Gee, you go away for a weekend and what do you find on return? Another bit of Bush campaign rhetoric reduced to rubble. Are you conservative holdouts (just give them a tax cut and they will reverse their so called "values" every time) beginning to see the emperor has no clothes? (just lots of campaign money and tax cuts) As a former teacher in a bedroom community outside of Houston (in the 80s) I can tell you Bush has not improved things such as education in the Lone Star state but ruined them (tax cuts CUTS educational spending). Here's the NY TIMES editorial on how Enron/Bush style PR and accounting created a false image of what was supposed to be a stellar operation. What we are getting out of Bush's education program is a student much like him. Inferior and unable to function unless your daddy was a former president and highly connected to the wealthiest people on the planet (and tight with the CIA).

Houston's School Dropout Debacle

As a presidential candidate and Texas governor, George Bush boasted that his state's school accountability system would be a model for the nation. A focus on basic skills and frequent testing had turned around an underperforming set of school systems in a state with a large poor, nonwhite population. In particular, he said, Houston was leading the way. When he was elected president, Mr. Bush selected Rod Paige, the Houston superintendent, as his education secretary.

It turns out the Houston schools have not lived up to their billing. Their amazingly low high school dropout rate was literally unbelievable — the educational equivalent of Enron's accounting results. The school district has 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...




___________________________________________________________________