Houston Schools: the Truth

One of the ponies Dubya's ridden to power is the "success" of the Houston school system, which apparently was a prototype for No Child Left Behind/No School Left Standing. One of the Shrub's claims: drastically reduced dropout rate, like 1.5%. But Sixty Minutes II thought maybe that didn't lissen just right, so they went to Houston, talked to a guy who's been demoted from high school principal to second asst principal of a three-grade elementary school (nope, not making this up), who says the dropout rate is actually, um, closer to 50%. The schools are cooking the books. They make up "codes" for the records of kids who vanish--"transferred to another school," "family relocation"--so they can claim nobody much actually drops out . And the principals of schools who report in the target range are getting paid bonuses--some as much as $5,000 a year--while others end up like this guy who's running a kindergarten but refuses to be humiliated, refuses to shut up.

This is No Child Left Behind, in action. This is how it is. This is education, run as business. For the mirror view, we have Martha Stewart on Larry King a couple weeks ago, referring to herself as a "teacher" and to the working-class KMart shoppers she exploits as "the people I help." Business, tricked out in the trappings of education, is one of Martha's Good Things, apparently. No dignity, no honor, just profit for the few in collapsing the distinction between self-service and service to others.