Are Bonuses For Student Test Results The Latest Sham & Scam For Taxpayers?

Answering the question posed in the headline for this column is the goal of my current research project that officially began last January with public information requests to the Houston I.S.D.

Let’s begin with a statement of fact.  Houston I.S.D. has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Texas Education Agency’s corrupt academic accountability system.  Despite horrendous levels of low academic performance by tens of thousands of students on academic measures not controlled by the TEA and the State of Texas, the state’s system has classified the vast majority of campuses in the district as recognized or exemplary. Congratulations Katy: you too have mostly recognized and exemplary schools.

The TEA’s actions in this regard constitute an asexual practice of promoting intellectual prostitution.  The accountability system is demonstrably dishonest.  The TEA itself has spent the last three decades taking the willingess of government to lie to people to new depths.  The TEA is worse than a common pimp working the streets of a red-light district.  At least the real pimp delivers a service and product that is what it is however despicable.

The TEA’s version of  ‘pimp’ is to deliver an inferior product and call it high class while spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to package its whore product in a fancy wardrobe.

It is on this foundation of pervasive dishonesty that Houston I.S.D. has voted to give over a hundred million dollars in bonuses (and growing)  to classroom teachers and administrators for gains in student academic performance on the state’s standardized test now known as the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS).

Because of my two-decade background in accountability research, I felt an obligation to get deep inside the numbers of Houston I.S.D.’s bonus program.

That prompted me to submit one of the most comprehensive public information requests of my entire career last January.  I knew that obtaining the information itself would be a major battle because it sought certain kinds of information that others had tried and failed to obtain on the program.

Ego aside (and some know that I am afflicted with a certain level of ego on these matters), I worked over the previous Christmas holidays to construct a public information request that would obtain 90% of the information that would be needed for genuine empirical analysis that would allow me to avoid a defeat before the Attorney General.  Others had failed.  I don’t like to fail when it comes to gaining public information.

I submitted the request for data in January 2010.  As anticipated, Houston I.S.D. sought an opinion from the Attorney General of Texas seeking to withhold the vast majority of the data I had sought.  As much as any non-lawyer can have, my experience over three decades has given me a strong working understanding of the public information act.

There are red flags that commonly kill a request and give the government seeking secrecy the upper hand before the Attorney General who makes the decision about whether information must be released or can be withheld.

It’s a fine line when constructing such major requests for data.  A researcher needs 100% of the data in a perfect world.  100% of the data that one would want is almost never available to independent researchers not paid to do contract work for the government.  So, the goal of an independent researcher is to get as close to 100% as possible without sabotaging the entire request.

The feckless Houston Chronicle education reporters had tried to get data, but its request was predictably and laughably so clumsy that even I would have denied it were I the Attorney General.  Rather than pursue, the reporters quit.  I don’t quit.

Whether run by a Republican or a Democrat, the open records division of the Attorney General of Texas has earned an extraordinary reputation in Texas for fairness in its willingess to accept and read submissions from citizens who are seeking information.  That fairness gave me an opportunity to respond extensively to the Houston I.S.D.’s legal briefs seeking permission not to give me the data I wanted.

When I read Houston I.S.D.’s  initial legal brief, I concluded that although the document was signed by an attorney, it may have been written by a paralegal intern.  Over the course of my career, I have fought and won open records battles with major law firms.  However, just in case any of the points resonated with the Attorney General, I submitted an alternative public information request (while not withdrawing the original) that was essentially the same with a slight change to address one point in the District’s first legal brief.

Once again, the District challenged that modified request before the Attorney General.

The reason that I am giving this insight into the process of obtaining data is to demonstrate that school districts don’t really like you getting inside their real books.  Districts generally want you to read ‘their version’ of reality.  Districts don’t generally want you to have access to the ‘raw empirical reality’ that is in fact actual reality.

The closer one’s request threatens the truth, the more likely the lawyers are to getting involved.

The bottom line is that I won two opinions from the Attorney General’s office giving me all the information I sought from both requests.

It took a long time to go through this process, but it was more than worth it.

Let me add at this point that Houston I.S.D., like most governments, has multiple components.  Once I got the lawyers out of this, the technical staff at Houston I.S.D. is comprised of some of the most honest, diligent, hardworking, and helpful people that I have encountered in more three decades of doing this work.

The complexity of the requests that I made were of the highest order of any requests I have ever made.

Once the attorneys were out of the picture, it took an extended period of time to work with the technical experts to define the most cost-effective and effective way to pull the data out of the computers at Houston I.S.D.

That data is now in the hands of my statistician.  We have had multiple meetings trying to frame and define the research questions to pull from the data.

My statistician is looking now at the most complex questions to be answered regarding individual students, teachers, and classrooms.

I have already begun my own analysis of some of the easier, big-picture, campus-level insights.  I will report on those starting soon.

The one thing I would like for my readers to understand is that I am not starting ‘cold’ with this new data.  Other than research officials in Houston I.S.D. and their ‘bought and paid for consultants’, there’s not a person in the United States who has obtained and reviewed more student-by-student and classroom-by-classroom data from Houston I.S.D. than me.

The new data that we are now evaluating is data that is nearer to the top of the pyramid. There is a tremendous foundation of knowledge upon which our analysis will rest.

If I had been able to raise about $20,000 from conservative leaders in this community (from Katy to Houston) over the past year including ones that would be household names to you, this project would have been completed a month ago. (We could not have rushed the legal part of this effort)  However, as the emerging Tea Party movement in the U.S. and locally knows, many Republicans like to talk the talk of conservatism but will not walk the walk.

The good news is that a few precious friends have helped get us to the brink of a major report that will likely reverberate nationally.

While my statistician is working the complex analysis, I will begin writing about some of the big picture foundations to set the stage.

For cynics, here’s what you need to know.

How much am I paying the statistician?  He’s doing it free as an academic exercise because he knows I don’t have any money to pay him.

What have I asked the statistician to give me?  The truth.  My directions are clear.  Tell me what the data shows and prove it.

If the Texas Education Agency took that approach there would not be so many intellectual whores roaming the state fueled with your tax dollars spouting academic lies about your schools and about your children’s actual academic skills.

Stay tuned.