The Shame of the Nation by Jonathan Kozol

Author:Jonathan Kozol
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307339416
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2005-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

Idols crumble. New ones are erected and then crumble too. In Houston, Texas, which for several years had been promoted to the nation as “a pillar of the so-called Texas miracle in education,” notes The New York Times—former education secretary Rod Paige had been superintendent of the district and had made his reputation there—some people “are questioning whether the miracle may have been smoke and mirrors” all along.

Highly implausible test-score fluctuations in the Houston schools have awakened suspicions of cheating on the part of principals who had apparently been pressured by administrators to do anything they could to boost the scores. At one school, named Wesley Elementary, which, according to Education Week, “gained national acclaim under then superintendent Rod Paige” for what appeared to be spectacular results in students’ scores, a recent analysis reveals that students scoring in the highest ten percent statewide when they were in fifth grade dropped to the bottom ten percent the following year in middle school. The 99 percent black and Hispanic school, which was using a scripted reading system and was praised by President Bush for its impressive gains, had been suspected of cheating once before, in 1998, when Mr. Bush was governor of Texas, but the principal insisted it was “racist” to believe the scores were false because this would somehow indicate black and Hispanic children could not learn. Suddenly now, according to The Dallas Morning News, it appears that these suspicions had been justified.

A former fifth grade teacher told The Morning News that teachers were “instructed . . . how to cheat” by walking around their classrooms while the students worked on their exams, stopping behind students who had chosen the wrong answer to a question, and remaining behind such students until they selected the right answer. Further analysis of students’ test scores at this school and others indicates that this was not an isolated situation. Nearly 400 Texas schools are now suspected of having cheated too. Investigations have been launched in 23 Houston schools, as well as in dozens of schools in other major districts. In at least one case, a criminal inquiry is under way.

Additional evidence uncovered recently indicates that gains in high school graduation rates in Houston, which had been widely publicized in national reports, also appear to have been overstated or outrightly false. A report by state officials in 2003, according to The New York Times, revealed that “more than half the students” who had disappeared from 16 middle schools and high schools in the year when Mr. Paige was winding up his tenure there should have been identified as dropouts, “but were not.” One high school, in the following year, insisted that it had no dropouts—not a single student had dropped out, the principal reported—even though 460 students had disappeared from the enrollment of the school that year. In an internal memo to the principal, a school official had alerted her to the discrepancies between the claims that she was making and the numbers he’d unearthed. “We go from 1,000 freshmen to less than 300 seniors with no dropouts,” noted this official.

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