Washington Post, Friday, April 21, 2000; Page A01 

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, middle-class schools are reading
literature, learning a variety of forms of writing, studying mathematics
aimed at problem-solving and conceptual understanding, . . . poor and
minority children are devoting class time to practice test materials," the
researchers, who have a decade's experience in Texas schools, said in a
report published by Harvard University. "This system of testing is
therefore not the benign 'reform' its political advocates claim."

Since the 1994 inauguration of the state's standardized test, the Texas
Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), many schools, especially in
working-class areas with low pass rates, are virtually handed over to "test
prep" from New Year's through April, when the tests are given.

Schools stage TAAS pep rallies and "TAAS camps," plus pizza parties and
trips to the ballpark for students who score well on practice exams. High
schools hold Friday night "lock-ins" in the gym, where students do TAAS
drills until sunup. Banners, such as "22 Days Left . . .," mark the time
until test day. Three years running, Houston's heavily minority Furr High
School gave a randomly selected student who passed TAAS a used Ford.

Texas officials defend concentrated test coaching as an appropriate way to
help pupils master the curriculum. "If kids are practicing long division so
they can do well on the test, then fine," said Margaret LaMontagne, Bush's
senior education aide. "These are skills they ought to know."

At the center of Bush's education program is a system under which teachers'
and administrators' careers can stall if they fail to raise TAAS scores. In
addition, students cannot graduate if they fail the exams.

These rules created by Bush and his predecessors "are central to closing
the achievement gap" between white and minority students, said Susana
Navarro, executive director of the El Paso Collaborative for Academic
Excellence, a group that works in that city's schools. TAAS "has helped
poor minority kids. . . . Lots of them for decades left public elementary
schools without being able to read, write or do math. Now they're being
challenged."

Pushing Accountability

Bush has devoted significant resources to improving public schools. Since
he took office in 1995, state education spending has risen 55 percent, to
$23.3 billion. Bush achieved his school reforms with bipartisan legislative
majorities and strong backing from the business community, which needed
educated youth for Texas's booming economy.

"Coming from business, Bush immediately got the idea of holding people
accountable for performance," said Charles Miller, a Houston money manager
who has helped lead Texas school reforms.

Under reforms pushed by Bush, Texas schoolchildren cannot graduate if they
fail 10th-grade TAAS tests on reading, writing and math, and later retests.
Students also cannot proceed from grade to grade if they flunk the test.

In a number of school districts, administrators' job prospects--and bonuses
that can total thousands of dollars--depend on which of four ranks their
schools receive, from "low-performing" to "exemplary." Officials set the
rankings based on school attendance, dropout rates and TAAS scores--and
then publicize them. To meet TAAS targets, educators also must ensure that
minority students score well--another Bush reform. Rod Paige,
superintendent of Houston's school district, has received several annual
bonuses of $25,000 based in part on TAAS scores.

Many of the results are striking, especially the narrowing gap between
white and minority scores. Last year, 86 percent of white 10th-graders
passed TAAS, up from 64 percent in 1994. More impressive are the gains by
minority students--64 percent of Hispanic 10th-graders passed in 1999,
compared with 34 percent five years earlier. Sixty percent of blacks passed
last year, more than twice the 28 percent from 1994.

Bush supporters insist these TAAS score increases are genuine, and they
cite as evidence the fact that Texas students' scores have risen on the
nationwide NAEP test.

But a career education expert at the U.S. Department of Education has
doubts. The official, who did not want his name used to avoid controversy,
said that while Texas fourth-graders' NAEP scores improved markedly over
time, older students' gains were much smaller. Moreover, the expert wrote
in a report, NAEP data "do not substantiate the . . . rapidly closing
[racial] gap" noted in TAAS scores.

He raised other questions, as well. Acknowledging that college board scores
are an imperfect measure because taking the test is voluntary, the official
points out that they have hardly changed in Texas over the years. "Texas
was near the national average on many measures of educational performance
when TAAS was introduced, and remains there," he wrote.

A Rand Corp. education researcher, Steve Klein, has similar doubts. In 1996
he gave math tests to about 2,000 students in 20 Texas schools. Klein was
curious because TAAS results suggested Texas had broken an almost
invariable rule in education--that middle-class children do much better on
math than poor kids. But that gap persisted in Klein's test.

"We knew something strange was going on," Klein said. He believes that
without meaning to, Texas officials design TAAS tests so they're vulnerable
to Texas teachers' coaching. He also thinks that kids who "prepped" for
TAAS not only didn't get a deep understanding of the subject, but also
weren't helped to pass non-TAAS tests.

Other factors might play a role in inflating Texas's test performance--such
as outright cheating.

With careers at stake, some educators have changed students' answers to
improve grades. Three Houston teachers and an administrator had to resign
after they erased wrong answers and wrote in the right ones. Austin's
school district was indicted last year after administrators were caught
tampering with test documents.

A state panel also is investigating what many experts say is a more serious
problem--deliberately underestimating dropout rates. Undercounting dropouts
is in administrators' interest because the statistic counts toward a
school's ranking.

The Intercultural Development Research Association, a Texas education
gadfly group, said the dropout rate is many times higher than official
estimates and is worsening. Over a three-year period, about 31 percent of
white students quit school, as well as 49 percent of blacks and 53 percent
of Hispanics, the group said.

Boston College's Haney said his research confirms that the state
drastically undercounts dropouts. (Texas officials say that Haney, as well
as critics McNeil and Valenzuela, have an ax to grind, because they were
paid witnesses against the state in a Hispanic civil rights group's failed
lawsuit alleging school bias.)

'Low Expectations'

Some schools have deemed many low-scoring kids as special-education
students to excuse them from TAAS, teachers said. But officials say they
have cracked down on this practice, and more special-ed students are now
tested with classmates.

Some educators also say the test is just too easy. Janice Taylor, a high
school math teacher in Houston, said the TAAS math test taken for
graduation could be passed by many fifth-graders.

Many of her 50 math seniors who passed TAAS were shocked when they did
poorly on math college boards, she said. "They think they're prepared," she
said. "But doing well on TAAS doesn't indicate they know what they need to
go to college."

Three California mathematicians agreed. In a 1998 report, they said the
TAAS math test needed for graduation was appropriate for the sixth grade.
They cited this TAAS question: "Kenyon is 5 feet 6 inches tall. His sister
Tenika is 7 inches taller than he is. How tall is Tenika?" Such "low
expectations," they said, are "cause for concern."

Another education expert retained by the same group, the conservative Tax
Research Association, compared sentence complexity and the length of
passages in TAAS reading tests and concluded that most got easier over
time. "There may have been no real improvement in [Texas students'] reading
skills," wrote Harvard education expert Sandra Stotsky. "There may have
even been a decline."

The Texas Education Agency strenuously denies Stotsky's and the
mathematicians' "inaccurate, unsubstantiated" allegations and insists that
TAAS tests are getting tougher.

Either way, a number of education researchers and Texas teachers said TAAS
is degrading the quality of Texas education.

"We are concerned that the repetitive [TAAS] demonstrations, drills,
worksheets and practice tests may lower [student] motivation, curiosity and
cognitive growth," said a 1997 study of Texas schools in the Journal of
School Leadership. "The most devastating effects" are on minority students,
it said, adding, "Many teachers insist [TAAS] does not measure what their
students need to learn."

Teachers said principals and commercial TAAS consultants hired by their
districts urge them to address their teaching mostly to the students who
barely failed TAAS last time. Many reading classes consist of going over
dreary one-paragraph passages, followed by multiple-choice questions.
Children are taught test-taking tricks, such as looking first at the
answers, circling key words and then reading the passage to find those words.

Some teachers express dismay that school districts, to identify slow
learners, set performance levels that children are pushed to meet even in
kindergarten. Some Houston parents are receiving letters saying their
kindergartners should attend summer school because they're behind in
rhyming or alphabet skills.

Margaret Immel, a Rice University reading expert who trains Houston
teachers, believes that setting such expectations ignores the unevenness in
the progress of 5-year-olds. She fears that "teachers will start engaging
in these isolated drills to get [kindergartners] on [grade] level. . . . In
many classrooms, the joy and magic of reading is being replaced with
drudgery."

Texas officials say their goal is maintaining pressure for learning.

"Does it matter to have educational standards?" Bush aide LaMontagne said.
"Does it keep people's eye on the ball? Absolutely. This is what leadership
is about. We're not here to make people happy."

Bush vows as president to expand on the Texas model by requiring all states
to test students. Non-performing schools would lose federal funds, with the
money going to parents to choose their own schools.

"We're not going to pay for schools that will not change," Bush said. "As
president, I'm going to rescue children from failure."