Took ten years to go from glowing puff pieces to pleading guilty to fraud charges in Texas.
https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/local/el-paso/2016/04...
Some of the individual measures sound positive but since they don't see sustained gains I'd guess that they are mostly juking the stats.
And then using that to push all sorts of absurd stuff like Murdoch owned education tablets:
In that list Mississippi ranked 34 in Pre-K-12. It used to be 50. They aren’t #1, but they certainly doing something very right to improve so much.
It appears the smart region, from the linked list, is: Utah, Colorado, Wyoming.