Bush Fails Schools Test

A Texas education "miracle" that helped establish George Bush as an effective reformer, and later became a model for US schools nationally, may have been a mirage, it was reported yesterday.

When Mr Bush was governor, the improvement of low-income pupils in Houston was hailed as a triumph of testing and school accountability.

A state test, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), showed remarkable gains by school students in the 1990s, and the apparent evaporation of a gap between white and minority children.

Houston's schools superintendent, Rod Paige, became education secretary in the Bush administration, and the city became the model for a national law, the No Child Left Behind Act, under which schools would lose federal funds if their pupils failed to show Houston-like results.

An analysis by the New York Times and educationalists, using the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT), found Houston no better than other cities, sometimes worse; furthermore it found the minority gap was still significant. Although 88% of Houston's school students are black or ethnically Latin American, state figures showed that only a few hundred of those leave school "college ready".

Mr Paige said TAAS and SAT scores could not be directly compared, but several educationalists disagreed.

Texas has also been found to have undercounted school dropouts.