Julian Borger (Guardian Utd): Bush fails schools test

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Thursday December 4

Bush fails schools test
By Julian Borger in Washington

A Texas education "miracle" that helped establish George Bush as an effective reformer, and later became a model for US schools nationally, may have been a mirage, it was reported yesterday.
When Mr Bush was governor, the improvement of low-income pupils in Houston was hailed as a triumph of testing and school accountability.
A state test, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), showed remarkable gains by school students in the 1990s, and the apparent evaporation of a gap between white and minority children . . . .
An analysis by the New York Times and educationalists, using the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT), found Houston no better than other cities, sometimes worse; furthermore it found the minority gap was still significant. Although 88% of Houston's school students are black or ethnically Latin American, state figures showed that only a few hundred of those leave school "college ready".

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