Teaching Test-Taking?

The establishment verdict is in: President-elect Bush made an astute choice by tapping Rod Paige, Houston's School Superintendent, to head his Education Department. The New York Times blessed the nomination as "wise," and both major teachers' unions have chimed in with support.

On most of the hot-button questions, Paige is a relatively uncontroversial pick. About vouchers, he has written, "We believe that public funds should go to students, not institutions, and there may be a time when vouchers will be part of the mix." (A limited voucher program in Houston was so modest and so narrowly designed that virtually no one took advantage of it.) Paige is a supporter of "performance pay" for teachers and a fairly strong proponent of a skills-based curriculum, especially phonics, but not to the point where he has openly horrified anyone in the teachers' unions or on the educational left. (Privatization, however, is Paige's one potential skeleton. He contracted with the for-profit Community Education Partners to renovate an old Wal-Mart and take in students expelled from other schools in the district. The Houston Press has reported that CEP falsified academic records to stay in good standing in the district. Paige defends the school, and the local teachers' union loves it because it exiles troublemakers. But when Paige touts the decline in violence in his district, it's important to keep this warehousing policy in mind.)

The basis for Paige's seeming pragmatism, and the core of his relationship with Bush, is "accountability." Both men believe strongly in a descending order of public liability, beginning with the governor, on down to district administrators, principals, teachers and ultimately arriving at pupils themselves: All get measured, and publicly lauded or shamed, by the outcome of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, the state-designed standardized test administered annually to public schoolchildren in third through eighth grades. (Passing a tenth-grade TAAS is required before a student can graduate from high school.) Both Paige and Bush staked their reputations on rising TAAS scores, and clearly both would like to see the Texas system--blending autocratic, centralized accountability standards with flexibility on how to satisfy them--bumped up to the federal level. But were the numbers truly what they said they were? And was placing both students and schools on a single-indicator model of performance good for Texas public education?

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