HISD: Lesson in deception? (Part II)

"I had good grades, but I did not pass to the 10th grade"

11:31 AM CST on Tuesday, November 25, 2003

By Anna Werner / 11 News

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HOUSTON – Did the Houston Independent School District cheat to make schools look better?

How do you get better test scores at the high schools? You can hold a bunch of the weaker kids back a grade so they can't take the test. They sit out and scores go up. Sounds like a neat trick, but HISD claims those kids just weren't ready to be promoted. So why wasn't an honor student ready for the tenth grade?

We start with a mystery.

Juana Juarez' grades are 90, 90, 85, 97, 99, 91, 92, 81. They are nearly all As and Bs. She received the grades during her first year at Sharpstown High School.

Comments from teachers on her report card say good, very good, good student.

So its no wonder she made the honor roll and received an award saying congratulations and signed by Sharpstown's principal.

So the mystery is why did school administrators then make her repeat the ninth grade the next year?

"I was frustrated," says Juarez. "I had good grades, but I did not pass to the 10th grade."

"I think it is discriminatory, I think its wrong," says Bob Kimball, an HISD assistant principal. "I think it really hurts kids."

He blew the whistle on the dropout fraud at Sharpstown High and he says what happened to Juana was, ""We reduced the number of people taking the test in the 10th grade." He means the TAAS test.

"We narrowed it down only those that we feel are gonna pass it," says Kimball.

Because when it comes to high schools, the state approval ratings depended on the TAAS results of only the tenth graders. "It's all about ratings," says Kimball.

So how was it done?

At the time, HISD's rules said that a 9th grader only had to have six credits, made up of any combination of classes, to be promoted to the tenth grade.

But then Sharpstown administrators applied for and got HISD board approval for a waiver of that rule. Now besides six credits, if a 9th grader hadn't taken and passed Algebra 1, English 1, and Physical Science or Biology, they couldn't be a tenth grader. In fact if they missed or failed even a part of one of these requirements they would stay in the ninth grade.

And former Sharpstown teacher Joanna Pasternak says that was overkill. "I think you're hurting these children by telling them they're complete failures when they only failed one course."

And Pasternak says she saw students kept as many as three years in the 9th grade waiting to retake a course they had previously failed or had never even taken. In the meantime she says, "Most of them are taking the majority of tenth grade classes."

But they're still considered a ninth grader. And when they finally got the course they needed to move up, what happened next was known as flipping the kid. "The kid would leap over tenth grade into 11th grade and never actually take the test as a tenth grader," explains Pasternak. "Then they don't hurt the accountability ratings."

And what does she think of that? "It's all a scam," says Pasternak.

But by the next year Sharpstown did see a rise in its TAAS scores.

But Kimball says, "It's misleading data."

And he says there was a price for it. "You're kicking out kids," says Kimball. "You're pushing them out because you're discouraging them."

And that makes them dropouts.

Take Jennys Franco. She is now working. She started out as a student at Hasting High School in the Alief School District, where, according to that school's transcript and the school registrar, she was a tenth grader. But then she transferred to Sharpstown High where they demoted her. They put her into the ninth grade. "Yes," says Franco. "They put me back in 9th grade."

But it turns out that was against HISD policy, which said if a school was using a waiver then "the classification of students transferring into the school from another school may not be changed."

Maybe that's why Sharpstown's version of her transcript shows a funny thing -- it claims her last grade at Hastings High was not the 10th, but the 9th grade.

Frustrated, Franco eventually dropped out. She told them, "That I'm not going anymore, that's it," she says.

Kimble says Franco wasn't alone. "Many, many students were victims of this classification policy and were demoted when they came here from another school."

And then there's Juana Juarez. 11 News let former Sharpstown teacher Pasternak take a look at her grade records. "The child has good grades," she says.

Is she a student that should have been held back? Pasternak answers, "No! Definitely not."

So why was she held back? Her school records show that in her first year of 9th grade she was not given one of the three required classes of science that, according to Sharpstown, she needed to pass to the 10th grade. And so despite being a good student she repeated the 9th grade.

"She was held back? That's disgusting," says Pasternak. "To take a child and crush them -- it just really makes me angry."

But Sharpstown High wasn't finished with Juana Juarez or Jennys Franco. Last October Sharpstown changed both of their school records so that neither one of them would be counted as a dropout.

HISD Superintendent Kaye Stripling declined our request for an interview. Instead the district sent us a statement claiming, among other things, that Sharpstown and other high schools were just trying to stop students from being socially promoted for the student's own good.