Texas Education: Miracle Or Mirage?
Two weeks before the election, a new study on student test scores in Texas has landed like a stink bomb on George W. Bush's campaign.
Ordinarily, think tank reports don't command much attention outside of the fraternity of specialists in the field; in this case, education. At best, you may get to announce your findings at a National Press Club news conference seen on the C-SPAN overnight.
But a new issue paper out Tuesday from the nonpartisan Rand Corp. may give Bush a black eye. The paper questions whether minority students in Texas are making any academic gains at all, let alone the leaps and bounds Bush has bragged about on the stump.
"I think 'the Texas miracle' is a myth," said Stephen Klein, a senior Rand researcher who helped lead the study, entitled What do Test Scores in Texas Tell Us?
Four RAND scholars including Klein found that major improvements by Texas students in tests administered by the state are not reflected in national exams given to the same youngsters.
Further, when they compared the results of national reading and math tests to state test results in the same subjects, researchers found a "striking" gap in average scores between whites and students of color.
A Rand summary of the findings says, "According to the [national] NAEP results, that gap in Texas is not only very large but increasing slightly. According to [Texas] TAAS scores, the gap is much smaller and decreasing greatly."
On the campaign trail, Bush boasts of a 40-point gain by Hispanic eighth-graders on the Texas math exam. African-American fourth graders, he says, have "better math skills in Texas than in any state in the country."
But the new study found the Texas tests often showed two, three or four times more “improvement” than the national exams. The discrepancies “raise serious questions about the validity” of the Texas test scores.
The researchers said some schools hire consultants to improve test scores, and suggested kids may be doing better on the Texas test because teachers "teach the test," a practice for which Bush himself has expressed disdain.
In an interview with Reuters, Klein said another possible explanation for the high number of students doing well in the Texas exam is that the state exam is not particularly tough, so even less-skilled youngsters are able to score well.
The Bush camp dismissed the study. Chief campaign spokeswoman Karen Hughes called the timing of the paper's publication "highly suspect" and its conclusions "at odds" with "credible" studies of Texas schools.
Appreciative of the power of the Rand name, the Bush campaign tried to spin the paper as the views of a few rogue researchers.
The Bush campaign reprinted a passage from the a Rand statement explaining that the researchers’ "views and conclusions … do not necessarily represent those of RAND or its reserch sponsors."
In a statement, Rand CEO James A. Thomson defended the study's timing: "We don't produce findings for political reasons, we don't distribute them for political reasons and we don't sit on them for political reasons. This is a scrupulously nonpartisan institution."
A main plank of Bush’s education platform is linking federal money for local schools to student test results. If a lousy school does not improve, Bush would redistribute federal money to students’ parents, in the form of vouchers toward the cost of tuition at an alternative school, like a charter school, parochial or private school.
The Rand study is more than a bad hair day for Bush, who has made education his signature issue. It's also red meat for Gore's ad men.
For months, the Gore campaign shined a klieg light on Bush's record on the environment and children's health care, only to see the governor’s poll numbers rise steadily until he took the lead for good in October.
If the Rand paper sticks, Gore may finally have something he can pin on Bush.