Kicked down and Out by the Texas Miracle

Abstract

IF WE ARE to believe the recent spate of articles (Phi Delta Kappan, Wall Street Journal, New York Times) about the high quality of education in Finland--and I have no reason to distrust them, for they only confirm earlier reports--we cannot help but become depressed over the state of education in this country. Finland maintains multi-tiered system for reaching children at the earliest point where they appear to be having trouble. There, education takes place in highly professional, threat-free environment. Here, the system's attitude reflects the comment I once heard from district superintendent. Asked in public meeting if the district administered corporal punishment, he said, I'm Calvinist, and I believe that man's depravity must sometimes be physically suppressed. system here encourages teachers and administrators to game it to protect their jobs or secure raises or dodge the impact of stupid laws (e.g., No Child Left Behind). As Linda McNeil, Eileen Coppola, and Judy Radigan of Rice University and Julian Vasquez-Heilig of the University of Texas, Austin, recently wrote for Education Policy Analysis Archives: system is high stakes for administrators because they have been required to sign away their tenure, and they have no collectively bargained contract: Their potential for cash bonuses on the up side, or alternately for job loss, depends on the production of rising test scores at their school. principals' performance contracts are annual, thus producing great pressure to show test score increases within very brief time period, far less time than actually needed to improve instruction, update curricula, or enhance the capacities of teachers .... stakes are high for students as well: Regardless of the number of credits and grades earned, students may not graduate from public high without passing the state mandated exit test. Strictly speaking, these words apply only to Texas, but number of other states have similar laws, and when I was in Pennsylvania last year, I found principals accepting the same loony terms, except that they were written into contracts by districts, not the state. And, of course, the Texas laws served as the model for NCLB. Texas laws produced The Texas Miracle, which some pretty quickly dubbed the Texas Mirage. Scores rose, score gaps narrowed, schools in increasing numbers were dubbed acceptable or recognized or even exemplary by the Texas Education Agency (TEA). That was the official story. fly in this particular ointment was that while scores in the early grades rose, they rose less in the middle grades and little in high school. Sooner or later the performance at the high level would reveal the weaknesses in the system. To prevent this, say the researchers, Texas created a legal loophole to permit principals to exclude from the tested cohort those students they deemed to be liabilities to the school-level scores. Schools were also given permission to retain in grade any student who had failed even one semester of one core course. They called it waiver. Some schools required students to retake the entire ninth grade, even courses they had passed (the Texas tests hit students in 10th grade). This increased the dropout rate, though it often increased schools' ratings, and the state rewarded schools even as their dropouts increased. This outcome was obscured by Texas' prolific school leaver codes under which many students who leave the system are not counted as dropouts. Using leaver codes, even statements of intent--I'm going to another district, I'll take the GED someday--relieves the from counting the student as dropout. As noted in the 14th Bracey Report, then-assistant principal Robert Kindall found one Houston with more than thousand ninth-graders, fewer than 300 12th-graders, and no dropouts. …