Keep this in mind while listening to Secretary of Education Rod Paige tomorrow night: Now, as Correspondent Dan Rather reported last winter, it turns out that some of those miraculous claims which Houston made were wrong. And it all came to light when one assistant principal took a close look at his school’s phenomenally low dropout rates – and found that they were just too good to be true. “I was shocked. I said, ‘How can that be,’” says Robert Kimball, an assistant principal at Sharpstown High School, on Houston’s West Side. His school claimed that no students – not a single one – had dropped out in 2001-2002. But that’s not what Kimball saw: “I had been at the high school for three years, and I had seen many, many students, several hundred a year, go out the door. And I knew that they were quitting. They told me they were quitting.” Most of the 1,700 students at Sharpstown High are under-privileged immigrants -- prime candidates for dropping out. One student was Jennys Franco Gomez. She dropped out of Sharpstown in 2001 for an all-too-familiar reason: she had a baby. “My baby got sick, and I don’t have nobody to take care of my baby and take it to the doctor,” she says. The high school reported that Gomez left to get a GED, or equivalency diploma, which doesn’t count as a dropout. But Gomez says she never told school officials anything of the sort. All in all, 463 kids left Sharpstown High School that year, for a variety of reasons. The school reported zero dropouts, but dozens of the students did just that. School officials hid that fact by classifying, or coding, them as leaving for acceptable reasons: transferring to another school, or returning to their native country. “That’s how you get to zero dropouts. By assigning codes that say, ‘Well, this student, you know, went to another school. He did this or that.’ And basically, all 463 students disappeared. And the school reported zero dropouts for the year,” says Kimball. “They were not counted as dropouts, so the school had an outstanding record.”