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Paige Defends HISD Progress
Education Secretary Rod Paige told business leaders on Monday that recent criticisms of the Houston Independent School District have been unbalanced accounts with an intent to derail national school reforms.
Paige, speaking during a breakfast meeting of the Greater Houston Partnership, said New York Times reports on HISD's test scores and crime rate ignore progress that the district has made since Paige was superintendent of the schools. A story unfavorably comparing Houston's scores on the state-mandated Texas Assessment of Academic Skills to scores on the national Stanford Achievement Test mixed incongruous results, he said.
"Comparing those two scores is like comparing bull riding to sheep herding," Paige said. "Both involve livestock but test different skills. "
Paige did not mention the Times by name, but HISD issued press releases rebutting the paper's articles and calling them pre-campaign attacks on the Bush administration.
President Bush's sweeping school reform package, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, included many of the same type of reforms adopted by Houston and the Texas Education Agency, including testing student progress annually and tying funding to performance.
"Because those who are fighting against it (No Child Left Behind) have targeted Houston and are targeting your children," Paige said, "you have a right to know what's happening. For better or worse, whether you like it or not, Houston has become the epicenter of this discussion, the battleground of a new struggle for freedom."
Since moving to Washington in 2001, Paige has tried to stay out of public scrutiny connected with local schools. But staying out of the fray has not been easy as Paige and Bush touted Houston as a model district for the nation. Media, scholars and school officials all have focused their attention on HISD to see what they can expect from No Child Left Behind and to predict its flaws.
The visit on Monday marked at least the second time this year Paige came to the defense of his old district. Earlier, he said that evidence of tampering with the dropout statistics reflected a weakness on the part of employees who counted students rather than with the accountability system he helped put in place.
The Partnership offered Paige a welcome audience. In the early and mid-1990s as HISD's reputation tanked, businessmen from the Partnership began fielding school board candidates and designing the framework for Houston's academic policies. Members of the organization also engineered the selling off of schools' support services to private businesses.
If the Greater Houston Partnership was the architect of the new and improved HISD, Paige was the project manager.
The TEA, a local law firm and a school-sanctioned research team have found that HISD did not accurately count its dropouts in the last two years of Paige's administration. Dismissing students' success, Paige said, carries the criticism too far.
"You are not wrong to try to give every child a quality education," Paige said. "You are not wrong to be guided by principles of fairness and equality."
The education secretary tied his message to the struggle for civil rights and to the administration's war on terrorism, saying education reforms will require a "coalition of the willing."
— Zanto Peabody
Paige defends HISD progress
Houston Chronicle
2003-12-15
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/metropolitan/2298570
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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