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     Reflections on Standardized Testing and the Texas “Miracle in Education”
                                                               or
     How Three Brothers, Two States, and One Law Tried to Destroy Public Education


Back when I attended elementary school and junior high—the concept of the middle school had yet to take hold—in the ancient days of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, Minnesota typically gave students two standardized tests, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the Stanford Achievement Test. Both tests had been refined over many decades, and though they were imperfect as all tests are, since they were norm-based and administered nation-wide, they allowed for state-to-state comparisons. Schools and individual students could readily see how they compared to other regions of the country.

Minnesota, along with states like Vermont, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Washington State, and several others traditionally scored near the top on these tests. What did the states do that ranked near the bottom? Instead of improving their educational systems by modeling them after the states that were doing well, they opted to write their own tests. What did Minnesota and the other leading education states do in response? Unfortunately, they chose to follow the new trend and design their own tests as well; thereby, not making our schools better, but greatly enriching the testing industry. And tragically, the state which Minnesota primarily emulated was Texas, due to its so-called “Miracle in Education.”

Publicity in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s surrounding Texas’ supposed educational success was touted by folks like Ron Paige, the Superintendent of Houston schools. Paige is one of the primary reasons why Minnesota and many other states followed Texas’ lead. Minnesota’s new test was called the Minnesota Comprehensive Test, or MCA; in Florida it was the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, or FCAT. Sadly, by the time new state tests had been written and implemented, at great expense to taxpayers, it turned out that Ron Paige had faked both test scores and graduation rates in Houston. But before Paige’s deception became public, Congress had already passed the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, which encouraged states across the country to radically change their educational practices. At the same time, President George Bush, Jr. nominated Ron Paige to be Secretary of Education. And given that Florida’s governor, Jeb was George’s brother, Jeb pushed hard to replicate Texas’ testing practices in his state, too. And to complete the triumvirate, the lesser-known Bush brother—Neil—started a test preparation company in Florida, which attempted to profit from the NCLB legislation.

As one example of how egregious Paige’s actions in Houston were, he claimed a district-wide drop-out rate of 1.5 percent on state reports. But Robert Kimball, an assistant principal at Sharpstown H.S. in Houston, had the courage to report the truth—that the freshman class of 1,000 in his school had dwindled to only 300 graduating seniors. As a reward for his honesty, Kimball was reprimanded and reassigned to a primary school. (The Houston School District would later retract his reprimand and pay him an undisclosed amount in an out-of-court settlement.)

Paige and his Houston school colleagues also routinely inflated scores on standardized tests. One method they used was placing low-performing students, many of whom were Black and Hispanic, in special education classes, where they weren’t required to take the test. At the same time, they went out of their way to ensure that talented football players remained eligible. One trick they employed was keeping football players in ninth grade for two consecutive years, then promoting them directly to 11th grade, which conveniently by-passed the high-stakes standardized test that was given in 10th grade, and which students were required to pass as a graduation requirement.

By the time reporters and educational experts had uncovered the ruse, most states had already followed Texas’ lead and radically changed their testing practices. I was still teaching in Minnesota when the first versions of the MCA arrived. The early iterations of the test were poorly written, fraught with errors and ambiguities, and in some cases, there were massive scoring errors. In 2002 alone, NSC Pearson, the company hired to score Minnesota’s tests, wrongly informed 8,000 students they had failed. As a result, many of those students weren’t allowed to graduate and some in some cases they even dropped out of school. To avoid going to trial, Pearson paid a seven-million-dollar settlement to the affected students, but that didn’t mitigate the trauma they had experienced.

So, in the end, the real Texas miracle was that Ron Paige and his co-conspirators managed to escape the punishment which they so clearly deserved, while millions of innocent students and teachers were forced to suffer through an ill-conceived and unnecessary educational experiment, the negative effects of which linger to this day.