PRESIDENT BUSH has pledged to send his first education bill to Capitol Hill within hours of his inauguration, a symbol of the priority he assigns to the issue that garnered so much campaign attention and looms so large in his Texas record of accomplishment.

This will kick off the busiest two years of education policy-making in Washington since Lyndon Johnson’s day. Even if the White House were inert, the 107th Congress would have its hands full with reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act — on which the previous Congress made good headway but eventually gave up — and the tangle of federal education research, statistics, and assessment programs. In 2002, the big “special education” program for disabled children also comes due for renewal.