Texas Helped Start the Ed Reform Mess,

so will Texas help undo this neoliberal disaster?

There's hope, but Obama and Duncan are such no-good, corrupt bastards I don't see a reversal on the national level.

There's all that money that's behind "reform," and politicians are all too willing to do the dirty work for these billionaires, Wall Street crooks, and neoliberal think tank shills.

It's literally a fight to the death for democracy in this country:

The Texas Miracle started to collapse when CBS News exposed Texas school officials routinely hiding drop out figures.

But Republicans and Democrats alike remained united in thinking that test pressures would eventually yield higher achievement levels for all students. But if that were indeed the case, wouldn’t those higher levels have started to become reality in the place were test pressures have been in place the longest?

To answer that question, Texas-based education professor Julian Vasquez Heilig has spent a lot of time examining the results of the Texas education regime. Writing at his own website, he found, over the past decade, the state’s students have performed “poorly,” relative to other states, on the benchmark National Assessment of Education Progress exam, a.k.a “The Nation’s Report Card.

“Texas dropped 21 spots in 4th grade math, four spots in 4th grade reading, and eight spots in 8th grade reading,” Heilig observed.