These local journalists who are conscious about their job per their new tag lines:
- "Keeping 'em honest"
- "We ask the 'Tough Questions'"
Some times the best way to achieve "social justice" is to present the facts and allow the conscious people to begin to ask questions.
The Houston Miracle
The PPP&HWTBC definition:
The scandal in the Houston Public schools by which attendance and school performance records were altered in order to give the impression that the school reforms, headed by then superintended Rod Paige, were more dramatic than they actually were. The notice about "The Houston Miracle" were incessantly repeated within the "Progressive that is Black" media outlets with the goal of discrediting Dr Paige on their way to discrediting "No Child Left Behind" and the George W Bush Administration.Wikipedia's version:
Houston's School performance
HISD's performance in the late 1990s and 2000s was dubbed the "Houston Miracle" by the media. A 2003 state audit of HISD's performance caused more controversy. One of the district's most publicized accomplishments during the Paige era was a dramatic reduction in dropout rates. When 16 secondary schools, including Sharpstown High School, were audited, it was found that most of the students who left school from those schools in 2000-2001 should have been counted as dropouts, but were not. It was found that the administrators at Sharpstown deliberately changed the dropout rate at the school. The Sharpstown controversy resulted in a recommendation to label the entire HISD as "unacceptable." Former Sharpstown Assistant Principal Robert Kimball, found by an external investigator to have been involved in the false reporting, asserts that HISD coerced administrators at many schools to lie on dropout rates. HISD asserts that the fraud is only contained to Sharpstown, and that the false statistics at other schools were caused by confusion related to the state's system of tracking students who leave school.[11][12] An article in The New York Times disputed the accuracy and usage of survey figures from Yates High School and Sharpstown High School indicating that close to 100% of the students intended to attend universities.[13]
The Atlanta Miracle
AJC: Atlanta grad rate doesn't add up
Thousands of high school students vanished from the rolls of Atlanta Public Schools in the past eight years, often with few hints to where they went.
Schools recorded many of them as “transfers” to other systems, at times without proof that the students hadn’t dropped out altogether. In 2008, a consultant to the district estimated recently, school officials couldn’t document the whereabouts of more than one-third of the district’s departed students.
The mass exodus from Atlanta’s high schools may be the primary reason for one of the district’s proudest academic achievements: a dramatic increase in its graduation rate, an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows. District officials boast that the rate of students getting diplomas within four years has risen 30 percentage points since 2002.
But the rate’s only surge, from 43 percent to 72 percent, came between 2003 and 2005, the Journal-Constitution’s analysis of state data found. During that time, the district removed from its rolls about 30 percent of all pupils in grades nine through 12 — roughly 16,000 students.
As a result, most of those students no longer figured into the district’s calculation of what Superintendent Beverly Hall has described as the “all-important” graduation rate: The fewer students being counted, the fewer graduates needed to make the rate higher. A student listed as a dropout would count against the rate. A transfer would not — even if school officials didn’t know, or didn’t try to find out, where a student went.
The district has sustained its higher graduation rate — 69 percent in 2009 — despite a two-thirds increase in dropouts since 2003.
A majority of the dropouts occurred at one school: an “alternative” campus for students with academic and behavioral problems. Many of the students most at risk for quitting were concentrated there, allowing other schools to keep their graduation rates up.
Questions about the graduation rate follow investigations into unlikely gains at many Atlanta elementary and middle schools on a state-mandated standardized test in 2009. After the Journal-Constitution published two articles reporting statistically improbable increases at some schools, state education officials found suspicious erasures that boosted scores on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, or CRCT, in hundreds of classrooms in 58 Atlanta schools. An examination commissioned by Atlanta’s school board concentrated on 12 schools where it said cheating may have been the most pervasive.
Taken together, inquiries into the CRCT, the graduation rate and dropouts raise doubts about the academic turnaround in which Atlanta’s school system has basked. The turnaround has attracted millions of dollars in corporate grants for a district where students historically have struggled and has garnered numerous national awards for Hall. At the same time, the apparent success has created pressure inside the district to continually produce more achievements.
“Over the past 10 years, our school district has made reforms that are multilayered and comprehensive,” Hall said in a speech last year. “As a result, by state and national standards, very few school districts in the United States can match the rate of student progress in Atlanta.”
I will document this issue for now while keeping my eye upon how this latest scandal will unfold.
Though I like Dr Beverly Harvard and her leadership of the Atlanta Public Schools - this is the second major scandal to break out on her watch. The first being the "CRCT" test modification charges.
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