by Gail Collins
The bill that averted disaster also created the Texas Miracle we would hear so much about in the 2000 presidential campaign. It did two major things. First of all, it gave the schools a lot of money. “Everybody got more,” said Bill Ratliff, the Republican who was head of the state senate’s Education Committee at the time. Ratliff was one of the five people who understood how the new formula for school funding worked. Most of his colleagues didn’t care—they just wanted to look at the printouts that showed how much money each district would receive. “That was the famous line: ‘Where’s my printout?’ ” Ratliff reminisced. “You have to raise all boats. You just raise some more.” And while everybody got something, the boats being raised the most were exactly the ones whose passengers were several years behind their grade level in reading and math.
Second, to convince people—particularly the business community—that the additional investment would be worthwhile, the school finance bill created an “accountability” system based on a series of statewide tests. This is the part that would, in the future, become the basis of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. Some of its authors are downright horrified at what they’ve unleashed. But we’ll get to that in a minute.
During the last half of the 1990s, Texas schools did get better. It was very, very hard to figure out exactly how much better, given the amount of conflicting data floating around, but some observers were wowed by how well the students were testing. (“I couldn’t believe it,” said David Grissmer, who wrote or co-wrote several important education studies on the state.) Some were just prepared to thank God for small favors. (Molly Ivins called it the “story on how our schools rocketed from abysmal to only slightly below average in a mere thirty years.”) The doubters would be empowered later, when reporters discovered that in some places, the results had been, shall we say, rigged.
Whether the lift was huge or modest, it had very little to do with George W. Bush, whose role as governor was to arrive at the party after the refreshments had been served and the orchestra had finished its first set. Bush was supportive, but as happened so frequently in the W. saga, his main role was that of cheerleader. “His contribution to education was to argue that it was necessary,” said Scott Hochberg, the legislator who had the debates with his fellow lawmakers about whether a high school diploma was important. “And the people who needed to hear that message trusted him.”
You will remember that there were two pieces to the big Texas school reform—getting more resources, especially for the poor districts, and testing/accountability. As a presidential candidate, Bush fixated on one of them. We will pause here while everyone guesses which.
“But it’s not a business!”
“Testing is the cornerstone of reform. You know how I know? Because it’s the cornerstone of reform in Texas,” W. said in one of his debates with Al Gore. His opponent, he said, only had a wishy-washy commitment. (“You may claim you’ve got mandatory testing but you don’t, Mr. Vice President.”)
While there’s absolutely no reason to doubt that Bush’s interest in education was genuine, you sometimes wondered how deep his focus went. (During the presidential campaign, a high school student in Beaufort, SC, asked what could be done to push up her state’s terrible college board scores, and Bush answered, “Write your governor.”) He did promise to increase federal aid to education, although by less than half of what Gore was targeting. But money, he argued, paled next to the importance of his plan—based on tests, accountability, and giving parents the right to move their children out of failing schools. “What’s more important is reform,” Bush told Diane Sawyer. “You know, why pour money into a system that’s not reformed?”
In the summer of 2000 the RAND Corporation came out with the study that seemed to verify the existence of a wondrous change in Texas schools, particularly when it came to closing the gap between white and minority students. “Regardless of where a child starts out in Texas, the research shows there is going to be improvement,” Grissmer, the lead writer, told the Associated Press. The Bush team did a happy dance. “I am proud of the results we have achieved in education in Texas. As president, I will achieve the same results, ensuring that no child is left behind,” the candidate said in a statement.
Then in October, just weeks before the election, another RAND study came out, this one finding that Texas had mainly taught its young people to be unusually good at taking the Texas assessment test. “It’s not a miracle,” said Stephen P. Klein, the lead writer. “We think these scores are misleading and biased because they’re inflated. They’re improvements in scores, but not in proficiency.” RAND is less a single entity than a collection of study projects, and it wasn’t absolutely unprecedented for two of its reports to apparently contradict one another. But it certainly was confusing. The second study was more recent, but smaller. The Bush campaign called it “the opinion of a few researchers.” The Gore campaign passed it out to every reporter in the country.
Meanwhile, journalists started coming back from Texas with notebooks full of complaints about the way the school curriculum was focused on the state standardized test. (“All the emphasis has been on scores, scores, scores,” a school board member in El Paso griped to the New York Times.)
Although Texas wound up having the most influence over national education policy, it was hardly the only state that developed a testing mania in the 1990s. All around the country, cutting-edge school districts were administering annual tests to certain grades, and using them to determine how well individual schools were performing. A school was only as good as its test scores. During the 2000 Senate campaign in New York, Rick Lazio, who was running against Hillary Clinton, visited a high school that had tested well and congratulated the kids for helping to maintain local property values.
In the states where the test obsession was strongest, teachers went into mourning for the days when they had been allowed to try to make learning fun. A fourth-grade teacher in Quincy, Massachusetts, talked about the unit on Antarctica that her students had always loved but which she had to drop from the curriculum in favor of test drills. A middle school PTA president in Scarsdale, NY, was upset that the kids no longer had time to learn science by tracking hurricanes on the computer because that wasn’t included on the tests. “It’s much less pleasant since the tests,’’ said Barbara Wilson, a high school math teacher in Boston. “Much, much less pleasant. Extremely less pleasant. Couldn’t be more less pleasant.”
The tales of woe were the same in Texas. “Growing up in El Paso, which is mostly a low-income, Latino community, I felt and still feel that most teachers were content letting most of my peers learn just enough to pass the TAAS test,” said Brenda Arredondo, who went on to Rice University and is now press secretary for a congressional committee. (TAAS is our old friend, the Texas Assessment for Academic Skills, which the state used to judge how well a school was performing.) Arredondo, who was in the Advanced Placement program, said that when it came to the kids who weren’t in AP, “it was like [the teachers] felt that it was not their responsibility to prepare students for anything beyond the TAAS test.” Another Texas native, now a Washington journalist, bemoans years spent writing “hundreds of practice descriptive paragraphs.” In high school, she recalled, her sophomore English teacher “leaned over the transparency machine and said: ‘Everything I’ve been teaching you kids for the last two years on persuasive essays: Toss. It. Out. Of. Your. Brains. Now I’m going to teach you how to really write.”
The dismay was shared by some of the people who had worked on the Texas school reforms and who had very different memories of what those tests were supposed to do. Paul Sadler, the Democrat who was head of the house Public Education Committee while Bush was governor, insists that the original intent was simply to find out whether a given child was performing at grade level, so the ones who weren’t could be given help to improve. “It wasn’t a throw-up exam, a your-school’s-going-to-be-trashed exam,” he said. Bill Ratliff, who led the education refo
rm drive in the state senate, felt that the tests were a way to let parents, and the community, know how well a school was doing, so they could decide for themselves what measures to take if the report card was bad.
“The unfortunate thing,” Ratliff added, “was we took those scores and started using them as a punitive measure. Terribly punitive in many cases.”
“Everybody said we need to run our schools like a business,” Sadler recalled. “I kept saying: But it’s not a business!”
The Texas business community tended to disagree. It pushed to make the tests high-stakes, so teachers and administrators would know that a poor performance could lead to unpleasant results, up to and including closing down the school entirely. They had accountability in their companies, and they knew what it looked like. “Market discipline is the key, the ultimate form of accountability,” wrote Louis V. Gerstner, the head of IBM, in a book detailing his ideas on how to run schools like a business. And while, at the beginning, testing was seen as a tradeoff for more resources, when budgets got tight, people began suggesting that accountability alone would do the trick. In 2011, the Texas Association of Business argued that a no-new-taxes state budget, which drastically cut the state’s commitment to school funding, would be fine as long as Texas implemented additional accountability—say, by testing pre-kindergarten classes. “We’re talking about productivity,” said Bill Hammond, the association’s CEO.
Whatever its flaws back home, the Texas Miracle worked great for a presidential campaign. George W. Bush’s identification with good schools was particularly important to women, for whom Republican candidates were sometimes a tough sell. At a low point in the race, Bush’s team reached out to Paul Sadler, who had worked successfully with the governor on education issues even though he was a Democrat. “They called and asked if I’d go to South Carolina and campaign with him,” Sadler recalled. But Sadler thought the testing-and-accountability version of education reform had gone way beyond what he had envisioned. “I think you’re going to create the biggest education bureaucracy in the history of the world,” he said he told the soon-to-be-president’s men.
“Well, maybe we’ll call somebody else,” they responded.
“He’s a pretty relaxed guy”
If the education issue was Bush’s trump card, it’s possible that the last-minute questions about the validity of the Texas Miracle—the second RAND report, the complaints about all the testing—cost him enough votes at the end of the campaign to send the election into the infamous Florida recount crisis. (Karl Rove disagreed, blaming a late-breaking release of records from a long-ago DUI arrest in Maine.) At any rate, with the help of the Supreme Court, the electoral college and a screwed-up ballot that left some Florida Democrats inadvertently voting for the right-wing Pat Buchanan, Bush wound up in the White House, eager to turn his schools agenda into law.
To tell how the legislation we now know as No Child Left Behind came into being, we have to begin with some serious praise for George W. Bush.
While some other states had gotten into testing in a big way, too, there was one part of the Texas school reforms that was unusual. It’s known as disaggregation. Basically, it means that a school’s score on the test is based not only on how the students do overall, but also on how much the poor, black, and Hispanic kids improve. “The argument was—and I think it was a compelling argument—that in the past the schools had let some sub-populations drop through the cracks and that wasn’t acceptable,” said Bill Ratliff.
Disaggregation put tremendous pressure on schools to focus on bringing up their poor and minority students. Districts with large middle-class white populations hated it because their schools could wind up with a low rating even if the majority of their kids were doing well. It was a powerful club against all the subtle and not-so-subtle forces that have created unequal educational opportunity in the twenty-first century. And George Bush adored disaggregation. He loved saying the word. Disaggregation was what he meant when he talked about “the soft bigotry of low expectations” for poor and minority students.
There are many veterans of the Texas statehouse in the 1990s who have claimed to be the core creator of the disaggregation system, and trying to sort it out would be as futile as trying to figure out what really happened to Davy Crockett. Bush certainly didn’t think it up, but as governor, he proved his commitment. When the Clinton administration ran a pilot program offering more flexibility to states that promised to improve school accountability and raise standards for all students, twelve states got the waivers to participate, but the results were underwhelming. “The only one that did anything concrete in trying to serve poor minority kids was George Bush’s Texas,” said Charles Barone, who was the top Democratic staff member on the House Education Committee at the time.
So Bush had every right to feel he had some serious credibility when the negotiations on a new federal education law began. Even before the inauguration, he invited a handful of lawmakers to Austin, to have lunch and talk about schools. The Republicans had control of the House and the Senate, and the guests included the education committee chairmen, Representative John Boehner, and Senator Jim Jeffords, and the ranking House Democrat, Representative George Miller.
“He asked people to say something,” recalled Miller. The president-elect was in high spirits, jovially calling the senators by their last names. (“Jeffords, what do you think?”)
Miller particularly remembered the way Senator Jeffords, a Vermont Republican, began his remarks by delving into his experiences with education back home in Vermont.
“Mr. President,” Jeffords said rather formally, “our two states have a lot in common.”
“I can’t think of anything,” Bush stage-whispered. (W., Miller noted, is “a pretty relaxed guy.”)
The meeting went well, but Jeffords would soon switch parties, becoming an independent and thereby handing control of the Senate over to the Democrats and the education chairmanship to Ted Kennedy. Maybe he was wounded by the crack about Vermont.
“Either you have consequences or you don’t”
The Democrats had no particular affection for Bush, and they disliked many of the Republican education priorities, particularly the idea that students should be allowed to use public money to attend private schools through the use of vouchers. But Miller and Kennedy were won over by the president’s enthusiasm for disaggregation—a concept even Bill Clinton had found too hot to handle. “That was a game-changer,” Barone said.
The focus on poor and minority children made it much easier for liberals to swallow the test-centric nature of the president’s vision, about which Democratic allies like the teachers unions were deeply unenthusiastic. The White House wanted to see all children, particularly those in grades three though eight, take achievement tests every year. The public should be told the results. Children in low-performing schools who got bad results should be able to demand outside tutoring help—paid for out of the school budget. So far, this was basically the Texas version of how to reform education—heavy on accountability, friendly to private enterprise—and it had some inherent problems. One involved that accountability. Virtually everybody agreed that the grass roots should run the schools, and that the state’s job was to set standards while the districts figured out how to meet them. But what happened if they didn’t? Back in Austin, people like Ratliff and Sadler had believed pressure from the community would make things better. If the pressure didn’t work, they didn’t really have a next step.
The business community had always felt there had to be a stage two. “Calling things what they are is great but either you have consequences or you don’t,” said Sandy Kress, who was a consultant to the Governor’s Business Council, which had pushed for education reform during W.’s gubernatorial years, and then one of the top White House aides handling the issue. After that, Kress became a lobbyist for Pearson PLC, one of the world’s largest test publishers.
The program Congress was cobbling together was going to involve stiff p
enalties for poor results. If a school consistently failed to improve, parents would have an option of demanding that their children be moved to a better-performing public school. (The White House wanted to give them vouchers to use at any school they wanted, private or public. That never made it into the Texas law, and it was never going to make it into a national one, either. Yet for voucher partisans, hope sprang eternal. Truly, if they could have figured out a way to hand kids vouchers with their flu shots, they’d have gone for it.)
The big question was how to figure out who was performing badly. That seemed simple in Texas, since all the schools took the same test. But the idea of imposing a national test on all states was anathema to many conservatives. (States’ rights! States’ rights!) So the bill-drafters in Washington decided that every state could write its own. No wonder the law was complicated—fifty different tests, fifty different standards for separating the winners from the losers.
When the Texas law was being written, by people who had no idea they were creating a national model, the legislators had debated whether the state should write its own test or adopt one that seemed to be working well for other states. If the second option had won out, perhaps that would have provided the juice to put a single test standard in the federal legislation. But looking back, Ratliff concluded it never would have worked. When the testing began, he recalled, Christian conservatives began spreading rumors that the new accountability had “an anti-religious agenda.” There were hysterical reports that the kids were being asked questions about witchcraft, and to calm things down, the state finally decided to make its old tests public every year so the critics could see there were no references to, say, the positive aspects of devil worship. If Texas had been using a national test, Ratliff pointed out, “we never could have been able to release it and to this day we’d be having these horror stories about pointy-headed liberals that were writing these tests in New York or Iowa or wherever.”
