New Report Shows How Test-and-Punish Texas Miracle Damaged Lives of 3 El Paso Teens
In the early years after the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, we were told the law was going to bring the Texas Miracle to the whole country. Supposedly, through the imposition of standardized testing—with serious consequences for schools and educators who failed quickly to raise scores—schools across the United States would raise expectations for students, thereby improving academic achievement and closing achievement gaps among racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups of students.
In The Children Left Behind, Debbie Nathan tells the stories of Sonia, Yanderier, and Leo, three students who were counseled out of Bowie High School in El Paso, Texas when school administrators predicted their TAKS scores (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) would be low, and would diminish the overall test scores by which their schools were to be rated.
As early as 2003, reporters, here and here, began questioning whether touted gains in Houston’s test scores were real. In 2008, Linda McNeil, a professor at Rice University, published a scholarly, peer-reviewed study, Avoidable Losses: High-Stakes Accountability and the Dropout Crisis, of the practice of pushing students out of school. She described rigid
