November 12, 2004
TURN THE PAIGE:
Education Secretary to Leave Post (Mike Allen, Michael Dobbs and Mark Stencel, November 12, 2004, Washington Post)
Roderick R. Paige has informed the White House that he plans to resign from his job as secretary of education next week, and President Bush will accept his decision, a senior administration official said today."The secretary has been thinking about it and talking to the White House about it," the official said. "Expect something soon on it."
Administration sources said Paige's likely replacement is Margaret LaMontagne Spellings, Bush's domestic policy adviser, who advised him on education issues when he was Texas governor. Bush's plan to nominate Spellings continues the pattern -- set this week with his selection of White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales to succeed Attorney General John D. Ashcroft -- of putting personal loyalists at the head of Cabinet departments so they become essentially an extension of the White House staff.
Although Spellings has kept a low profile, administration officials said she was at least as influential on education policy as Paige was. [...]
As secretary, Paige was one of the leading architects of the No Child Left Behind initiative, which Bush signed into law in January 2002 with broad bipartisan support. The law aims to make every child in the country proficient in reading and math by 2014 and sets increasingly ambitious annual academic benchmarks for different groups of students, including minorities and disabled youngsters.
NCLB and DC vouchers alone make him the best Secretary of Education we've ever had. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 12, 2004 6:54 PM
NCLB is typical government school flummery. If the kids don't pass the test, water down the test.
Posted by: Bart at November 12, 2004 7:04 PMEven better, we give them vouchers. It's brilliant.
Posted by: oj at November 12, 2004 7:08 PMWell, the vouchers haven't hit Michigan yet and we have a bunch of schools flunking. I don't know what triggers the damn vouchers, but we're waiting! And Bart's right, the school's flunk, then lower the test standards, and flunk a little less the next year....waiting!!
Posted by: JimGooding at November 12, 2004 7:20 PMWhy is Paige leaving?
Posted by: genecis at November 12, 2004 7:38 PMHe was good, I'm sorry he's leaving.
But as to NCLB - OJ recently posted an article that the test scores are improving overall. And you can check out how Texas has been doing all these years at the State of Texas site, IIRC.
Posted by: Sandy P at November 12, 2004 7:47 PMHe's 71 and he's done an awful lot.
Posted by: oj at November 12, 2004 7:50 PMTest scores don't matter when they dumb down the test. The SAT has been dumbed down over 200 points since I took it 25 years ago, and it was dumbed down a good 100 points in the decade before I did.
Posted by: Bart at November 12, 2004 8:25 PMDon't forget, Secretary Paige called the teacher's unions "terrorists."
That alone makes him the best we have ever had.
So Al Shanker's American Federation of Teachers which provided financial and logistical support for Solidarity in Poland during the Cold War, along with free office space in NYC and DC are terrorists? Try again.
Posted by: Bart at November 13, 2004 6:46 PMActually, it was specically the NEA he called a terrorist organization, in the context of their lobbying against NCLB.
He was wrong, of course. The teachers' union is really the spawn of the devil.
Posted by: David Cohen at November 13, 2004 8:18 PMoj,
That's patent nonsense.
Virtually the entire permissiveness culture which has destroyed public education was the result of a top-down dictation by the Federal government and the political class at the behest of the lumpiest of our Lumpenproletariat. The tragic dumbing-down of curriculum and the end of serious discipline in public education is the result of local politicians wanting to make parents feel good about their illiterate, vicious spawn. The influence of trial lawyers in criminalizing almost any attempt to impose discipline in schools had its own dreary impact. One should also not discount the political class's decision to fight every single social horrible in America, from racism and segregation to physical and sexual health issues to trendnoid issues of the day like environmental flapdoodlery in the schools where the guinea pigs can't vote rather than in the real world, where they can.
Rank and file teachers opposed this and the AFT took an explicit stance against the lack of standards as early as the mid 60s. The NEA, which was always a company union run by cheesy hack politicians from small town school boards, officially took an opposite tack. But neither group drove the bandwagon.
Posted by: Bart at November 14, 2004 6:40 AMBart:
Unions are the political class. Teachers got the schools they wanted.
Posted by: oj at November 14, 2004 8:28 AMObviously these people are not teachers writing these little hate notes about the unions.
Posted by: Toni at November 16, 2004 8:32 AM