The truth about Texas school reform

Has George W. Bush made his state's education system a model for the nation?

By Joan Walsh

Nov 1, 1999 | Paul Haupt is standing in a crowded hallway, trying to give a tour of El Paso's new and improved Pebble Hills Elementary School, but it's slow going. He can barely finish a sentence without interruption by a hello, high-five or hug from a student.

Three-quarters Latino, two-thirds from low-income homes, Pebble Hills students are usually quiet and contained, roving from classroom to computer lab to lunch room in their casual school uniforms -- red, green or white polo shirts over khaki pants, shorts or skirts. But when they see Haupt, the school's director of instruction, they have to shout their greetings.

It wasn't always like this, he says.

"I owe a lot of kids an apology for the way I used to teach math," the portly, ebullient teacher says. Haupt has the mien of a newly recovering alcoholic anxious to share his change of life with other sufferers, and make amends to those he harmed before he saw the light.

"It was all 'Add, take away, multiply, divide -- what's so hard about that?'" he recalls with a shudder. "A lot of people will tell you: They became math teachers because there's only one right way to teach it, and only one right answer. And of course that's completely wrong."

The agency of change in Haupt's life -- his 12-step program, if you will -- was an innovative training program sponsored by the El Paso Collaborative for Academic Excellence, a seven-year-old program put together by determined school reformers at the University of Texas, El Paso. It was specifically designed to train both new and experienced teachers to get results for the diverse, low-income population that dominates El Paso schools.

The program seems to have produced extraordinary results in El Paso. But Haupt's conversion story is being told all over Texas. A 15-year push to reform education and demand high standards of all schools for all students, but especially blacks and Latinos, has in the last five years finally paid big dividends, producing an education turnaround unrivaled by other states.

The vast improvement in Texas schools has gotten national attention, and it's going to get more, because much of the change has occurred during Republican Gov. George W. Bush's five years in office. Detractors try to explain away the good news by saying Texas has improved kids' test-taking skills, not their education. Others credit -- or blame -- Texas' lack of strong teachers unions, which they say lets reformers make change quickly, but ensures that such change can never be replicated nationally without union-busting coast to coast.

But it's clear that even correcting for Texas' unique labor climate and test-happy education establishment, Bush deserves credit for the school reform that's now making headlines. Progress in Texas predates Bush, of course: In 1984, a reform commission headed by none other than Ross Perot pushed through a sweeping program for change. The components included expanded funding, mandatory teacher testing and evaluation, a new statewide curriculum and a statewide student-testing system, including a graduation exam. Later, Gov. Ann Richards mandated tougher tests and a new emphasis on improving minority achievement.

The effort has paid off: Once among the lowest performing states, Texas is now at or near the top on most measures. On the state's own assessment tests, scores have steadily climbed in the last five years. The Texas high school exit exam, which students have to pass to graduate, is a good example. Sophomores take the test, required for graduation, to prepare for their final chance as seniors. Where only half of Texas 10th-graders managed it in 1994, fully 75 percent did in 1998.

On national tests, Texas kids rank at or near the top in math, reading and writing. In writing, Texas eighth-graders ranked fourth in the nation, behind traditionally high-achieving, relatively homogeneous states like Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maine, while its black and Latino students ranked first and second, respectively.

If Texas' statewide school-reform achievements are noteworthy, El Paso's are stunning. Pebble Hills' demographics are matched by the city as a whole. It's the fifth-poorest congressional district in the nation. Two-thirds of its 135,000 students live in poverty, half enter school speaking only limited English and about 10 percent cross the Mexican border from dusty, polluted Juarez every day.

Since 1993, El Paso's test scores have soared. That year only two-thirds of its white students, and about a third of Latinos and African-Americans, passed the state's mandatory math exams. In 1998, the pass rates were 91 percent, 80 percent and 75 percent for the three groups. The city has seen similar gains in reading. The most striking thing about those figures is how the city has closed two-thirds of the achievement gap between its white and minority students.

Texas still ranks 40th in education spending, and about that in teachers' salaries. Just this week Bush got into a pissing match with his GOP rivals to prove that his legendarily miserly state is even less generous to poor people than the rest of the nation believes. Still, many credit him with continuing the state's commitment to reform. They say he's raised standards, funding and school and teacher accountability to a new level.

Now, the GOP front-runner's all-but-inevitable presidential nomination threatens to put the Democrats on the defensive when it comes to education, for the first time since the party made the issue its own by pushing through expanded funding for poor students under President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. It could be that just as it took a Democratic president to preside over dramatic welfare reform, it will take a Republican to reform the schools, to break the stalemate over turf, bureaucracy, ideology and funding that has sentenced many children, especially poor urban kids, to educational failure.

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