Education Secretary's Allies Depart Under Cloud in Houston
By SAM DILLON, NY TIMES, June 26, 2004

HOUSTON, June 25 - Three years after Rod Paige left his job as schools superintendent in Houston to become the federal secretary of education, his successor and several of his closest associates are stepping down, some amid questions about how business dealings have been conducted in the district.

Kaye Stripling, who is 63 and has served as superintendent in Houston since Mr. Paige left in January 2001, announced her retirement this month

Others who have recently resigned include Laurie Bricker, a member of the Board of Education, and Cathy Mincberg, the district's chief of business services. Ms. Bricker was an ally of Dr. Paige as he carried out his pro-business vision, which included privatizing many services in the district. Ms. Mincberg helped engineer Dr. Paige's rise to superintendent in 1994 while she was on the board and before she became a paid administrator.

This week, the nine-member board named Abelardo Saavedra, one of Ms. Stripling's top deputies, to serve as her interim replacement. Mr. Saavedra is Houston's first Hispanic superintendent, in a district where 59 percent of students are Hispanic. A formal search is under way for a permanent replacement, but board members said Mr. Saavedra was a favorite.

In the seven years that Dr. Paige was superintendent, Houston reported such gains in student achievement that George W. Bush's supporters hailed the progress in the 2000 presidential campaign as a Texas miracle. It helped Dr. Paige earn his cabinet seat and enabled the Bush administration to use Houston as a model for the No Child Left Behind education act. With Dr. Paige's departure for Washington, Ms. Stripling, a onetime teacher, was named to replace him. In 2002 the Broad Foundation, based in Los Angeles, awarded Houston a $1 million prize as the best urban school district in the United States.

But in 2003, a state audit of records at 16 middle and high schools in Houston showed that more than half the students who should have been reported as dropouts in the 2000-2001 school year had not been. Those findings were followed by the discovery that Houston had also failed to report thousands of schoolhouse crimes, raising doubts about the district's credibility with all kinds of data and attracting nationwide attention from the news media. Last fall, Dan Rather and Bill Moyers made reporting trips here.

Lawrence Marshall, a board member since 1997, said Ms. Stripling's biggest mistake in confronting that crisis had been to heed the advice of the man who served as a spokesman both for her and for Mr. Paige, Terry Abbott. He had told her to decline interviews with Mr. Rather and other national television journalists about the dropout scandal.

"It was absolutely insane for us not to have our superintendent responding to these criticisms on '60 Minutes,' " Mr. Marshall said in an interview. "That's one of the greatest acts of stupidity that's ever occurred in this district because that was a good time for us to say we'd made some mistakes and just be open about it."

Mr. Abbott, who is still the district spokesman, said Ms. Stripling's aides had given long interviews to Mr. Rather's producers. "No public official grants every single request for an interview on every subject," he said. "That isn't advisable, practical or possible."

Mr. Saavedra, who once served as the superintendent in Corpus Christi, was an executive deputy superintendent here when the dropout crisis unfolded last year, and he worked with auditors from the Texas Education Agency who came to Houston to find out how the district's record-keeping had failed so badly. Mr. Marshall said Mr. Saavedra had handled the crisis skillfully.

"He virtually bailed us out in the way he handled that,'' Mr. Marshall said. "The new era that Abe Saavedra will usher in will focus on the hard-core issue of student achievement, student retention and the achievement gap."

Karla Cisneros, the board president, said the board had made no decision yet on a permanent superintendent. "We are looking for the best person for the times," she said.

The string of resignations by onetime associates of Mr. Paige began on May 13, when Ms. Bricker announced that she wanted to devote more time to her family and to a consulting business. Ms. Bricker stepped down after her board colleagues voted against awarding her husband, a prominent architect, a new school design contract. District records show that he received millions of dollars in school contracts while Ms. Bricker was a board member.

"There was some rethinking by the board, and we concluded that it just really didn't pass the smell test," Mr. Marshall said.

Ms. Cisneros led the criticism of those contracts.

"I spoke and voted against awarding Jeff Bricker's firm a contract because of what I believed to be a perceived conflict of interest, even though legally it was O.K.," Ms. Cisneros said.

In an interview by e-mail, Ms. Bricker insisted that her reasons for stepping down were entirely personal. Her father died recently, she said, and she must now care for her mother and a sick father-in-law.

"No board's action influenced my decision to leave the board," she said.

Ms. Mincberg, in announcing her resignation last month, said she wanted to run a nonprofit school reform organization.