Decision Points

arrived in the Oval Office:
    Dear Mr. President,
    You and Mrs. Bush couldn’t have been more gracious and generous to Vicki and me and the members of our family last night and these past few days. I very much appreciate your thoughtful consideration. Like you, I have every intention of getting things done, particularly in education and health care. We will have a difference or two along the way, but I look forward to some important Rose Garden signings.
    Warm Regards,
    Ted Kennedy
    I was excited. No Child Left Behind stood a much better chance of becoming law with support from the Lion of the Senate. It was the beginning of my most unlikely partnership in Washington.

    Ted Kennedy was not the only legislator I courted. Over my first two weeks in office, I met with more than 150 members of Congress from both parties. I hoped to replicate the productive relationship I’d forged with Bob Bullock, Pete Laney, and other legislators in Texas. One news story began, “If relations between Congress and the White House soon deteriorate into bitterness-as-usual, it won’t be for lack of effort to avoid that by President Bush.” Another suggested that I was conducting “the biggest charm offensive of any modern chief executive.”
    Whatever the press called my effort, both houses of Congress soon took up No Child Left Behind. By March, the Senate education committee had completed a bill that included all the key elements of my proposal. The House moved next. Congressman John Boehner of Ohio, the skilledRepublican chairman of the House Education Committee, collaborated on a solid bill with Congressman George Miller of California, one of the chamber’s most liberal members. The House passed it by a vote of 384 to 45.
    The process of reconciling the House and Senate bills dragged through the summer. When Congress returned from recess in early September, I set out to reenergize the debate with two days of school visits in Florida. Laura agreed to give her first-ever testimony on Capitol Hill. As a teacher and librarian, she had great credibility on education. Her appearance was scheduled for September 11, 2001.
    By the end of that morning, it was clear I would not be the education president. I was a war president. Throughout the fall, I urged Congress to finish No Child Left Behind. Ted Kennedy gave a courageous speech defending accountability in front of the National Education Association, a teachers’ group that contributed heavily to Democrats and strongly opposed the bill. Senator Judd Gregg and Congressman Boehner, once an advocate of abolishing the Education Department, rallied Republicans who were anxious about the federal role in education. Like me, they argued that if we were going to spend money on schools, we ought to know the results it produced. A week before Christmas, Congress passed No Child Left Behind by a bipartisan landslide.

    Over the years, No Child Left Behind prompted plenty of controversy. Governors and state education officials complained that the bureaucracy was too rigid and that too many schools were labeled as failing. When Margaret Spellings became education secretary in 2005, she modified bureaucratic restrictions and increased flexibility for states. But we both made clear we would not dilute the accountability measures. The purpose of the law was to reveal the truth, even when it was unpleasant.
    Some critics said it was unfair to test students every year. I thought it was unfair not to. Measuring progress was the only way to find out which students needed help. Others complained about what they called “teaching to the test.” But if the test was well designed to measure knowledge of a subject, all the schools had to do was teach that subject.
    Another common claim was that No Child Left Behind wasunderfunded. That’s hard to believe, given that we raised federal education spending by 39 percent over my eight years in office, with much of the extra money going to the poorest students and schools. *
    On a more fundamental level, the critics who complained about the money missed the point of No Child Left Behind. The premise of the law is that success cannot be measured by dollars spent; it has to be judged by results achieved.
    By the time I left office, fourth- and eighth-grade math scores had reached their highest levels in history. So had fourth-grade reading scores. Hispanic and African American students set new records in multiple categories. The gap had narrowed in exactly the way