Education secretary aims to move No Child Left Behind forward

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings served as President Bush's domestic policy adviser during his first term in office and as an education aide to Bush when he was governor of Texas. Spellings -- the first mother of school-age children to serve as Education secretary -- is now responsible for the ongoing implementation of Bush's education agenda: The 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, which calls for all elementary and middle-school students to be able to read and do math at grade level by 2014.

She must also push Bush's plan to add additional tests in high school.

Spellings took over at Education in the middle of a scandal in which the department was found to have inappropriately paid commentator Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote No Child Left Behind. On her second day in office, she provoked a controversy of her own by questioning federal funding of a PBS education program that was going to depict lesbian mothers.

In a February 2 interview with National Journal, Spellings discussed all of these topics. Edited excerpts follow.

NJ: What are your top priorities as secretary?

Spellings: I think there are two immediate ones. One is stabilizing, embedding the principles of No Child Left Behind. It's starting to mature a little. We've learned some things. There are great things happening. We know what works. There is a genius to No Child Left Behind. It means more information for parents and educators, more emphasis on doing what works.

And then we need to build on that, the same sound principles and building blocks, to take it into high school and to ramp up the quality of the system so we get every child out of high school. The president talked about it on [January 31]: Only 68 of every 100 ninth-graders get out of high school [on time], and only about 26 of those are in college in their sophomore year -- at a time when 80 percent of the fastest-growing competitive jobs require at least that level of education.

People think they can go to college and should go to college. However, we are not adequately preparing them to be successful in college and to realize that dream.

NJ: Some people would argue that the bigger problem with higher education is that kids can't afford to go.

Spellings: Certainly affordability is part of it, but if only 68 percent of the kids who enter [high school] are graduating from high school, then affordability is not the issue. If you can't get out of high school, you can't go to college, right? So, it's both. The president has called for the need to increase Pell [Grants, which provide college tuition help for lower-income families]. But we sort of accept that tuition is going up, and that that's a fact, and that we need to raise grants and raise financial aid to accommodate that. Well, why is tuition outstripping every other indicator, outstripping inflation, outstripping cost-of-living increases, outstripping pay raises? A little fact-finding on that might be in order. Having just gone through this myself with my oldest daughter, I think it's hard to figure out what's the real cost, what's the value-add, and how realistic is it that your child gets out in four years, six years, etc. The need for information for parents about outcomes in higher education is something that can be worked on.

NJ: Do you believe that in 2014, 100 percent of American students will be reading and doing math at grade level?

Spellings: We've set in place the policy principles and the necessary ingredients for that to occur. There needs to be more discussion about the right indicators and what "proficiency" means. You hear a lot of discussions from states about special-education students -- you know, how will they ever be proficient? I think we need the right kind of curriculum and the right kind of measurement systems. Those definitions of proficiency are left to states. So I'm going to look to states and do a lot of listening and learning about the appropriateness of those and their trajectories to get to those.

NJ: Some people criticize the department for being too rigid in not granting states the flexibility to meet No Child Left Behind goals. Other people say you should stick to your guns. What's your response?

Spellings: If you're going to do systemic school reform, people on the ground have to buy into it. The people on the front lines -- teachers in classrooms, principals on campuses -- are the ones who are going to close the achievement gap, not me, the secretary of Education, and not this department. So they have to think it's achievable and do-able and sustainable.

There's a lot of misinformation out in the world about what No Child Left Behind is and is not, and what it does and does not do. I called them horror stories in my [confirmation] hearing -- people who say No Child Left Behind forced them to cancel the spelling bee, or they can't have art because of No Child Left Behind. Of course that's not the case. There are some very bright lines in this statute. I'm committed to them, I'm hawkish about them, but I think I need to look at and listen and learn about what flexibilities need to be provided so that we're moving toward the goal of proficiency by 2013-14.

NJ: Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee suggested that it would be prudent to hold off on high school assessments until there's been more study of what's happening in elementary and middle schools around the country.

Spellings: I don't think it's an either-or situation at all. I do think we're ready. The president has proposed resources for those high school assessments, and he's proposed a phase-in time to put them on-line -- 2009 is what's been called for, for standards and measurement systems to be put in place, recognizing that it's a little more complicated in high school.

NJ: A few years ago, you told The Dallas Morning News, "We're here to develop policies for all American families, however they sort." That doesn't seem to match up with your decision in late January to object to the depiction of lesbian mothers on the PBS program Postcards From Buster, which is funded in part by the Education Department's "Ready to Learn" grant program.

Spellings: I don't see it that way at all. We are -- we're here to develop reading best practices, math programs, Striving Readers, ninth-grade intervention, State Scholars, No Child Left Behind; all of those policies are for every family in America.

NJ: But why wouldn't the department support a program that shows two mothers?

Spellings: The requirements of the Ready to Learn grant are fairly specific about research-based programming in an appropriate way. This program, this Ready to Learn grant, this particular Buster thing, is targeted to a 6-to-8-year-old audience. And my belief, as a mom and as a policy maker, is that there are ways to foster school readiness and reading development that are straight down the line with respect to families in America. I think public broadcasting has a special trust with the American people. When you turn on Sesame Street and you go take a shower -- hey, I'm a mother -- you don't necessarily think that that's going to provoke a debate or discussion in your family that you may or may not want to have with your 6-year-old. I think those issues -- sexuality and human development and that sort of topic -- are appropriate for parents to enter into in their own time and in their own way, and not at the discretion of the Department of Education, [using] federal tax dollars.

NJ: Would it be OK for a program like that to show a single mother, as opposed to two mothers?

Spellings: The requirements of the statute lay some bright lines about research base, appropriateness, so on and so forth. I think one of the things I've learned in the seven days I've been at the Department of Education is that we -- as the customer, if you will, the contractor -- with this nearly $100 million worth of tax dollars, we need to know what is the content that is being prepared and developed for consumption by young children and their families. Fostering school readiness, that's what we're supposed to be doing. That's what this is about. And I think we can do -- and this is true of the Armstrong Williams-Ketchum contract -- better stewardship, better oversight on the financial side of this, so we don't discover -- I don't discover, on my second day on the job -- here comes something that a lot of families would want to discuss in their own way. I made the same decision that public broadcasting -- those right-wing conservatives at public broadcasting -- made.

NJ: You mentioned the Armstrong Williams case. What went wrong there?

Spellings: I don't know yet. We have an inspector general investigation going on. Obviously, I'm trying to get to the bottom of it as quickly as possible. There's nobody who cares more about the integrity of No Child Left Behind and this department, and the credibility of both the act and this organization, than I do. Anything that undermines that, I'm real concerned about, and I want to address it and move on and talk about the policy agenda we have.

NJ: You mentioned being a mother of school-age children. How does that factor into the decisions you make?

Spellings: Being a mother and experiencing education firsthand and experiencing the implementation on the receiving end, I tell a little story about how when I was in Texas -- this was before No Child Left Behind -- we had enacted some of these same policy things into the law, including the campus report card, and seeing it come from the statutory development and the negotiations around that, and then the regulatory process that came at the Texas Education Agency, and then getting it in my own child's backpack -- it's a loop. And I feel lucky to be able to have all of those different pieces of the action.