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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ColtonGang who wrote (50977)	10/23/2000 12:04:04 PM
From: ColtonGang	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

'Texas Miracle' Doubted By John Mintz Washington Post Staff Writer A cornerstone of Texas Gov. George W. Bush's presidential campaign is what state officials call "the Texas miracle": the impressive gains that Texas students, particularly minority children, have achieved on test scores during his tenure. A Bush campaign ad touts his school reforms as "the most fundamental in a generation." But a growing corps of skeptics, including some education experts and Texas teachers, believe that Bush's record on education is less than miraculous. They say Texas's standardized tests are too easy and that aggressive test-drilling inflates children's scores and turns some Texas schools into drab factories for test preparation. As evidence of his claim, Bush points to the skyrocketing scores of Texas children on a standardized test that the governor has strongly promoted, and in particular to the narrowing gap between the scores of minorities and whites. Picking up on initiatives launched by his predecessor, Gov. Ann Richards, and billionaire Ross Perot, Bush has put in place an "accountability" system under which educators' careers rise and fall depending in part on how well children fare on that test. He also has increased state spending on schools and tightened curriculum standards. It is difficult to evaluate all the Texas officials' claims about soaring test scores. But it is clear that some of their key assertions aren't backed up by other tests issued on a national scale. While Texas says it has dramatically shrunk the gap between minority and white students' scores, a test used across the country called the NAEP showed they haven't closed that "achievement gap"--in fact, it suggests the gulf between the state's white and black fourth-graders widened over time. Some experts say this suggests many of Texas's gains result from intense drilling to pass the state's test, and from the quality of the test itself. "The Texas miracle in education is a myth," said Walter Haney, a Boston College researcher who studies test statistics. Texas schools, he said, have some of the nation's highest dropout rates, and the system of accountability that Bush touts helps drive tens of thousands of students, mostly minorities, to quit school each year--a loss that in turn boosts test scores, he said. "Texas has got to seriously think about the tradeoffs here.", Some education experts and teachers say the emphasis on tests also undermines educational quality. Teachers whose careers depend on raising minority pupils' test scores often neglect such activities as creative writing, literature and science labs, these specialists say. One largely Hispanic high school in Houston with virtually no library spent $18,000--almost its entire instructional budget--for commercial test-preparation materials that replaced teachers' lessons, according to two researchers, Linda McNeil of Rice University and Angela Valenzuela of the University of Texas. "While middle-class children in white