No Child Left Behind

5 No Child Left Behind "The worst educational system you could possibly have" he story of how Texas came to set the education agenda of the nation is more emotionally complicated than the one Tabout financial regulation. Not many of us have conflicted feelings about Phil Gramm's efforts to deregulate swaps or give Enron the green light on its electricity futures trading schemes. Bad news for the bottom 99 percent. However, reforming educa tion is another deal altogether. Let me warn you in advance that its going to be filled with people who were trying to do the right thing—along, of course, with a passel of special interests. This is also going to be a story about how Texas gave us a new vision of public education that involved unprecedented levels of federal oversight of local schools. Texas! Amazing, right? Even today there are Texas politicians who shake their head in stunned befuddlement at what they've wrought. The very idea of Texas being at the center of a national educa tion reform movement is counterintuitive. Nothing in its history suggests this is the place where the Lone Star State should wind up. Look at the Alamo, and you can instantly imagine a series of Texas politicians going to Washington and starting wars. On energy, you can intuit the connection. Even taxes. But Texas had not tradition- 72 AS TEXAS GOES. 73 ally been the first, second, or twentieth name that came to mind when the subject was quality education. Back in 1920, in a cry that would be repeated throughout most of the state's modern history, the Campaign for Better Schools pushed for more funding with a flyer that read: TEXAS First in Size First in Agricultural Products First in Production of Oil Seventh in Wealth Thirty-Ninth in Education When World War Two began, 23 percent of the young men being drafted or recruited from Texas were too badly educated to qualify for the military—twice the national average. After the war ended, Texas still only required that teachers have a high school education, and rural districts routinely shut down when it was time to plant or harvest the crops. "We had the worst educational system . that you could possibly have," recalled former House Speaker Reuben Senterfitt, who helped get the schools their first infusion of state funding. Decades later, many Texas policy-makers still believed that all you needed to make it in their state was sweat and savvy, not book learning. "When I first came to the legislature you had to have arguments with a lot of people about whether it was necessary to graduate high school," said Representative Scott Hochberg, who was first elected in 1992. Nevertheless, Texas had joined the rest of the nation in wonder ing if its schools were up to snuff. The Reagan administration—not normally known to be a den of worrywarts when it came to the quality of domestic government programs—had issued a widely influential report, "A Nation at Risk," in 1983, which said that the 74 GAIL COLLINS world was becoming one large economic village, in which prod ucts of the American educational system were at a disadvantage. The hawkish White House warned ominously that the country had been "committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament," and the more Americans looked around, the more it did seem as if other countries—particularly rather obscure Nordic countries—were doing way better at teaching reading and math, not to mention science and geography. What did Finland know that we didn't? The debate raged endlessly, as did the promises for change. The first President Bush vowed to be the "education presi dent," to little discernible effect. And Bill Clinton ran, in part, 011 his pro-education record as governor of Arkansas. Then came the 2000 election. During the campaign, George W. Bush couldn't stop talking about education. "It's important to have standards," he'd say, holding up his hand to indicate the set ting of a bar—a gesture that seemed to indicate the standards he had in mind were about five feet high. During one of the primary debates, he got a little sulky when John McCain was asked about schools while he got a question 011 gun control. "Not about educa tion, but go ahead," he said unhappily. As a presidential candidate, George W. Bush wasn't just issuing general promises to improve the schools. He claimed to have the secret recipe. "We think we know how to do it. Governor Bush has done it in Texas," Dick Cheney told America in the vice presidential debate. This came up all the time. Bush, it was said, had presided over "the Texas Miracle" that turned public schools around, sent test scores soaring, and dramatically narrowed the gap between middle-class white kids and poor, black, and Hispanic students. On the presidential press buses, reporters kept asking the Texas journalists whether the state's schools had improved as dramati cally as the campaign claimed. Frequently, the response was something along the line of "I guess so." Political reporters tend to shy away from in-depth analysis of education, which invariably requires a discussion of the relative value of the Texas Assessment AS TEXAS GOES 75 of Academic Skills versus the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But it really did appear that something good had happened. "One of our better right-wing billionaires" We need to examine the Texas Miracle, because the way you interpret the saga of how Texas pulled its schools up—and how far the pulling went—will have a lot to do with how favorably you look upon the legacy it gave the nation. When the Reagan White House started ringing the warning bell about international competition in the 1980s, Texas was still close to the bottom of the barrel when it came to the quality of education. Beginning public school teachers were paid $4,100 a year. Administrative costs were high, in part because Texas had 1,031 independent school districts, nearly 400 of which had fewer than 500 students. (In a huge lift, reformers in the late 1940s got the number down from over 2,000. Further merging was regarded as politically impossible; cynics blamed the existing districts' determination to protect the identity of their high school football teams.) Funding was wildly inequitable. The wealthiest district in the state had more than $14 million in assessed property value to tax for each child in the local public schools, while the poorest district had $20,000. The first serious elfort to change things came in the mid-1980s from Governor Mark White, a Democrat who was once described by an opponent as "one of the first nerds in Texas." White wanted to improve education as a tribute to his mother, an overworked teacher. "I've got pictures of her classroom in the first grade with thirty-four kids in it," he told reporters. To figure out what to do, he appointed the inevitable blue-ribbon commission, with Ross Perot as chairman. Perot, a short, big-eared man with a squeaky voice, was a bil lionaire businessman who would later run for president as a third- party candidate, destroying the reelection hopes of George H. W. 76 GAIL COLLINS Bush in 1992. (As a candidate, Perot's big issue was the federal debt. As a businessman, he got his big break when he snared huge government contracts to handle Medicare data processing. This would make him one of the many, many rich Texans who were deeply opposed to Washington spending money on things that did not involve them.) Before his presidential adventures, he was best known for having financed a commando raid on Iran to rescue some employees who had been jailed during the fall of the shah's government. He also once dispatched an attorney to go to England and buy an original copy of the Magna Carta. After the lawyer shelled out $1.5 million for the historic document and requested instructions on how to safely transport it home, Perot said: "Just stick it in your briefcase." Deferring to the man with the check book, the lawyer did just that. Perot was, in short, a man who knew what he wanted. And the education task force was one of his finest hours. "They traveled around the state and he was smart enough and wealthy enough and peculiar enough that he would say absolutely what was on his mind,' said David Anderson, a former state education official who now lobbies the legislature on education and other issues. Besides spending an enormous amount of time on the project, Perot also spent $500,000 of his own money on consultants. "H. Ross took off like an unguided missile," the iconic Texas columnist Molly Ivins wrote. "I keep having to explain to foreigners that some loopy right-wing Dallas billionaires are a lot better than others, and H. Ross happens to be one of our better right-wing billion aires. This is assuming you don't make him so mad that he goes out and buys an army and invades your country with it." The commission report will be remembered forever in Texas for its wildly controversial "no pass, no play" recommendation, which held that students who were failing in their classes should not be allowed to take part in sports or other extracurricular activities. ( It wasn t just football,' said Anderson. "Perot told a great story of a west Texas boy missing forty-four days of school showing his AS TEXAS GOES 77 chicken at the various agricultural competitions.") A new bumper sticker appeared on Texas cars: "I Don't Brake for H.

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