11 October 2007 | 2 comments

So I’m in Newsweek this week (the October 15 issue). Well, sorta — my work is. Here’s the top:

For a while it seemed as though Forest Brook High School in Houston was a shining example of school reform. In 2005, after years of rock-bottom test scores, results shot up: 95 percent of eleventh graders passed the state science test. Administrators praised the hard work of the teachers. The governor awarded the school a $165,000 grant. But that same year, the Texas Education Agency hired a company called Caveon Test Security to ensure that the state’s standardized-test results were valid. Caveon — along with an investigative series by The Dallas Morning News — found a host of irregularities at Forest Brook. The state eventually cleared the school’s administrators but made sure last year’s testing was monitored by an outside agency. The scores at Forest Brook plunged Last year, only 39 percent passed science.

Regular readers will note that all of those particulars were in this story I wrote about Forest Brook back in July.

10 October 2007 | 3 comments