The latest scandal in the Houston public schools, until recently regarded as the jewel of the so-called Texas education miracle, was hardly surprising.

Texas' claims to have simultaneously raised test scores, closed achievement gaps between white and minority kids, and lowered dropout rates were dicey long before then-Gov. George W. Bush parlayed the "miracle" into the keystone of his "compassionate conservatism" and thus of his 2000 presidential campaign.

Anybody who looked twice at the numbers that Texas education officials were touting back in 1999-2000 -- and especially at the dropout rates -- had to know that they were too good to believe.

The official number was a rate of 1.6 percent per year. But since more than one-fourth of Texas' seventh-graders weren't graduating -- for black students it was 40 percent -- the claims looked phony even to some leaders of the Texas Legislature. The scores, on tests that Texas officials later acknowledged were absurdly easy, were being achieved at the expense, among other things, of a lot of kids who were being pushed out of school.

The disclosures in Houston, where Rod Paige, now Bush's secretary of education, was superintendent until 2001, make clear how great the number-fudging really was. In Houston, 5,500 of the students who left high school in 2000-2001 should have been counted as dropouts. Half were not.

Now comes information that the absurd claims of some of those same high schools that between 90 percent and 100 percent of their graduates were going to college were fabricated by school officials who were being pressed from above to look good. Davis High School in Houston claimed that every one of its graduates in 1998 went to college. According to the Texas High Education Board, the figure was less than half.

Something similar was true at Yates High, where, according to the New York Times, the principal sought to save money by replacing experienced teachers with subs and newcomers, and at Sharpstown High, one of the schools with the phony dropout numbers. All serve primarily poor and minority students. According to the Times, neither Houston's present superintendent nor Paige was available for comment.

The Houston story is a nice paradigm of a lot of other administration number-fudging. Indeed, it may have been one of the things that taught the Bush people that, when necessary, data could be stretched beyond recognition as long as the music and the smiles were sweet enough -- on taxes, on budget deficits, on pollution controls, on weapons of mass destruction, on the cost of policing and rebuilding postwar Iraq.

The Times itself touted Texas' reported achievements in 1999 -- some of them real enough -- with nary a question about dropouts or about the widespread cheating, then already well reported in Texas, in the Austin and Houston schools.

Nor was much attention paid to the extended drilling that was gutting months of other instruction. It was a great story that Texas, once in the pits of education, was dramatically raising its test scores, and nobody wanted to spoil it.

The administration has been counting on the will to believe ever since.

Early last year, in one of the great White House photo ops of all time, Bush signed his hallmark No Child Left Behind education act. Sen. Ted Kennedy and Rep. George Miller of California, two of Congress' biggest liberals, stood smiling behind him. Now both are fuming that they were hoodwinked. Funding for NCLB has fallen $6 billion short of what Bush promised. The essence of the NCLB deal was to provide support that, at least in theory, would be commensurate with the standards the law seeks to impose on schools and kids.

Now Bush is cutting still more from education. The excuse is the war, but most of the real reason is tax cuts that were sold, first as something that the nation's 2000-2001 surplus could easily sustain, and then, as it vanished, as an economic stimulus.

The cut was sold with yet another set of phony numbers -- averages concealing the fact that the lion's share of the savings would go to fat cats, not to ordinary families.

From its very beginning, the administration, contrary to its leak-prone predecessors, has been famous for its disciplined ability to control information -- for staying on message -- even in the face of an accumulation of contrary information. It has reinforced that by refusing to release data about such things as the influence of industry interests in the makings of its energy policy and by canceling periodic reports on what the states get in federal funding.

None of that is particularly new, except perhaps in scope. What is new is the fudging, the concealing of data and the contemptuous belief that the public won't understand, won't care and won't know. When the truth does come out, the object of the lies will have been achieved.

So far, it's paying off handsomely.