Rick Perry's Texas Fails High School: Update

by: Libby Shaw

Sat Jul 10, 2010 at 14:29:17 PM CDT

From The Nation.com.

A recent report from Education Week and the Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center shows that the nation's graduation rate dropped for the second consecutive year, following about a decade of improvements. Three out of every 10 American public students will fail to finish high school, but in Texas that dropout rate increases to about 35 percent, according to the report.

Moreover, Dallas and Houston are named as two of 25 national "dropout epicenters" from whose high schools come one-fifth of all dropouts. Texas policymakers seem wholly unaware of this crisis, since the Texas Education Agency calculates the graduation and dropout rates in a manner that puts them at 88 and 12 percent, respectively. At schools like Robert E. Lee in Houston, where in 2008 the federal calculations placed the graduation rate somewhere in the thirties, those numbers seem almost comical.

Voodoo fuzzy math, anyone?  

Criss Cloudt understandably grew defensive last week as she tried to explain to a group of legislators how a student who got absolutely every question wrong on a TAKS writing test could be scored as passing it.

Cloudt was in the hot seat because she is the Texas Education Agency's associate commissioner in charge of the "accountability system" that administers the TAKS test and ranks schools and school districts on a four-tier scale from "unacceptable" to "exemplary."

She was also in the hot seat because the man presumably most responsible for instituting the controversial new "Texas Projection Measure" that is producing such absurd results, Education Commissioner Robert Scott, failed to show up. But that's another story. Today we look at the ways that Cloudt appeared to try to mislead Houston state Rep. Scott Hochberg and his Appropriations Subcommittee on Education, and how Hochberg repeatedly called her on it.

Yesterday Rick Casey published another article in the Houston Chronicle about the TEA and wrote at length about the Education Commissioner Robert Scott.

A Fraudulent System.

You can't blame him, I guess. He would have to go under oath and try to parry questions from the one legislator who had figured out that a new statistical device used by the TEA to rate Texas schools and school districts was a fraud.

The official reason for Scott's absence is so weak that any student beyond sixth grade who believes it should fail social studies.

"The commissioner was invited, but he never confirmed that he would be there," a Texas Education Agency spokeswoman said. "So in his mind it was tentative that he would attend. He was here at internal meetings related to hurricane preparation."

But House Appropriations Subcommittee on Education Chairman Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, had patiently worked with Scott's staff to find a time that the commissioner would be available, had been sent a written list of witnesses headed by Scott, and had been assured late the afternoon before by the TEA's legislative liaison that Scott would be there.

In a sense you couldn't blame Commissioner Scott. It was going to be a shootout under oath, and Hochberg had all the ammunition.

Rick Perry's Race to the Bottom.

Scott skipped the hearing to save his own political butt and Perry's too, given that a shootout during an election cycle would have been bad for the Governor.  This is especially true when the Education Chairman has all of the ammunition.

Rep. Hochberg certainly did bust the TEA for its voodoo statistical measuring tools.  

This statistical device had magically turned about 450,000 of about 1 million failed TAKS tests last year into "passing" on the basis that the students were likely to pass two or three years later.

As a result, the number of schools rated as "unacceptable" was more than cut in half, and the number given the top rating of "exemplary" more than doubled.

Hochberg also outed Governor as well, for guess who sits on top of the agency's organizational chart?  

If you look at the organizational chart of the Texas Education Agency, at the top is Perry.

He appoints the commissioner, and in Scott he appointed not an educator, but a former member of his own staff.

Ironically, when Perry named Scott to replace former Galena Park ISD Superintendent Shirley Neeley as commissioner, it was reported that one of the reasons was that Neeley hadn't cracked down vigorously enough on teachers and principals who cheated on the TAKS test.

Instead Scott, apparently with the governor's support, has presided over a scheme that makes the whole (already rickety) system a fraud by counting failures as successes.

Not for students, but for school officials, state bureaucrats and political leaders.

That, in the political world, is "accountability."

Of course Rick Perry would appoint a former staff member with no background in education to head the TEA.  This is standard operating procedure in Perry's world of cronyism and political scheming all in order to serve himself first and foremost.