July 26, 2003

Education Secretary Defends School System He Once Led

od Paige, the secretary of education, yesterday defended the record of the public schools in Houston, where he was superintendent before joining the Bush administration. Advances in student achievement, Dr. Paige said, were genuine and "still standing," though he said "there probably was" a dropout problem.

In an interview with the editorial board of The New York Times, Dr. Paige addressed questions about the dropout problem in Houston and about No Child Left Behind, the federal education act largely modeled on changes first adopted in Texas. He said he had not responded earlier to reports about dropouts in Houston to avoid interfering with his successors there, "not because I have any concern addressing the issue."

In recent months, Houston has come under increasing scrutiny by the Texas Education Agency, state politicians and the news media. Earlier this year, KHOU, a television station in Houston, reported that Sharpstown High School there had falsely told district and state education agencies that it had no dropouts, even after a school employee had contacted 30 students who left and found that the majority had, indeed, dropped out.

A later state investigation tarnished the reputation of Houston, once considered Exhibit A of a Texas "miracle" in education, which helped propel George Bush to the presidency.

The state audited 16 middle schools and high schools and found that of 5,500 teenagers who had left school in the 2000-1 school year, about 3,000, or 55 percent, should have been reported as dropouts. The audit recommended lowering the rankings of 14 of the 16 schools, and said Houston's school system should be ranked unacceptable.

Houston as a whole reported a 1.5 percent annual dropout rate, though education experts estimate that the true percentage of students who quit before graduation is nearer 40 percent. The city is appealing the recommendation, and contends that it may be guilty of shoddy record-keeping, but not fraud.

Dr. Paige had initially declined to comment on the underreporting of Houston's dropout figures, but agreed to discuss them after an editorial in The Times earlier this week said that he "owes it to the country to share his thoughts on how this happened and what it means."

Dr. Paige, who was Houston's superintendent from 1994 to 2001, said he effectively stopped running the Houston district in late December 2000, when President Bush nominated him as education secretary.

Yesterday, Dr. Paige called Houston "the most evaluated, the most looked at, the most open public school system in the history of the universe," and said he welcomed scrutiny, as superintendent of schools and as the nation's chief education official.

He contended that Houston deserved the prize it won this year from the Broad Foundation as the best urban school district in the United States, saying the award was not based on dropout data supplied by the district, but on a survey by the Manhattan Institute.

That survey, nevertheless, ranked Houston near the bottom of the country's 50 largest school districts, saying it had one of the lowest graduation rates, at 52 percent. In fact, 3 of the 10 worst school districts for high school graduation — Dallas, Houston and Fort Worth — were in Texas, the survey said.

In comparing the success of school districts for the prize, dropout rates did not figure prominently, said Brad Duggan, president of the National Center for Educational Accountability, an Austin group that evaluated the research on candidates for the prize. Mr. Duggan said his group considered an array of measures, from scores on standardized exams to success at closing the achievement gaps between black, Latino and white children.

Dr. Paige said: `'This system in Houston is still standing, it's vertical and it has been reviewed by some of the best. And the data can take it because it is earnest, it is open, it is objective, and it is there."

Asked whether he doubted, then, that there was a serious dropout problem in Houston, Dr. Paige said: "I didn't say that at all. I think there probably was."

He said he could not say whether the district masked the problem. "Because I have not been there since December 2000," he said, "I wasn't in a position to know the details."

He added, "I wouldn't doubt that in a system as large as Houston, where you have 300 schools and 13,000 students that you're going to have some problems."