Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks

4. Making Sure Kids Learn

George W. Bush startled many Republicans in January 2001 when he announced his number one priority for social policy: reform of elementary and secondary education. Bush rejected the prevailing view of national conservatives that this issue is not a responsibility of the federal government. Indeed, he had insisted at the 2000 Republican convention that the party platform not include the long-standing plank that the federal Department of Education be abolished.1 Bush sought instead a major new role for the federal government in public education based on his experience with “standards and testing” in Texas.2 There was plenty of reason to question the effectiveness of state-level oversight of public education. Gains in student performance had stalled. National data for nine-year-olds showed no progress in reading and science scores from 1980 to 1999 and only modest gains in math over the same period. The scores from urban schools were below average, and the achievement gaps between 4 Making Sure Kids Learn 64 · Bush on the Home Front white children and black and Hispanic children were large, persistent, and, by some measures, growing.3 Most disturbing of all was the fact that fewer than half of the states were fully measuring the progress of students against clear academic standards.4 The enormity of the challenge is apparent in the achievement gap between white children and black children in the United States. It starts at 1 to 2 standard deviations among three- and four-year-olds and increases by as much as one-third by the end of the K–12 experience. The gap increases less during the school year than during the summer, and is larger for math than for reading. Black children thus start first grade with a disadvantage and then are less likely to be taught by high-quality teachers than are white children.5 But how could a fragile, newly elected Republican president persuade a divided Congress to pass legislation aimed at comprehensive reform of public education? In the last year of the Clinton administration, the Congress was unable to pass a reauthorization bill addressing precisely this set of issues. Bush certainly took some political risks. Opinion polls showed that the public trusted Democrats more than Republicans on the education issue. A repeat of the gridlock of 2000 was more likely to reflect badly on Bush and the Republicans than on the Democrats.6 From the standpoint of legislative strategy, there was no realistic hope that Bush could move an education bill through Congress on Republican votes alone. Indeed, opposition from some conservative Republicans was likely, especially in the House. Over in the Senate, where the party split was 50–50 after the 2000 election, any Republican bill was highly vulnerable on the Senate floor to unified Democratic opposition. To the surprise of virtually everyone, Bush worked quickly and effectively with Congress to create the largest reform of public education since the enactment of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. The “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) legislation, with symbolic rhetoric borrowed from the liberal Children’s Defense Fund, mandated that 100 percent of U.S. children have basic math and reading skills by the 2013–14 school year. In this chapter I examine how Bush accomplished this legislative feat and, more importantly, how the White House used executive powers to manage the difficult process of implementation. Based on the initial evaluations of stateby -state implementation, I also consider how well NCLB is working, why it has Making Sure Kids Learn · 65 triggered complaints and intense opposition, what the funding controversy is all about, and why NCLB will need to be refined in the years ahead. Bush’s track record on public education includes not just the process of passing and implementing NCLB but his recognition of the need for modification of NCLB as unanticipated problems emerged. The Standards and Testing Movement George W. Bush’s perspectives on federal education policy were not new. They reflected the standards and testing movement that was catalyzed in 1983 by publication of A Nation at Risk. In this report, the National Commission on Excellence in Education sounded the alarm about poor student achievement in the United States.7 The movement gained further momentum at a 1989 education summit in Charlottesville, Virginia, convened by President George Herbert Walker Bush.8 Backing his pledge to be the “education president,” Bush proposed to...