http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/washington/12spellings.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=sloginBy SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: June 12, 2008
NEWPORT, Ky. — Margaret Spellings is not running for office — at least, not yet. But in the waning days of the Bush presidency, she is running one last campaign.
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Charles Dharapak/Associated Press
Margaret Spellings, the secretary of education, first met President Bush in the 1990s when she was a lobbyist and he was considering a run for governor of Texas. They were introduced by Karl Rove, and she went on to help run Mr. Bush’s Texas campaign.
On a cold and soggy morning in March, Ms. Spellings, the relentlessly cheery and sometimes sassy United States secretary of education, turned up here, at a little brick elementary school across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. She had been on the road for months, promoting President Bush’s beleaguered education initiative, No Child Left Behind, delivering one sales pitch after another.
“I’m pretty sure that the new president, whoever it is, will not show up and work on George Bush’s domestic achievement on Day 1,” she told a group of civic leaders and educators, promising to do “everything in my power” to improve the law before the White House changes hands.
For Ms. Spellings, a longtime and exceedingly loyal member of the Bush inner circle, it was a startling, if tacit, admission that the president’s education legacy is in danger. No Child Left Behind — the signature domestic achievement, beyond tax cuts, of the entire Bush presidency — has changed the lives of millions of American students, parents, teachers and school administrators. Yet its future is in grave doubt.
Adopted by Congress on a wave of bipartisan unity that followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the law imposed unprecedented testing requirements and tough expectations on the nation’s nearly 99,000 public schools. But despite rising test scores, there is no hard-and-fast evidence, most experts say, that it is actually improving student achievement.
Today, roughly 11 percent of schools do not meet the law’s standards — a figure that is expected to climb sharply as more schools struggle to meet the demand that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014. The bill is so deeply unpopular that Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who was its chief sponsor, often calls No Child Left Behind “the most negative brand in the country.”
The White House had hoped Congress would revisit the bill this year, but on Capitol Hill, prospects for updating the legislation are virtually dead. On the presidential campaign trail, the presumptive Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, vows to overhaul it. The presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, supports the law, though Ms. Spellings knows his priorities are elsewhere.
“It’s not his passion,” she said. “It’s George Bush’s passion.”
And so, the education secretary has hit the road. She has visited more than 20 states this year, testifying in capitals from Tallahassee to Topeka, trying to gin up support for the measure while announcing administrative changes intended to make it more palatable — an insurance policy, of sorts, to help it withstand an assault after Mr. Bush leaves office.
She carts her own roller bag, changing into blue jeans in airline frequent-flyer lounges, so as not to rumple her business suits. She has slogged through inclement weather, flight delays and bad airport food.
“This is my child, my baby,” she said over dinner in Maysville, Ky., referring to the No Child law.
And with seven months left to go, she is not prepared to let it slip away.
A Triumph
The story of how No Child Left Behind morphed from a bipartisan legislative triumph into a laugh line on the Democratic campaign trail is, in part, the larger story of the Bush domestic policy agenda, of a Texas governor who came to Washington vowing to be “the education president” and wound up consumed with fighting terrorism and two wars.
But it is also the story of “little old Margaret Spellings,” as she sometimes calls herself, and her personal journey with Mr. Bush.
They met in the early 1990s — a mutual friend, the political strategist Karl Rove, introduced them — when Mr. Bush was toying with running for governor and she was still Margaret LaMontagne, the chief lobbyist for the Texas Association of School Boards. She helped run the campaign, became a top aide in Austin and, after a divorce, followed Mr. Bush to Washington, a single mother raising two daughters with a big new title: chief of domestic policy.
Today, Secretary Spellings (she married Robert Spellings, an Austin lawyer, in August 2001, and became education secretary in January 2005) is one of a handful of the so-called original Texans still working for Mr. Bush. At 50, she is viewed as a potential candidate for Texas governor and is also one of several determined women, among them Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who count Mr. Bush as a boss and a friend.
“She and Bush have a special relationship, a camaraderie,” Mr. Spellings said of his wife, adding, “She trusts him, and she loves him.”
Perhaps more than any other adviser, Ms. Spellings helped shape the Bush education philosophy: a strict emphasis on standards and accountability, intended to close the “achievement gap” between black and white, rich and poor. While other Republicans talked of dismantling the federal Department of Education, Mr. Bush cast education as a civil rights issue, challenging “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
