The former President of the United States may joke about being retired but he’s still keeping busy. One thing he’s up to is working on education and he’s quietly attracting a lot of people to his efforts. This week’s TIME School of Thought checks in on one aspect of his Bush Institute’s work, school principals.
George W. Bush is writing a sequel to his big education act. The No Child Left Behind law was signed almost a decade ago, with overwhelming approval from Congress (384 to 45 in the House and 91 to 8 in the Senate). Now, amid a bipartisan effort to gut its accountability measures, the former President is quietly pushing new education-reform initiatives aimed at improving and empowering school principals, who too often lack the training or authority to effectively run their schools. And once again, he’s approaching this massive education problem by blurring political lines.
I was invited in my role as TIME’s education columnist to sit in on a small meeting this week that Bush organized in New York City, and I was struck by the roster of advisers he had assembled to guide the George W. Bush Institute’s education work. The group included some big names in the education non-profit world as well as leaders of traditional public schools and charter schools. But by my informal count, most of the 10 people around the table were Democrats, including Clinton and Obama administration alums…
If you want to see the former President the Secret Service has to let you, but no one can stop you from reading the entire column by just clicking on this link.
“384 to 45 in the House and 91 to 8 in the Senate.” Says it all. Yet, the majority of ‘school folk’ will provide a lemming like response to NCLB as George W. Bush’s idea. Good bad or otherwise, at the end of the day NCLB was and still is a bipartisan effort to moderize the elem and sec. schools act. The education discussion is always divided by Republican and Democrat. A closer look reveals two other groups; the uniformed and the informed. Keep pushing dialog amonst the later and move on.