow business people to work through their license while being in the classroom. It is well-known now that superintendents will be paid a high wage but only expected to stay for maximum of one to two years. In this political climate, it is the best this professional can hope for as we have yet to invent a superpower to address the woes ailing our education system.
But in the end, at the base of it all, what we need to examine is why this revolution in education, this No Child Left Behind, failed. There is nothing wrong with high aspirations, with requiring teachers to teach and students to learn, but it was more than that - this program literally had no hope of succeeding. And what I come back to over and over again is that you can not right a sinking ship. This ship, grounded on a falsehood, became a comedy of errors with no hope of ever staying afloat. We no longer have, as Plato outlines in the Republic, a system of study which engages students in the dialectic, which teaches them to inquire into principles that explain and justify the beliefs one has taken up in one's inquiries. And since even our politicians no longer value ethics, it stands that our citizens do not either, and vice versa. Perhaps we should at least start with Nietzsche and begin questioning our own beliefs of right and wrong, for at least he puts us in the realm of considering it. We seem to have walked away from placing ethical decisions in the forefront altogether, and so we are willing to educate our populace on the grounding of a fabrication, and then have the nerve to ask why it has not worked.
1. www.cbsnews.com/stores/2004/01/06/6011/main591676.shtml
2. http://http//www.nytimes.com/2001/07/10/politics/10EDUC.html?ex=1222315200&en=b29095b94825580c&ei=5070
3. http://ed.sc.gov/news/more.cfm?articleID=605
