Prometheus 6   

No child left behind

…unless you, you know, leave them behind.

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 8, 2003; Page A01

HOUSTON -- When the state of Texas bestowed "exemplary" status on Austin High School in August 2002, ecstatic administrators compared the honor to winning the Super Bowl. There was more cheering and pompom-waving a few weeks later when a private foundation honored Houston for having the nation's best urban school district.

Just a year later, the high school has been downgraded to "low-performing," the lowest possible rating. And the Houston Independent School District -- showcase of the "Texas educational miracle" that President Bush has touted as a model for the rest of the nation -- is fending off accusations that it inflated its achievements through fuzzy math.

Austin is one of more than a dozen Houston high schools caught up in a burgeoning scandal about the reliability of their dropout statistics. During a decade in which, routinely, as many as half of Austin students failed to graduate, the school's reported dropout rate fell from 14.4 percent to 0.3 percent. Even a Houston school board member calls the statistic "baloney."

If this were any other school district in the nation, few people would pay much attention. But Houston is the political springboard for U.S. Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige. He was school superintendent here before moving to Washington, and what originally began as an argument over dropout data has expanded into a debate about the administration's entire approach to educational reform.