Houston: Where Innovative Lying Takes Wing

When Jerroll Tyler, a sophomore at Houston's Sharpstown High School turned 18, he met the full force of Texas' no-nonsense approach to education. He received an attendance contract, warning that if he missed more than two days of school, he was out permanently. By week's end, Mr. Tyler had caroused his way past the limit.

Months later, when he showed up to take a state math exam needed for graduation, a dean at Sharpstown told him he was no longer enrolled. "I went home, and I never looked back at school again," Mr. Tyler said.

Which was why Mr. Tyler and his mother, Karen Gamble, were shocked to see that Sharpstown High claimed it had no dropouts at all last year. It reported, instead, that Mr. Tyler had transferred to Southwest High, a charter school he had never even visited. Some 462 other students left the school that year, and Sharpstown claimed that not one had dropped out.

Sharpstown was not alone. A recent state audit in Houston, which examined records from 16 middle and high schools, found that more than half of the 5,500 students who left in the 2000-1 school year should have been declared dropouts but were not. That year, Houston schools reported that only 1.5 percent of its students had dropped out.

The audit ?- which recommended lowering the ranking of 14 of the 16 schools from the best to the worst, has been a stunning blow to the Houston school system, the largest and most celebrated district in Texas. Last year, the city won a $1 million prize as best urban district in the country, from the Broad Foundation, which is based in Los Angeles.

The city has also been a pillar of the so-called Texas miracle in education, whose emphasis on grading school performance became the model for the rest of the country under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. It was largely on the strength of his success here that Rod Paige, Houston's former superintendent, followed George W. Bush east to become secretary of education.

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.

"It was Enron accounting," said Joseph Rodriguez, a former employee of the district's office of research and accountability, who is running for an open seat on the Houston school board. "Who are our dropouts? We haven't identified them."


And the story isn't even in the local paper.