Rod Paige, other Bush administration appointees named to Mitt Romney’s education advisory group - The Washington Post

Rod Paige, other Bush administration appointees named to Mitt Romney’s education advisory group - The Washington Post:

'via Blog this'

NEW YORK – Mitt Romney on Tuesday announced a team of education policy advisers that includes former education secretary Rod Paige and other top appointees from President George W. Bush’s administration.

(Mary Altaffer - AP)

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Romney, who is attending a series of fundraisers in New York Tuesday, has not made education policy a focus of his campaign. But he plans to outline what he would do as president in an education policy address in Washington on Wednesday.

Romney is a proponent of expanding school choice – as governor of Massachusetts, he was a charter schools advocate -- and has been an outspoken critic of teachers’ unions.

Romney’s Education Policy Advisory Committee includes several prominent opponents of teacher’s unions, including Paige, who as secretary of education in 2004 labeled the National Education Association a “terrorist organization.”

Full Story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/rod-paige-other-bush-administration-appointees-named-to-mitt-romneys-education-advisory-group/2012/05/22/gIQAP0hJiU_blog.html

It should not be forgotten that back in Rod Paige's time at the head of the Houston school system he made students disappear so the district's scores went up. Many of Paige's underlings were fired for this while Rod rode his falsified record right to the head of the department of education. This is just another example, like the banks how the 99% underlings take the fall, while the politically and business connected remain protected. No wonder Mitt like Rod Paige.

As for Mr. Paige's tenure in Houston:

The short bio of Paige released by the Romney campaign states that he once was superintendent of Houston's schools. But it fails to mention that Paige, once he was in Bush's cabinet, became mired in an ugly scandal, when the news broke that the Houston school system, the seventh largest in the nation, had falsified its dropout stats during Paige's tenure.

As the Los Angeles Times put it:

A series of internal audits and external investigations that followed found that nearly all of the schools examined in Houston, with the nation's seventh-largest school district and where U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige had been superintendent, were vastly underreporting dropouts.

A New York Times editorial explained why this was particularly embarrassing for Bush and Paige:

As a presidential candidate and Texas governor, George Bush boasted that his state's school accountability system would be a model for the nation. A focus on basic skills and frequent testing had turned around an underperforming set of school systems in a state with a large poor, nonwhite population. In particular, he said, Houston was leading the way. When he was elected president, Mr. Bush selected Rod Paige, the Houston superintendent, as his education secretary.

It turns out the Houston schools have not lived up to their billing. Their amazingly low high school dropout rate was literally unbelievable—the educational equivalent of Enron's accounting results. The school district has found that more than half of the 5,500 students who left in the 2000-1 school year should have been declared dropouts but were not.

Dr. Paige, who has declined to comment on the Houston scandal, can remain silent no longer. He was brought to Washington to provide national educational leadership. With Houston facing a crisis of fiddled data, he owes it to the country to share his thoughts on how this happened and what it means.

Several years later, when 60 Minutes was reporting on the Houston dropout scandal, Paige still wouldn't explain his role: 

60 Minutes also tried to talk to Paige himself, but he declined. His spokesman said the dropout controversy broke after Paige left Houston to become education secretary....

Paige's spokesman suggested that 60 Minutes talk to Jay Greene, a leading expert on dropouts at the Manhattan Institute. Greene supports the kind of accountability reforms Paige enacted in Houston.

But this is what Greene said when asked what he thought about Houston's "official" dropout rates: "I find that very hard to believe. It is almost certainly not true. I think it's simply implausible. I think a reasonable guess is that almost half of Houston's students do not graduate from high school."

full story here: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/05/romney-education-adviser-rod-paige-dropout-scandal

LP - Maybe they could also add Michelle Rhee to erase test scores to make them go away.