Houston's Systematic Mistreatment of Special Needs Children

The Houston Independent School District has an established history of miseducative corruption, which goes back to the glory days of Rod Paige, who made a national reputation with made up graduation and dropout numbers for Houston high schools.  His compelling lies earned him a spot as Secretary of Education for Geo. W. Bush, and since leaving ED to make room for the bovine Margaret Spellings, Paige has been on the prime rib speaking circuit of corporate ed reform.

In 2009, Houston elites brought in corporate ed reformers' poster boy, Supt. Terry Grier, to initiate as many half-baked ideas, child-unfriendly programs, and lucrative deals as possible.  Grier was such a disruption that HISD won Eli Broad's highest honor in 2013.

As a result of some good reporting by the Houston Chronicle, we now find that many of the efficiencies that have been achieved by Grier and his corporate team have resulted from the systematic mistreatment of special needs children. 

Chart below and clip from the most recent article in the Houston Chronicle series:

. . . . Federal officials have approved RTI, with one caveat: Schools cannot require teachers to try RTI before requesting a kid be evaluated for special ed.

That is exactly what has happened in HISD, according to numerous current and former staffers.

"RTI was a huge roadblock," said Renee Tappe, who retired in 2015 after 35 years in special education at HISD. "Every now and again, it would help a kid a little bit, but when you look at the number of kids denied, it's not even close to being worth it."

When delay is no longer possible, several HISD staffers said they have been encouraged to suspend or expel students who act out instead of evaluating them for special ed. A 2015 TEA probe confirmed HISD has done that multiple times, including by charging kids with truancy, according to records obtained by the Chronicle.

The district also has started increasingly serving students with dyslexia in Section 504, a less robust and less accountable program than special ed.

Veteran employees also pointed to the budget cuts as a way that HISD has intentionally lowered special education rates. Officials have cut nearly 600 special ed positions over the past decade, a 40 percent drop that has been even sharper than the dip in students, statistics show. . . .

Guest Post: No Excuses for obfuscating abysmal attrition data with complex calculations

By John Thompson

MacArthur Genius grant recipient Roland Fryer did some complex calculations in "Creating 'No Excuses' (Traditional) Public Schools" to estimate student performance gains during the first year of Houston's "Apollo 20." The massive pilot program extends "No Excuses" instruction to neighborhood schools. Fryer, however, omitted a simple statement of its most important data for that type of experiment. In contrast to "No Excuses" charters, low-income students were not going out of their way to volunteer for 21% more hours of instruction and much more rigorous enforcement of academic and behavioral standards. Some of those charters have had attrition rates of 40% or more. So, an evaluation of whether Fryer's model could be scaled up for neighborhood schools requires an estimate of how many students opted out during the program.

Fryer reported that over 7,000 students were enrolled in nine schools, and that all results were based on the sample of students who remained in school long enough to take the spring tests. He did not reveal how many students took those tests. Or if Fryer did, I could not find it.

Fryer found large gains in math for the two grades where Houston could afford more than $2,500 per student for personalized tutoring, but overall results were disappointing. Middle school students largely declined in reading while high school kids increased for a total effect on reading that was statistically insignificant. Results for "double-dozing" math and reading classes also were discouraging.

Fryer acknowledged, however, that even those modest increases are questionable if his statistical models could not account for challenging students opting out. But he was not very transparent in reporting the students' attrition rate. Back when I was in school, we could turn to the tables at the back of an academic paper and discern that sort of essential information. So, I checked out Table Two on page 71 and looked for something like, "N = x." All I found, however, was that Fryer reported 8,693 "observations" on students who began the school year with Apollo and took two spring tests.

So, I checked out the district's interim report, dated January 2011, which said that 7,385 students were in the program. The Houston Chronicle reported in the fall of 2011, only 6,156 enrolled at the beginning of the second year. But still, it was impossible to tell from Fryer's work whether attrition affected his results. The district's interim report, however, said that the students who entered the Apollo program were 86.6% economically disadvantaged. According to Fryer's report, the sample of students who remained until testing was 61% economically disadvantaged. In other words, Fryer started with nine high-poverty schools, but his conclusions seem to be based on a sample that were not far from average poverty for public schools.

Fryer's report is preliminary and it is categorized as a "working paper," but his "back of the envelope" estimates of return on investment are just as perplexing. He worries that the most effective treatment, where each highly-recruited tutor worked intensively with two students, would be difficult to scale up. Even so, Fryer asserted that the return on investment would be 2-1/2 times as great as the returns that James Heckman found for high-quality pre-school. Heckman, however, evaluated gains that were sustained over time, and clearly Fryer did not. Apparently, Fryer's estimate was based on test score increases, which he compared to increases studied by Alan Krueger due to reducing class size. Even if Fryer is a true believer in data-driven instruction, however, it is hard to understand that how anyone could assume that one-year boosts in math scores, after a diet of interim tests every three weeks, as well as benchmark tests, would be life-transforming.

That gets us to back to the key issue. Fryer claims that if all five characteristics of "No Excuses" schools are implemented with fidelity, then the legacy of poverty can be overcome. What else would it take to scale up his model? "Apollo 20" required the removal of 310 teachers and nine principals. The district replaced 100 instructors with Teach for America teachers, and 60 veterans with a history of increasing test scores. Those transfers received two annual $10,000 bonuses. Replacing nine principals required 200 interviews and one third of those who were hired have since been replaced. A national search attracted 1,200 applicants for tutors. Of the 287 who were hired, thirty left. All three groups were subjected to intense training in "No Excuses" values and techniques and were subjected to detailed and expensive oversight.

It is hard to imagine where Houston, or any other district, could find enough of the type of educators that their experiment requires. The key metric, however, was not the attrition of those carefully-selected adults, but that of the students. The big question is how many high-poverty neighborhood school students stuck out the year, and whether test score gains were inflated by the loss If anyone can find that answer in Fryer's work, or explain why he did not volunteer that information so that everyone could evaluate his evidence for themselves, I'm all ears.

Dr. John Thompson was an award-winning historian, lobbyist, and guerilla-gardener who became an award-winning inner city teacher after crack and gangs hit his neighborhood. He blogs at thisweekineducation.com, and huffingtonpost.com, and is writing a book on 18 years of idealistic politics in the classroom and realistic politics outside.

If You Can Hide the Facts That Don't Fit, Hide Them: If You Can't Hide the Facts, Declare Them Irrelevant

In the case of the latter reform strategy of declaring the facts irrelevant, New Jersey's (and the Business Roundtable's) Education Commissioner, Bret Schundler, provides a prime example. Because the reality does not fit the "terrible teacher" narrative that Governor Christie has adopted, two days ago Schundler denounced New Jersey Public Schools as a “wretched system” and the state’s #1 national ranking on the NAEP in both 4^th and 8^th grade reading and math as “irrelevant.” Facts don't fit the ideology? Just declare them meaningless.

In the case of the former reform strategy of changing the facts, school turnaround artists in Houston recently have demonstrated an ability to jigger the facts and manipulate the data in ways that would make even the former Superintendent, Rod Paige, blush. In so doing, another Houston Miracle has been realized, no less fallacious than the first one done under the the tough crook Paige, but enough of a miracle, when you need one most, to bring to town Governor Rick Perry, along with the hapless educrat and former journeyman forward of the Melbourne's Eastside Spectres, Arne, the Dunc, Duncan.

Both of these shining stars of the political firmament were at Sam Houston High School to celebrate the miraculous turnaround that has been announced after just two years. Erika Mellon of the Houston Chronicle picks up story (great reporting):

. . . .In the summer of 2008, the Houston Independent School District was under orders from Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott to make major changes at Sam Houston, which was the longest-running unacceptable school in the state. State guidelines required HISD to replace the principal and rename the school. In addition, at least 75 percent of the teaching staff had to be replaced, and half the students were supposed to be new.

Instead of rezoning some students to a different high school, HISD, with Scott's permission, split Sam Houston into two campuses: one for freshmen, called the Ninth Grade College Preparatory Academy, and one for upperclassmen, called the Sam Houston Math, Science and Technology Center.

Projected to pass

In 2009, the first year the new schools were rated, the Math, Science and Technology Center earned “recognized” status — the state's second-highest rating — and the Ninth Grade Academy was dubbed “academically acceptable,” one step below “recognized.”

What Perry didn't mention at his news conference was that both campuses got a ratings boost thanks to a change in the state's accountability system, which rates schools based mostly on students' scores on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills exams. Under the new rules, schools got credit not only for students who passed the exams but also for those who were projected to pass within three years.

Without the easier standard, called the Texas Projection Measure, the Ninth Grade Academy would have been rated “unacceptable” because of the low science and social studies scores of a few students and the upper school would have been rated “acceptable,” not recognized.

The Sam Houston Math, Science and Technology Center also benefited from not having freshmen count in the ratings.

The old Sam Houston had been rated unacceptable for the last five years specifically because the scores of black students on the math TAKS weren't high enough. Last year, with the schools split, there weren't enough black students at either school for them to be counted separately in the ratings. A racial subgroup is counted only if there are at least 30 students. The Ninth Grade Academy tested only 27 black students in math, and the Sam Houston Math, Science and Technology Center tested only 25.

Had the schools been combined, there would have been enough black students to count in the ratings — and the passing rate would have fallen in the “academically unacceptable” category again under the previous, tougher, rating system.

Of the 52 black students at both schools, 26 passed the math TAKS. That's a 50 percent passing rate — 5 points below the 55 percent “acceptable” standard. (To complicate matters, with the Texas Projection Measure, the combined scores would have hit the acceptable mark.)

Researcher's view

Ed Fuller, an education researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, said it's “misleading” to call Sam Houston a successful turnaround school based on the state's accountability system.

“It is really smoke and mirrors,” Fuller said. “If they're going to hold Sam Houston up as a turnaround school, the lesson for district policymakers is to split your schools and ensure your lowest-performing subgroup is not included in the accountability system.” . . . .

If you can hide the facts that don't fit the ideology, hide them.