Education Secretary Margaret Spellings shrugs off complaints by conservatives that President Bush has vastly expanded the federal government’s role in education.
In an interview with The Examiner Monday, Spellings said such conservatives are “the same people who talk about the lack of rigor in state standards” for public schools. She argued that the No Child Left Behind Act, enacted five years ago Monday, has gone a long way toward establishing rigorous standards.
“The power of this law is huge,” she said. “We’re focusing more attention than ever before on our neediest kids.”
Conservatives acknowledge they have been quick to complain about the nation’s failing public school system.
“But just because something needs to be fixed doesn’t mean Washington should do it,” said Cato Institute scholar Michael Tanner, author of the forthcoming book “Leviathan on the Right.” “And in fact, the general history is that Washington doesn’t do a very good job.”
In 1996, the Republican Party platform stated: “The federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula.”
“That is why we will abolish the Department of Education [and] end federal meddling in our schools,” the GOP said.
Nowadays, the Republican Party brags about spending more federal tax dollars on local schools.
“Funding for education’s up 41 percent from the federal level since the president took office,” Spellings told The Examiner. “But we’re also now asking: What are we getting for it?”
Spellings said the No Child Left Behind Act has led to higher reading and math proficiency, especially at the nation’s most troubled schools. She called it the development of “human capital.”
“If we’re going to continue to be the world’s innovator, the world’s economic leader, we’re going to have to figure out how to develop that human capital,” she said, adding that this justifies a “more vigorous federal role” for the government in education.
In addition to fending off criticism from conservatives, Spelling is often accused by liberal teachers’ unions of forcing educators to spend too much time on testing. Some educators call this “teaching to the test.”
“Tests have been a part of the education enterprise since Socrates,” Spelling said. “That is the way that teachers find out how well kids are doing.
“If you have standards that say I want to teach you to read, write, add and subtract, then you can devise a test around those particular skills that will measure that,” she added. “When you teach to the test, that’s a good thing.”
