Naked City

Bob Moore

An Amarillo school official has words of warning for Austin school superintendent Pat Forgione, who's now laboring to restore credibility to AISD's dropout reporting system: Don't expect big rewards for your diligence, at least not from the Texas Education Agency. Amarillo ISD annually accounts for the whereabouts of more than 99% of its students, says superintendent Bob Moore, but TEA's accountability system routinely pegs his district a notch below other districts that have less complete records.

"I'm not pointing fingers," says Moore, "but I'm saying if we're going to play high-stakes games that could cause people to lose their professional careers, then we've got to have a dropout reporting system that treats districts fairly." Amarillo's 1997-98 annual dropout rate, 1.9%, is slightly higher than the reported state average, 1.5%, and well above the 1% standard necessary to earn "recognized" or "exemplary" status from TEA. But Moore, citing TEA's own data as evidence, says that some districts which earn higher ratings cannot account for as many as 40% of the students who leave their schools.

Moore testified at a Senate Education Committee hearing in November, saying that TEA needs to rethink how it defines dropouts and perhaps not include them in its accountability system at all. Most researchers agree that the agency's current numbers give a misleading account of schools' dropout problems, and reforming TEA's reporting methods promises to be a hot topic in the next legislative session. Moore says that until TEA forces districts to count as dropouts all students who go AWOL from the classroom, districts which track their students rigorously will be punished. "Now, if your data is accurate, there's a strong likelihood you're [no more than] an 'acceptable' school" in TEA's accountability system, says Moore. "Most [districts] are doing a great job of reporting, but the reputation and hard work of their teachers and administrators is being undermined when the state doesn't assure accurate reporting" across the board.

TEA spokesperson Debbie Graves Ratcliffe says Moore may feel his district is being penalized now, but that's less likely to happen in the future. TEA stepped up its enforcement of dropout reporting in 1997 by requiring school districts to more accurately document whether "leavers" are transferring to other schools or abandoning education. But the agency stopped short of counting students whom schools could not locate as dropouts, saying that they would give schools at least one year to get their houses in order. Ratcliffe says TEA is "all but certain" to count underreported students as dropouts next year.

This year, TEA slapped "unacceptable" ratings onto Austin and several other districts with glaringly faulty data, putting 16 under investigation. But not all schools with high percentages of underreported students were censured by TEA, Moore has discovered. Brazosport ISD, for example -- an "exemplary" district with 5,600 students in grades 7-12 -- counted only four dropouts but had incomplete records for more than 500 students. North Forest ISD in Harris County could not account for 21% of its departing students, Moore reports -- higher even than Austin's 18% figure -- but was rated academically acceptable.

"I told Pat Forgione, 'I would be furious,'" says Moore, who says his research shows that 250 of the state's 1,229 districts would fall into low-performing status if their underreported students were counted against them. Instead, TEA classified only seven districts as academically unacceptable in its 1997-98 ratings. Ratcliffe says the schools were rated before TEA had time to investigate their data irregularities, unlike with Austin ISD, which self-reported its problems early. Forgione was not available for comment.

Moore has good reason to criticize TEA's dropout reporting system -- last year, Amarillo ISD led the state in the number of campuses rated low-performing due to dropouts. That stigma, says Moore, overshadows the accomplishments of the majority of the district's schools, which are rated recognized or exemplary. Amarillo, says Moore, could be the largest exemplary school district in Texas if it had had the good fortune to commit a few more clerical errors. Instead, the district and city have been "bombarded" with low grades from the comptroller's office and national organizations that rate school success, not to mention angry letters from parents. Amarillo "is undervalued in comparison to other districts who underreport [dropouts]," Moore told Senate Education Committee members, adding that 67 of the 94 districts ranked above Amarillo had more students unaccounted for than listed as official dropouts.

TEA associate commissioner Criss Cloudt says that over the next two years, her agency expects to have long discussions about modifying its dropout reporting methods. But the alternative systems proposed -- using cohort tracking or measuring high-school completion rates -- are essentially cosmetic changes that put new numbers on the same data. Meanwhile, says TEA, the agency expects data from school districts to improve by next year, and districts with high numbers of underreported students, including Brazosport, are being watched closely.