The Broad Prize: An Inconvenient History

U.S. News and World Report reports on the upcoming Eli Broad Foundation's "Broad Prize for Urban Education," and calls it "the Nobel Prize for education reform." It fails to mention that the history of the Prize suggests it might be more aptly named the Potemkin Prize instead. (h/t to This Little Blog.)

In a nutshell, the first awardee of the Prize in 2002 was the Houston Independent School District, led by Rod Paige, whose "Houston miracle" would catapult him to the position of Secretary of Education under George W. Bush and lead us all down the primrose path of NCLB.

A June 2008 post on the now-defunct Eduwonkette blog on EdWeek tells a background story on Paige's prize-winning methods that shouldn't disappear down the Memory Hole:

[A December 2000 NYTimes article wrote that] Rod Paige "helped nudge test scores steadily upward in the Houston district, which is largely black and Hispanic. It now ranks among the highest-performing in the state." Houston, the commentators cooed, was nothing short of a miracle. In 2002, the district won the first Broad Prize for Urban Education.

By 2003, the press - and the Texas Education Agency - started looking more closely at Houston's results. In the Times first article on the Houston miracle, "Questions on Data Cloud Luster of Houston Schools," Diana Schemo wrote, "Now, some here are questioning whether the miracle may have been smoke and mirrors, at least on the high school level. And they are suggesting that perhaps Houston is a model of how the focus on school accountability can sometimes go wrong, driving administrators to alter data or push students likely to mar a school's profile -- through poor attendance or low test scores -- out the back door."

{snip}

In this month's issue of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a new study by UT-Austin professor Julian Vasquez-Heilig and Linda Darling-Hammond, "Accountability Texas-Style: The Progress and Learning of Urban Minority Students in a High-Stakes Testing Context," revisits the Houston miracle by analyzing years of student-level test score and graduation data (1995-2002). There's no version up on the web yet, but here are some key findings:

• Growth on scores on TAAS exam outpaced scores on the Stanford exam. This appears to be prima facie evidence of test score inflation.
• Low-scoring students were excluded from taking the TAAS, both through special education and language exemptions and grade retention.
• A key strategy for improving test scores involved retaining students in 9th grade so they would not sit for the TAAS exit exam in 10th grade. At its peak, 30% of 9th graders were retained for one or more years. Some students were kept in 9th grade for two years, and then skipped to 11th grade so they could avoid the exit test. When more students were retained, unsurprisingly, accountability ratings went up.
• While minuscule dropout rates were reported, only a third of students were graduating in Houston in 5 years or less.

The post concludes with a fun bit of link-snarkery:

Take home lessons? If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

I don't know what measures, if any, Broad has taken to prevent such travesties since this rough start. Does anybody else?

(For more, see 60 Minutes and the Dallas Morning News on how high-stakes testing led Houston to cheat to the top.)

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