I’ve been meaning to write about this one for a while and the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen reminded me of the story’s significance this morning.
As long-time readers may remember, I’m not a big fan of Rod Paige, Bush’s secretary of education. First, he’s completely irrelevant. When the Bush administration was shaping the No Child Left Behind policy, the White House completely ignored Paige and separated the education secretary from the process.
Second, he’s clueless. Paige has been asked to travel on Bush’s behalf to talk about education issues and testify before congressional committees on the administration’s education policies. Not only does Paige consistently fail to impress, he usually comes across as incompetent.
As The New Republic reported in July 2001, “[A]t times Paige has seemed painfully unaware of both the policy and the politics behind the massive education reform effort he ostensibly oversees.” Even a Republican House staffer remarked, “People realized that [Paige] was outside of the process. I don’t think anyone thought that he was really involved.”
Third, Paige isn’t exactly Mr. First Amendment when it comes to religion and public schools. You may recall a week-long flap Paige got into in April when he said, “All things equal, I would prefer to have a child in a school that has a strong appreciation for the values of the Christian community, where a child is taught to have a strong faith, where a child is taught that there is a source of strength greater than themselves.” These comments sparked a controversy that led to some fairly intense criticism from Democratic lawmakers, education groups, civil liberties organizations, and newspaper editorial boards.
That being said, Paige is still at his post, presumably with Bush’s support.
When nominated to serve in Bush’s cabinet, many marveled at Paige’s triumphs as Houston’s superintendent of public schools in Houston from 1994 to 2000. Usually near the top of Paige’s list of accomplishments was his success in dramatically bringing down dropout rates in one of the nation’s largest school districts.
There was one funny thing about those dramatically curtailed dropout rates, though. They weren’t true.
In Paige’s last year as Houston’s superintendent, the school district reported an incredibly low dropout rate of 1.5%. That was better than any comparably-sized school district in America. The problem, however, is that the district, which was under Paige’s supervision, cooked the books and failed to count thousands of students who dropped out and didn’t return.
As Cohen explained today, “As with Enron, [Houston’s] school system has kept a set of books that has absolutely nothing to do with reality. Some high schools reported absolutely no — that’s zero — dropouts. That these schools were in impoverished areas made the figures either preposterous or a miracle. The school system — not to mention George Bush — preferred to see a miracle.
“The so-called Texas Miracle is precisely why Rod Paige was named secretary of education. He was Houston’s school superintendent before joining the Bush administration, and was chosen, the president said, because Paige knew that ‘accountability is the true foundation of education reform.’ Paige had the numbers. But some of the numbers were bogus. Worse, they were plain unbelievable. Schools simply concocted numbers to please headquarters. Dropout rates went down to zero; every high school student was heading off to college, even those in schools where most of the students failed to take the SATs or, when they did, scored dismally. Everything in Houston worked perfectly. The records said so.”
This is a story that has been generating some steam the last few weeks. If Paige’s most impressive accomplishment in Houston was his success with lowering dropout rates, and it turns out that success was completely fraudulent, then Paige may soon be facing some renewed pressure to update his resume and see if he can break his DC lease.
Not surprisingly, Paige has decided that he doesn’t want to talk about the Houston dropout controversy. His Dept. of Education spokesperson merely says that Paige “stands by his record of accomplishment in Texas.”
That’s fine, but now that his record has come into question, Paige will need to do a little more explaining about what role he played in Houston’s fuzzy math. If he knew that the numbers were false, he was involved with perpetrating a fraud. If Paige didn’t know that the books were being cooked, he was negligent in his responsibilities as superintendent.
The New York Times editorial page wrote over a month ago that Paige “can remain silent no longer. He was brought to Washington to provide national educational leadership. With Houston facing a crisis of fiddled data, he owes it to the country to share his thoughts on how this happened and what it means.”
That was written in July. Paige still isn’t talking. Didn’t Bush promise to usher in a new “era of responsibility” as president?