Five years ago, President Bush signed into law No Child Left Behind. As a new Congress prepares to debate the law’s future, the White House is working to build support for renewing it without any serious reforms. Last week, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings remarked that she was looking only at proposals to “perfect or tweak” it.
But the Bush administration’s satisfaction with No Child Left Behind is surprising because the President’s original education agenda was very different from today’s law. President Bush once advocated limiting federal power in education. During the 2000 campaign, he pledged that he did not want to be “federal superintendent of schools” or the “national principal.” He promised not to “tinker with the machinery of the federal role in education” but to “redefine that role entirely.”
