Government in action: Outside auditors concluded in May that 16 Houston schools with much-publicized "zero" dropout totals actually had at least 3,000. A whistleblower-principal told The New York Times that principals had been pressured to record their dropouts in some other, benign way. According to him, no one within the school district's culture (created by former superintendent Rod Paige, who is now U.S. secretary of education) realized that people would be suspicious if these schools reported "zero" when every other urban school district in America is plagued by dropouts.