An Overview of America's Education Agenda

Abstract

Creating good schools for our children is more than a matter of doing what is morally right, Mr. Paige asserts. It is a matter of maintaining our national security, building on our prosperity, preserving our democracy, and strengthening our great country. WHEN PRESIDENT Bush asked me to accompany him to Washington to help promote his principles of education reform, I accepted eagerly. I had worked with him in Texas for six years when I was superintendent of the Houston schools and he was governor. I knew he was dedicated to the needs of students and particularly concerned with improving the performance of and opportunities for disadvantaged children. During those six years, I instituted then Gov. Bush's principles of education reform in my large urban school district, and I watched student achievement skyrocket. The results I observed were not unique to Houston. Across Texas, white students improved, black students improved, and Hispanic students improved. At the same time, the achievement gap between minority and disadvantaged students and their peers narrowed. The Education Trust heralded our success in closing the achievement gap with this comparison: If African American eighth- graders everywhere wrote as well as their peers in Texas, the national achievement gap between White and African American eighth-graders would be cut in half. The Education Trust report concluded that the large achievement gaps of 1994 had shrunk substantially, from 36 percentage points to 21 percentage points for black students. I knew then that Gov. Bush was a strong and talented leader, with an impressive knack for bipartisanship and the determination to accomplish great things for our students. He had the vision to see that the education system in Texas had lost its way, and he knew how to set it back on the right course: by committing it to achieving results for every child. He knew that if we harnessed the power of parents and communities, our schools could live up to our ideals. Under his leadership, practitioners, policy makers, parents, and leaders of business, government, and communities of every ideology in Texas united behind his plan for education reform and effected extraordinary change in our schools. I have been honored to help him bring his vision for education to every state in the nation. Our task began on President Bush's second day in office, when he unveiled his No Child Left Behind plan. This plan sought to change the culture of education by using the same principles of reform that had already shown results in Texas: accountability for results, local control and flexibility, expanded parental options, and doing what works according to scientific research. We faced a formidable challenge. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, most of the progress in student performance in reading and math was made during the 1970s. Little has improved in terms of student performance since 1980. And while science scores declined in the 1970s and improved during the 1980s, they too were flat throughout the 1990s. While these problems were evident, many school boards were enmeshed in arguments over such topics as budgets and work rules. The system was focused on itself, not on students. The President designed his No Child Left Behind plan to guide Congress in reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the legislation that defines the federal role in education. It is the most sweeping reform of the federal role in education since ESEA was passed in 1965. Practitioner to Policy One reason that President Bush chose me to be secretary of education was that he wanted someone with practical experience in improving achievement among those student populations often dismissed as hard to teach. When I arrived in Washington last year, I was confident in my expertise and determined to put my experience as a practitioner to work in the policy debates. …