OUSTON - Alief Middle School, with a giant yellow pencil jammed like a javelin into the front lawn, seems the very model of Texas education being promoted by Governor George W. Bush. The school has soaring student test scores, is undergoing a costly renovation, and has an array of programs to help its mostly minority population.
But peel back the layers at the school and throughout the surrounding district, and a far more complex story emerges about Texas education, and Bush's role in boosting it. Yes, test results have improved markedly, but some researchers who have studied the system said the test content has been diluted and that the rising scores may mask an unhappy statewide trend: a surge in dropouts among lower-performing students.
And while it is true that millions of state dollars are flowing into schools like Alief, much of the money comes from a court-mandated program that Bush detests.
The program, called ''Robin Hood,'' sends money from wealthier districts, at a rate of a half-billion-dollars per year, to the state's poorest schools.
Bush is praised in Texas for his advocacy of education issues, and for his determined push to hold students, faculty, and schools more accountable. And the Bush campaign, believing that the governor's education record may be a key to winning the presidency, has boasted that the ''remarkable success'' of the Texas reforms proves his leadership mettle.
But a closer examination finds that while Bush gets and plainly deserves credit for boosting education spending and for pressing for reforms, some of the successes he cites were enacted under prior governors. Or, where he was the prime mover, the measures are so new that their impact cannot be fairly measured.
For example, Bush's much-discussed plan to end ''social promotion'' of students and to enact tougher testing requirements won't take full effect for three years, making the outcome of the initiatives impossible to judge.
And Bush lacks a track record in his home state on two of his most significant national proposals.
He tried and failed to win Texas passage of a voucher program, raising questions about how he would persuade Congress to pass a national version of his proposal to use public funds to help pay for private school education.
And while Bush did win approval for quasipublic charter schools, the Texas program is dogged by funding problems and has a mixed record.
''The verdict is still out on charter schools,'' Bush acknowledged in a telephone interview.
Bush, as he often does, pointed to rising scores on state-administered tests as proof of his success, taking particular pride in the shrinking performance gap between white and minority students in this ethnically diverse state.
But a soon-to-be-released report by the Center for Study of Testing at Boston College said the rising test scores may be misleading because so many students who might fail the test are dropping out. The report said Texas has an overall dropout rate of 20 percent and that the rate runs as high as 50 percent for minorities.
Texas officials said the overall rate is 15 percent.
''There is this myth of the miracle of Texas education,'' said the study's author, professor Walter Haney of Boston College.
''Texas has gotten a huge amount of press, but in my view, it is largely a scam. The test scores have been going up because they have been pushing huge numbers of kids out.''
While Bush and his critics disagree about his accomplishments, his greatest achievement may be that he has changed the Republican Party debate on education, which, until recently, has been about how to eliminate the US Department of Education and cut spending. Bush's goal is different.
He wants to rebuild the nation's education policy by using the Texas model, an emphasis that invites scrutiny of what has really happened in his home state.
To understand how Texas has overhauled its educational system, the clock must be turned back to 1984. Standards were so lax then that many high school diplomas were considered meaningless. Football was king.
When state education officials conducted accreditation reviews of the schools, ''they wanted to make sure the flag was flying and restrooms were clean,'' according to James Smith, the superintendent of the Alief School District. The state had one of the nation's worst education records.
Enter Ross Perot. Long before the Dallas businessman ran for president, he was a fierce critic of the Texas education system.
He was appointed by the then-governor, Democrat Mark White, to propose ways to clean up the mess.
Perot's best-known reform, called ''no pass-no play,'' required that students pass their courses in order to participate in extracurricular activities. But the other reforms were equally important.
They included a maximum class size of 22 students for kindergarten through fourth grade and a mandatory state test to graduate high school.
But Perot's push to require that poor and rich schools have equal access to resources may have had the most lasting impact. At the same time the Perot committee made that recommendation, a group of schools dominated by lower-income Mexican-Americans sued Texas in a bid for increased funding.
After several governors struggled with the issue, the Texas Supreme Court in 1994 approved the prosaically named ''Chapter 41,'' better known as Robin Hood. Bush took office the following year.
Before Robin Hood was passed, it was not unusual for rich districts to spend $6,000 per student, compared to about $3,500 in the poor areas.
Many schools in lower-income areas were falling apart and had trouble attracting quality teachers. After Robin Hood became law, the expenditure per student equalized at about $5,400, though some wealthier districts raised taxes to spend more.
Nearly overnight, the poor districts had an extra $2,000 per student to spend, a dramatic increase by any measure. Suddenly, tens of millions of dollars were pouring into the poorer districts, enabling them to build new schools, hire better teachers, and begin afternoon programs.
Bush, asked why he never mentions Robin Hood as a key part of the improved Texas education picture, played down the importance of the program, saying it was ''a court-ordered system that I tried to change.''
He noted that he tried - and failed - to replace Robin Hood's reliance on property taxes with a program that relied on general state revenues, which are used in the equivalent program in Massachusetts.
Many education officials, including Bush supporters, said Robin Hood has been crucial.
''The change in our finance system has certainly been a factor,'' said the Texas commissioner of education, Jim Nelson, while stressing that Bush's emphasis on accountability has been important. ''The fact we have been able to put more resources'' in the poorer ''districts clearly has allowed them to do things they couldn't do otherwise.''
The impact is readily seen on opposite sides of Houston.
In the Deer Park District, where 72 percent of the students are white, one of the world's greatest concentrations of oil refineries rises from the flat landscape, providing a property tax bonanza.
The millions of dollars in extra property taxes have enabled the district to build a dazzling array of state-of-the-art schools.
Fairmont Junior High School, nestled among the houses of a planned suburban community, has facilities that rival many colleges and country clubs, with high-tech labs, two sparkling gymnasiums, and an indoor swimming pool. The average teacher's pay is $37,000. Principal Billye Smith said she is visited daily by real estate agents, who pepper her with questions about test scores that are crucial to potential home buyers.
Still, many in the district voice anger at sending 42 percent of the school property taxes to poorer areas, a drain that has created a $4 million deficit in the upcoming budget and is expected to lead to a layoff of 50 teachers.
''It is very unpopular,'' said Deer Park assistant superintendent John Piscacek. ''It has leveled us down to some extent.''
On the western side of Houston, the Alief School District is home to the state's most ethnically diverse population, with 60 languages spoken, and immigrants from Vietnam, Nicaragua, and many other countries housed in apartment buildings.
Alief Middle School has a minority population of 95 percent, with many students coming from lower-income families. Many classes are taught in temporary trailers hidden behind the school in double-file rows.
But Alief is undergoing a transformation, thanks to Robin Hood. The money is helping pay for a $10 million reconstruction, computer labs, many after-school programs, and specialists who focus on helping improve student test scores. Most importantly, the money has allowed Alief to raise starting teacher salaries to $33,000, making it competitive with wealthier districts.
All of this, local observers said, has contributed to the rising test scores that make Bush beam.
Smith, the Alief superintendent, said the Robin Hood money, combined with the emphasis on accountability, has been the key to improving education.
''The mechanics of the system certainly were in place when George Bush became governor, there is no doubt about that,'' Smith said.
''But I don't think there is any doubt about the fact that Bush is a real leader in education. As superintendent, I had never been called to the governor's office in my life until George Bush was elected governor. It impressed me that the governor asked me to sit down and talk about this.''
Bush's educational ideals were on vivid display earlier this month throughout Texas schools.
It was test day, when students as young as third-graders take the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, commonly called TAAS. For months, students had prepared for the test with prep sessions and hours of drills. At Fairmont Junior High in Deer Park, the students learned test skills at the Breakfast Club, the Lunch Bunch, pep rallies, sleepovers, hot dog dinners, and even bake sales. Now the school was enveloped in an eerie silence during the all-day test.
The stakes are enormous. Students who fail the test, scoring under 70 percent, risk being forced to repeat their grade. If a school has too many failing students, it can be taken over by the state and, in theory, the principal and teachers could be fired.
But the tests, which Bush wants to replicate across the country, have sparked much controversy, just as the similar - but tougher - MCAS tests in Massachusetts recently led to protests about the fairness of putting so much emphasis on a standardized exam.
Sandra Stotsky, a Harvard University researcher who analyzed the Texas tests for the Tax Research Association of Houston, concluded that the reading level of the tests administered from 1995 to 1998 had been lowered on a regular basis. That could explain, at least in part, the rising test scores Bush cites so often, she said.
''I was able to determine that the reading level was going down fairly systematically at two of the three grade levels being assessed,'' said Stotsky, who is now deputy commissioner of education in Massachusetts. As a result, Stotsky said, Texas ''may not necessarily be showing an improvement in reading ability and may not necessarily be showing that the gap has decreased between different ethnic groups.''
Margaret LaMontagne, Bush's senior state education adviser, denied the reading level has gone down.
While Bush often speaks about the Texas requirement that a student must pass a test before graduating high school, the test is widely considered to be too easy. The test, which is taken during 10th grade, is based on the minimum skills that a student is expected to master by the eighth grade, officials said.
''It's the minimum eighth-grade skills. It's ridiculous,'' said Sandy Kress, a former head of the Dallas School Board.
Kress, who praised Bush's education policies, noted that the governor recently won passage of legislation that would require an 11th-grade test based on 10th-grade knowledge, but that won't take full effect until 2004.
Bush said the rising TAAS scores prove his education plan is working. But Haney, the Boston College professor who researched the Texas tests, concludes that the higher scores have come partly because Texas has greatly underestimated its dropout rate. Haney said the Texas dropout rate is more than 20 percent, and may be as high as 50 percent for minority students. Texas officials dispute the figure, but acknowledge that at least 15 percent of seventh-graders don't graduate and another 15 percent take continuing education or graduation equivalency tests.
Bush said the dropout rate is too high. ''We've got to do a better job, and it starts with teaching people to read at young ages, and that's exactly where our initiatives are aimed,'' he said.
There are also questions about whether some school administrators have cheated, either by altering test results or arranging for the students who are considered likeliest to fail to skip the tests.
In the most celebrated case, the Austin School District, where Bush's twin daughters attend high school, was indicted last year on charges of manipulating test scores to increase school ratings.
''There is a tremendous amount of pressure,'' said Carolyn Graf, principal of Jollyville Elementary School in a neighboring district in the Austin suburbs. ''The pressure comes maybe not so much outward, but from each one of us. Our test scores are printed in the Austin American Statesman.''
Under Bush's plan, the pressure on schools will increase in the next several years, as more students are required to take tougher tests.
But some experts worry the preparation for the test puts so much emphasis on math, writing, and reading skills that many other important subjects are given short shrift, including humanities, social studies, and science. A new Bush plan will eventually broaden the content of the test.
''I think right now we have an educational system that is watering down the quality,'' said Linda McNeil of the Center for Education at Rice University in Houston.
In Bush's view, a variation of this system can be implemented nationwide, with school test results published on the Internet. If schools that receive federal funds fail to improve their standings in a three-year period, Bush said, then students should be able to get a $1,500-per-year subsidy that could be used to help pay for private school in a voucher-like program.
But there is no track record in Texas on whether such a program will work. Bush wanted a generous voucher system, with students allowed to take the full $5,400-per-pupil annual expenditure to a private school, aides said. But the measure died in the Legislature.
Now, with the conservative emphasis of the primary campaign behind him, Bush is hoping his education plans will be attractive to moderate suburban parents who send their children to public schools. So, he hardly makes mention of the word ''voucher.''
''I'm not trying for a voucher program,'' Bush said. ''It's an accountability system.''
Similarly, Bush has no interest in focusing on the key role that the Robin Hood program played in improving so many Texas schools. Instead, he is betting on a combination of testing, accountability, and early reading initiatives.
While the plan yet may prove successful, some wonder how far Bush can go without Robin Hood by his side.
''It is ironic,'' said Craig Foster, executive director of the Equity Center, which fought for the Robin Hood program. ''Bush benefits from the higher test scores politically, but he owes it to something he hates.''
