Re: how to achieve zero drop-outs

[Bernard Cleyet <anngeorg@PACBELL.NET>]

So what else is new.  (note date of below article.)

bc

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/15_03/Bside153.shtml


 Paige Leads Dubious Cast Of Education Advisors

By Stan Karp

Secretary of Education Rod Paige is now the top spokesperson for the new
President's education plans. But the Bush Administration is bulging with
Cabinet members, advisors, and consultants who have a dubious history of
disservice to public education.

As the first African-American head of the Education Department and a
sitting urban superintendent from Houston, Paige was treated gently by
both the media and Congressional Democrats during his confirmation
hearings. But his Texas record makes it clear why he was chosen to bring
Bush's punitive accountability system to a national stage.

Paige, a former college dean who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the
response time of football linemen, was a longtime Republican activist
and a member of the Houston school board when he was appointed
superintendent in 1994. The move angered the city's Latino population,
which felt it had been overlooked, and led to new state regulations
prohibiting sitting board members from moving directly to top
administrative posts.

Paige's tenure as superintendent was marked by efforts to privatize or
contract out not only custodial, payroll, and food services, but also
educational services like "alternative schools" for students with
"discipline problems." Hundreds of such students were removed from
Houston high schools. They were also excluded from the state's TAAS
testing, a move which helped boost the scores upon which so much of
Paige's and Bush's reputation as school reformers is based.

Paige helped design the test-driven polices that reflect the negative
impact TAAS testing had on Texas schools. He put principals on
"performance contracts" that relied heavily on TAAS scores. By the time
Paige left, Houston's graduation rate ranked in the bottom ten of the
nation's 100 largest school districts. (Six of the worst 14 graduations
rates are in Texas cities.) According to one researcher, "fewer than 60
percent of the African-American and Latino kids who begin 9th grade in a
Texas public high school make it to graduation." This strategy of
"losing" large numbers of Black and Latino students is one of the main
ways Paige and other Texas superintendents "closed the achievement gap."

.......

In addition to the above, others in Bush's policy stable include figures
from his father's administration like Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch;
corporate supporters like Norman R. Augustine, retired chairman of
Lockheed Martin Corporation, and Ed Rust, Jr., chairman of State Farm
Insurance; African-American voucher proponents like former NY.
Congressman Floyd Flake and former Milwaukee Schools Superintendent
Howard Fuller; and conservative education reformers like Lisa Graham
Keegan, Superintendent of Public Instruction in Arizona, and Reid Lyons,
a reading and childhood development expert from the National Institute
of Health.

The Administration has not yet publicly released the test scores of any
of these advisors.

Spring 2001"



John S. Denker wrote:

> http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=68&ncid=68&e=4&u=/nyt/20030711/ts_nyt/questionsondatacloudlusterofhoustonschools
>
> >"It was Enron accounting," said Joseph Rodriguez,
> ...
> > "We go from 1,000 Freshman to less than 300 Seniors with no
> > dropouts," Dr.  Kimball wrote. "Amazing!"
> ...
> > The audit which recommended lowering the ranking of 14 of
> > the 16 schools from the best to the worst, has been a
> > stunning blow to the Houston school system, the largest and
> > most celebrated district in Texas. Last year, the city won a
> > $1 million prize as best urban district in the country, from
> > the Broad Foundation, which is based in Los Angeles.
> >
> > The city has also been a pillar of the so-called Texas
> > miracle in education, whose emphasis on grading school
> > performance became the model for the rest of the country
> > under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. It was largely
> > on the strength of his success here that Rod Paige,
> > Houston's former superintendent, followed George W. Bush
> > east to become secretary of education.