THE TEXAS EDUCATION “MIRACLE”….George Bush became governor of Texas in 1994 and reforming education was one of his major campaign promises. So how did he do?
A U.S. Census Bureau study shows that Texas again ranks last in the percentage of high school graduates.
The study released Tuesday shows that 77 percent of Texans age 25 and older had a high school degree in 2003, the same percentage as a decade earlier, when Texas ranked 39th in the country. Meanwhile, graduation rates in other states have improved and a record 85 percent of Americans have high school degrees.
So Bush’s programs apparently had no effect at all, while other states showed consistent improvement. The result is that Texas now ranks dead last.
But there’s good news for Texans: both George Bush and Rod Paige, the superintendent of the Houston school district and the man most closely associated with the “Texas Miracle,” are gone. The bad news is that George Bush is now president of the United States and Rod Paige is his Secretary of Education.
Oops.
