Houston Miracle debunked?

January 10, 2004

Some left-of-center folks are having a field day with the reports coming out of Houston regarding the allegations that the "Houston Miracle"--high test scores and low dropout rates--was manufactured.

In the Open Source Politics blog, Jay Bullock reviewed "NOW with Bill Moyers" in October 2003, and now 60 Minutes II has joined the act.

We found this link to the 60 Minutes II show at the Assorted Stuff blog, who is on the opposite side of the spectrum from us, but makes some interesting points on the state of education in the United States.

As for the debunking of the Houston Miracle under then-superintendant Rod Paige (now the federal Secretary of Education), the evidence seems to be damning.

Relying on testimony from administrators, students, and guidance counselors, they illustrate numerous cases where the dropout data was either distorted or completely faked, to paint a school--or the entire district--in a favorable light.

What is especially disturbing are the cases of students being deliberately shuttled around so that they wouldn't have to take a high-stakes tenth-grade Algebra test. One student spent three years in the ninth grade, before being mysteriously promoted to eleventh. Unfortunately the student completely missed all her tenth grade coursework, and was essentially swindled out of a proper high school education, eventually dropping out.

This is appalling.

While we completely sympathize with the victims in this story--including one administrator who claims he was demoted for being a whistle-blower--we don't buy 60 Minutes II's conclusion.

They try to paint the entire success story in Houston (which includes much, much more than high school graduation rates and Algebra scores) as being one manufactured out of whole cloth. While they acknowledge that a district audit concluded that the phony dropout numbers were largely confined to Sharpstown High School, and that only a few individuals at that school may have done the fudging, they conclude the district suffered from "fuzzy math."

As for that Algebra exam, we have no doubt that some "helpful" individuals were highly motivated to see their school do well. (Unfortunately some of these individuals weren't math teachers!) These folks deserve to be punished, but the overall point is missed, which is that suspicious data must be investigated to determine the facts of the case, before sweeping conclusions are made.

But we'd also raise another point, questioning why there's a high-stakes math test given that one year

We say, "High Stakes Testing invites High Stakes Cheating."