As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda

by Gail Collins

  Don’t blame the Texas drafters for this one—they had no idea that the law they were passing would wind up being the inspiration for a new national schools agenda. Who knew that when you mixed school-funding lawsuits, witch-hunting Christian conservatives, and business interests in love with the magic of the marketplace, you’d wind up with a new federal education initiative that was based on fifty different tests?

  “I think he looked on the sunny side of the street”

  The Democrats won several big points during the No Child Left Behind negotiations. Bush dropped the voucher demand as hopeless, and he agreed to a schedule of large increases in federal education aid that was painstakingly worked out down to the smallest detail. But the White House won a central accountability point—if a school consistently got bad results on the tests, children should be able to transfer to a better school in the system. Then, the theory went, the threat of the loss of students would force the poor schools to pull themselves together. It was the first rule of the marketplace—consumer demand drives everything. That law does generally work when the product customers are judging is a television set or an iPod. Education turned out to be more complicated. Parents often preferred to keep their children in a familiar, easy-to-reach school that got poor results rather than transferring them to a more successful model in a strange neighborhood. (In New York City in 2011, parents held demonstrations to protest city plans to close schools that had repeatedly failed to meet the standards.)

  Diane Ravitch, an education expert who had been a cheerleader for No Child Left Behind, recalled the day her enthusiasm for the law evaporated—at a 2006 conference at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, in which “the scholars presented persuasive evidence that only a tiny percentage of eligible students asked to transfer to better schools.” In California, only 1 percent of kids in failing schools requested a change. In Colorado, it was 2 percent. While the advocates of choice were certain that most families wanted the chance to escape their neighborhood schools, Ravitch recalled, real-life experience “demonstrated the opposite.” And if there was no real threat of lost students, then a central accountability principle was toast.

  That left only the threat that a bad test performance posed to the principals and teachers, many of whom quickly demonstrated that if the high stakes involved their own careers, they were prepared to spend large chunks of class time drilling students on how to pass. “The problem we had then was, we didn’t know much about tests,” said Miller. “What we’ve learned over time is the tests were all of different validities and values.” But Miller doubted that Bush had any idea he was pushing a plan with dubious underpinnings: “I think he looked on the sunny side of the street.”

  The debate over the No Child Left Behind bill went on for months, but it finally was passed into law with an 87–10 vote in the Senate. It happened shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when lawmakers were yearning for a chance to show some unity. It was signed into law in January of 2002. The nation had a big new federal education program that looked very familiar to Texans.

  “He simply walked away from it”

  In 2003, more than a year after the plan that produced the Texas Miracle had been translated into No Child Left Behind, a Houston TV station discovered that a local school had fudged its reporting to make it look as though dropouts had just moved to another district. (“We go from 1,000 freshmen to less than 300 seniors with no dropouts. Amazing!” an assistant principal wrote to the principal, cynically.) The state responded by conducting an audit which found that in 2000–01, just as George W. Bush was getting elected president, being sworn in, and naming Houston schools chancellor Rod Paige as head of the Department of Education, more than half of the 5,500 Houston students who left the school were described as having moved to another district rather than being declared dropouts as they should have been. So much for accountability.

  The Bush administration still saw the sunny side of the street. “Some people think they can damage the process of national reform and defeat the No Child Left Behind law by striking out at Texas and the Houston Independent School District,” Paige told a gathering of business leaders in his home city. “They believe they can win by fighting a proxy war here. So they try to devalue the good work of the people of Houston.”

  By then, the president’s mind was on other matters. The White House had a war or two to run, and Bush failed to deliver on his commitment to dramatically raise funding for education. “Those promises were explicit,” said Miller. “You get me the reform and we’ll get you the resources. He simply walked away from it.”

  “A federal takeover of public schools”

  No Child Left Behind immediately made an impact on the nation. One of the first big changes was that nearly a third of the states lowered their standards for academic success. As an official in North Carolina explained to the New York Times, the states were stuck with a choice—lower standards so their students would hit the markers under the new federal law, “or do you do the right thing for kids, by setting them higher so they’re comparable with our global competitors?” North Carolina went for the global competitors and actually raised its standards. Maine, Oklahoma, and Wyoming lowered the bar for all the critical tests. Many other states lowered only some or, in a real stab at creativity, raised some and lowered others.

  It was impossibly complicated. As time went on, the entire nation seemed wound up in some variation on the fight over the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills versus the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg ran for reelection in 2009 on the terrific progress of the public schools, where two-thirds of the students were passing the state English test and 82 percent were proficient in math. (Pour the champagne!) Then when the test was changed to one the teachers and students weren’t already familiar with, the scores dropped back down. (Put the cork back in the bottle!)

  “This doesn’t mean the kids did any worse—quite the contrary,” averred the mayor, as parents around the city beat their heads against the nearest wall. Meanwhile, in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania, cities had high hopes that their struggles with the No Child model were going to bear fruit, then found out that at least some of their progress was the result of educators who gave into the temptation to cheat—principals with an eraser, or teachers who gave students a sneak peek at the questions or impromptu hints during the test-taking.

  You have to give Bush some credit. He got a big bill through Congress, which probably could never have happened if it hadn’t been for that particular blend of business-oriented priorities which Republicans liked, along with the focus on progress by poor and minority children to bring along the Democrats. It sparked a lot of experimentation, which is good, and shook up institutions which can be really, really resistant to change.

  But by its own standards, No Child Left Behind flunked. Under the law, local schools had to have all their students reading and doing math at their grade level by 2014. If not, they were supposed to face an educational nuclear meltdown, complete with closed schools and fired teachers. In 2011, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that the deadlines were “a slow-moving train wreck” and predicted that if they weren’t waived, about 80,000 of the nation’s 100,000 public schools would fail to meet their markers.

  This is a familiar pattern. One of the reasons that many veteran teachers responded with such skepticism to No Child Left Behind was that they’d seen that movie before: Ambitious school reformer arrives on the scene, offers a dramatic plan for change, complete with deadlines by which the vast majority of students will be reading at grade level. Or doing math as well as their proficient peers in Singapore. Or doing anything as well as the Finns. Perhaps some improvement occurs, but it’s never as much as was advertised and by the time the deadlines arrive, everyone has retreated to their respective corners trying to pretend the whole thing never happened.

  President Obama called on Congress to fix the law, but the Republican
s—who had really come to loathe it—hardly seemed interested in working out a deal. So in the fall of 2011, the president invited states to apply for a waiver from many of the No Child Left Behind requirements, including the deadlines, in return for meeting a new set of objectives. The law, he said, had “serious flaws that are hurting our children instead of helping them.”

  “Testing our kids to death”

  You may be wondering how things are going, education-wise, in the state that deeded its reform plan to the country. Paul Sadler, the Democrat who led the effort in the Texas house, complains that the state is “testing our kids to death.” (Under the state’s newest regimen, students take seventeen high-stakes tests between third and eighth grade, and up to a dozen more while they’re in high school.) A survey by the Texas State Teachers Association showed that 43 percent of its members were seriously thinking of looking for another line of work.

  Sadler still believes that the leaps made in the 1990s are holding up. “I think most of our schools do a pretty good job,” he said. Other observers are, at minimum, disillusioned. “The eighth grade reading scores were exactly the same in 2009 as 1998,” said Diane Ravitch, referring to the scores Texas received in the national NAEP test results. (I know we were trying to avoid them, but sometimes it’s impossible.) “The whole country is now embarked on remedies that didn’t do anything for Texas.”

  David Grissmer, the author of that glowing RAND study, says that since 2000, when the study came out, Texas students’ scores on national tests have begun to “flag.” Perhaps coincidentally, 2000 was exactly the time when Bush stopped being governor and turned the state over to Perry, whose interest in K–12 education was minimal. When the state’s budget developed a monster hole in 2011, Perry refused to raise taxes—or even dip into state savings—to avoid enormous cuts in school aid. As the impact began to hit the districts, schools began cutting back on programs that had been in place since the Perot commission, seeking waivers on class size and preschool requirements. Former First Lady Barbara Bush wrote an opinion piece in the Houston Chronicle protesting the lack of financial support for public schools. “We rank 36th in the nation in high school graduation rates,” she wrote. “An estimated 3.8 million Texans do not have a high school diploma. We rank 49th in verbal SAT scores, 47th in literacy and 46th in average SAT scores.”

  It all sounded sort of familiar.

  “Not a single person would show up”

  When No Child Left Behind celebrated its tenth anniversary at the beginning of 2012, there weren’t any parties. The Republican presidential candidates were denouncing it in one debate after another, and the Democrats in Congress weren’t much more enthusiastic. Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, who was the Denver school superintendent before he ran for office, said that if anyone had called for a rally to preserve the law as it stands “not a single person would show up.”

  George W. Bush gave a rare interview defending the law and blaming some of its problems on the teachers’ union. “People don’t like to be held to account,” he said. However, the teachers’ union’s hostility was a mere peep compared to the negativity of, say, a Rick Perry. As governor, Perry refused to let Texas compete in Race to the Top, Obama’s effort to get states to voluntarily meet No Child goals. He refused to let Texas join in an effort to come up with national standards that all the states could agree to—the only state, besides Alaska, that declined to take part. It was, Perry claimed, “a federal takeover of public schools.” Then, of course, he ran for president himself, promising to do away with the law entirely and eliminate the Department of Education.

  Given the total failure of that presidential thing, we will refrain from pointing out that back when the law was first passed, Perry had issued a press release bragging that “Texas was a model” for No Child Left Behind, and pointing out how much extra funding it would send to the state.

  The law ran into an inherent conflict in the worldview of the Texas political establishment: how do you demand both limited government and accountability? Remember how the mayor of Midland was so sure his constituents would want the water conservation rules to be voluntary? Then he discovered that the public was more concerned about making sure their neighbors couldn’t get away with watering the lawn on the wrong days. Accountability trumped limited government.

  The authors of the Texas school reforms wanted communities to come up with their own solutions when their schools failed to meet the mark. But then business leaders worried that the communities might not do anything, or do the wrong things, and accountability rules entered the picture. Then, when the law went national, the accountability rules became incredibly complicated due to the demand that every state be able to have its own tests. The whole thing became a pain in the neck, and the conservative Republicans in particular began denouncing the entire effort. (States’ rights! States’ rights!)

  Yet it was the statesrights capital of the country that sent us down this path in the first place. Sometimes, Texas’s most important export is not oil but irony.

  6

  The Business of Schools

  “Step up and give the Dwight Eisenhower speech”

  When history students of the future look back on what the No Child Left Behind Act did to American education, what will they see as its biggest impact? (This is an important question, so perhaps it will be included on one of the standardized tests of 2112. The eleventh-grade history teacher’s job may depend on everybody having the correct answer. She may be standing in the front of the class, spelling it out with semaphore flags.)

  Okay, back to the point. The answer is: education privatization.

  I know it’s very difficult to move forward when the words “education privatization” get tossed out at the very beginning of a chapter. My suggestion is that you try to think of the privatizers in a fun way. I personally imagine a pirate crossed with a sanitizer—a guy with an eye patch and a carpet steamer.

  Keeping that in mind, let’s consider what’s happened to public education over the last decade or so. More and more of your education tax dollars are going to for-profit companies. They write the tests, and grade the tests, and if your child fails the tests, they provide government-subsidized tutoring. If the poor kid gets really discouraged and drops out anyway, they’re back with GED rescue programs. For-profits also run more and more of the public schools themselves. Really, pretty much everywhere you turn, there’s a corporation with its hand out.

  Perhaps this is a welcome development, which will bring the magic of the marketplace to our overly bureaucratized educational sector. Or perhaps this is a case of our corporate entrepreneurs intruding into an area where the for-profit motive doesn’t work and shouldn’t be all that welcome.

  Just in case you were wondering, I’m once again going for the second option.

  All over the country, there are people hopping up and down, waving warning flags. In Tennessee, school districts are losing state aid to private companies whose business plan calls for encouraging parents to believe their kids are best off if they don’t leave the house at all, and go to class alone with their laptops in the living room. In Colorado, the state discovered that the for-profit companies providing most of the mandated after-school tutoring for struggling students were charging up to $89 an hour to little or no benefit. In Ohio, a for-profit charter operator that just happens to be owned by one of the state’s biggest political donors keeps getting more contracts and bad performance ratings. And all around the country, parents of public school students complain that their kids are being squeezed out of classroom space by new charter schools, many of them run by for-profits.

  “I’m waiting for someone in a prominent position to basically step up and give the Dwight Eisenhower beware-the-military-industrial-complex speech,” said David Anderson, the former Texas education official. These days Anderson is a lobbyist, representing a number of private education companies. But he still worries. “Are we getting to the point where the business interests in education a
re overwhelming the education interests in education?”

  The eye-patch-and-carpet-steamer guys are taking the public out of public education! Where did this come from? Forgive me if I take you back to Texas.

  “We’re market-driven Republicans”

  Texas is crazy about privatizing things. The most famous recent example was the Trans-Texas Corridor, a huge highway that was supposed to run across the state and be built by private funds. It was going to be swell—a network of monster roads, linking all the far-flung parts of the state, with six lanes for cars, which would be able to go up to 85 mph. There would be four separate lanes for trucks, and room for both passenger and freight rail lines. The companies doing the construction would make their money back from tolls. And you could build up commercial development along the sides if you sectioned off a wide enough swath of land—say, maybe four football fields’ worth of wide enough. Really, if the cars had little helicopter rotors for flying, the whole thing would have looked like a Road of the Future in a 1950s science fiction movie.

  Rick Perry was really, really excited. “When our hair is gray, we will be able to tell our grandchildren that we were sitting in the Department of Transportation conference room when one of the most extraordinary plans was laid out for the people of the state of Texas,” the governor intoned on the day of awarding the first Corridor contract in 2002.