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Margaret Spellings Talks to RedState

By Bluey Posted in Featured Stories | Policy — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Education Secretary Margaret Spelling to talk about No Child Left Behind, a conservative alternative called A-PLUS and the Bush Administration’s support for school choice.

Spellings will be on Capitol Hill later this week to testify in front of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, one of many public appearances she plans this month in support of her initiatives. She’s also reaching out to conservatives to talk about education reform. My interview wasn’t the first she’s done with a conservative blogger (I believe Erick Erickson and Mary Katharine Ham hold that distinction), nor will it likely be the last.

The first couple questions are on tape (it's my YouTube debut), followed by the complete transcript on the jump.

Read the rest of the interview...

When President Bush ran for office in 2000, he promised to “restore local control, set high standards, and give schools flexibility to meet them.” How does No Child Left Behind reflect those goals?

Well, we’re well on the way to meeting those, and I think now we have a 50 state accountability plans that are in place that set standards, that are set locally. There’s the local-control piece. We have flexibility for states with respect to how they use many of the resources that have been provided -- now 46% more resources than when the President took office -- and our major title or major program that funds poor minority students, which are the focal point of No Child Left Behind.

So, we’re well on the way to meeting those. The law is up for reauthorization or renewal this year. We can do more to meet those three goals. We can make our accountability system more nuanced. We can bring high standards to our high schools as well. We all know that the job market is becoming more and more demanding and we simply need to continue to pick up the pace and look at our higher grades. Look at high schools and look at our colleges and universities as well as far as providing educational opportunity.

One of the things that President Bush did early in his first term was to bring school choice to Washington, D.C. Can you talk a little bit about what your hopes are in the next couple of years for school choice, both here in Washington and nationwide?

Well, clearly we are very pleased with the progress of the D.C. program to date, and we’ll need to get additional resources through the appropriations process this year so that the students will continue to enjoy those scholarships, those students and their families, this coming school year.

But we can do more. We now know there are about 2,000 of our 90,000 schools who have failed to meet the No Child Left Behind targets for five or more years, and we need to bring more vigorous tools to bear, like school choice, around those particular kids and families that find themselves trapped in those chronically underperforming schools.

We also need to expand opportunities for chartering schools, as well as provide more tools to get our very best teachers in some of those challenging environments. So, there’s certainly more to do, but I also think we’ve set the table on making distinctions about those schools who are very much within range and those schools who need very serious intervention [which] need to allow parents more opportunity to go elsewhere.

How would you rate the likelihood of No Child Left Behind’s being reauthorized this year?

I certainly hope so, and I think it’s really in everybody’s interest that we do get it reauthorized this year -- not the least of which is that it’s working for kids and we don’t have any time to lose on closing the achievement gap and really making sure that every child has a high-quality education.

On the Republican front, I know you’re aware that Sen. [Jim] DeMint, Sen. [John] Cornyn and Congressman [Pete] Hoekstra have introduced sort of an alternative. I think it is an attempt to scratch some of the itches about local flexibility, which obviously I’m concerned about. I’ve worked on that here and the President has called for some. But I also think it’s important that we do not turn back the clock on holding ourselves accountable and giving a deadline to ourselves to make sure that every kid is performing at or above grade level by 2014. And that’s sound Republican accountability from our point of view.

On the Democrat side, obviously the NEA is not happy with NCLB; it has not been for some time, and so it’s interesting to me to see how bizarre it is for the conservatives and the NEA to be in the same places, saying, ‘Send us the money and leave us alone.’ And I don’t think that’s the prevailing wisdom really in either party. I think people do know what education means to our country and individuals. So, I’m cautiously optimistic, is what I would say, that we would get something done this year.

Democrats have complained almost from the start that No Child Left Behind isn’t adequately funded. Do you believe the administration has put enough money toward education?

Resources are obviously a perennial issue here in Washington, at any state capital and at the school board. No matter what the amount of money is, there are a lot of people who think that there’s not enough money on the planet to adequately fund education. But I’m very proud of the President’s record on what we’ve done. Funding for education with his new budget request will be up 46% or so in Title I; those are big increases. Funding for special education is up very significantly over that period of time; about 65%. They’re very significant increases. But I think what’s important is that we changed the conversation from just asking, ‘How much do we spend?’ to ‘How are we doing toward making sure every single kid is at grade level by 2014? We’ve tried for a long time the spend-the-money-and-hope-for-the-best strategy and now we have a different conversation, and that’s good.

A criticism among conservatives is that education spending has increased about 50% under President Bush, yet that significant increase doesn’t correspond with higher test scores. What do you say to critics who raise that argument?

Well, a couple of things. First, the facts. The facts are that where we have focused with our young readers primarily (our 9-year-old fourth-graders) we’ve seen more progress in the last five years on the national education report card -- this is not a test that can be “taught to” -- we’ve seen more progress in the last five years than in the previous 28 years of the test. It literally had essentially flat-lined, then all of a sudden five years ago it started to tick upward. The second thing I’d say is that people need to be mindful that as late as 2005-2006, we had about half of our states just becoming compliant with the annual assessment and disaggregation data, which are the most profound policy parts of No Child Left Behind. So, really this is the second year of implementation in lots of places, and so the early adapters who had done this earlier (North Carolinas and Texas) have seen better results quicker because they’ve been at it longer.

Back when President Bush was on the campaign trail in 2000, he talked about not becoming the “superintendent in chief.” Obviously, when No Child Left Behind was being debated in Congress, it was a time when our country was closely divided. The President reached out to Sen. Teddy Kennedy and Rep. George Miller. Are there aspects of No Child Left Behind that Democrats included in 2001 that you’d like to see changed?

Well, I think, a couple things I would say to that. One is that I think, and I say this a lot, we passed the very best law we could five years ago, knowing what we knew then. We’ve learned some things in five years, thank goodness, and we didn’t have annual data and we didn’t have disaggregated data. We had kind of a dearth of information in a lot of places and so, we ought to improve it based on what we’ve learned. I think we now, rather than have hunches about good schools and bad schools and whatnot, we know very specifically how many schools have not made adequate yearly progress targets for five years or more -- in other words, these chronically failing schools. What are we going to do about them?

The President believes, as I do obviously, that we need to bring real school choice, the opportunity to charter those schools, and the opportunity to put our very best teachers in the most challenging educational settings when they are so desperately needed, irrespective of what the local bargaining agreement might call for because, again, now that we’ve said No Child Left Behind, deadline of 2014, we can’t get a few years out and say, “Just kidding.” So, kind of the moral high ground. But I think that’s something that’s now we’re at a maturity in the law that has allowed us to push those sorts of vigorous tools more vigorously.

About that deadline of 2014: What are you doing to ensure that states don’t dumb-down their tests to get everyone to 100% proficiency?

A couple of things. We have this national education report card called the NAEP, and one of the important reforms in the law five-and-a-half years ago was to require states to participate in that national education report card. It’s kind of a truth in advertising. If states say, “Well, 100% of kids passed our state test.” Then I can say, “Really? Here on the national stand it’s about 22%” It’s not a national curriculum. This obviously is the right calibration between those who are setting policy and paying their precious tax dollars at the state and local level. They’re going to be the primary funders. And also kind of an understanding of how rigorous, how is the test, how is the bar here in states. And I think when we start to look at this data, we start to see some interesting anomalies that people don’t expect, like South Carolina and Louisiana. People don’t expect them to have higher standards than Texas. They have higher failure rates, but they also are holding themselves to a higher standard.

At a press conference announcing the A-PLUS legislation sponsored by Senators DeMint and Cornyn, Rep. Tim Walberg cited the extraordinary amount of paperwork his daughter has to do as a teacher. Are there any efforts to reduce the amount of bureaucracy?

First, I have to take issue with the thesis, which is to say that No Child Left Behind gets blamed for lots of stuff. There is one true mandate in No Child Left Behind, and it is that every kid is tested one time a year, and that we disaggregate that data. That means to say we separate is out by a student’s characteristics. So, I guess this teacher is asserting that one test a year in reading in math is an overwhelming paperwork burden? I mean, I’m just asking because what is the paperwork burden specifically that they’re talking about? I just have to know that or else I can’t solve the problem.

Testing, of course, has been part of the educational enterprise since Socrates. It is how teachers get feedback about how kids are doing. Now, some local jurisdictions -- and if I were in a local school board I’d be for this, and her local school board might have put this in place -- I’d want to know how we were doing along the way. I wouldn’t want to wait until the end of May to take that one snapshot that the federal law requires if I was going to be accountable as the campus principle or the superintendent. I’d want to know, ‘How are we doing at mid-term? How are we doing in the first quarter?’ Now, if that’s the paperwork burden, then she ought to take that up with her principal and her superintendent, but I would suggest to her if I were a manager, I’d want to know how we were doing along the way.

My mother is a K-12 librarian in Upstate New York and my mother-in-law is a first-grade teacher in Massachusetts. One of the things they hear a lot is a concern about “teaching to the test.” What advice do you have for teachers who feel they’re stuck in this predicament?

What we’re seeing here in the country is also part of the adapting journey by grown-ups. I mean that when grown-ups -- teachers or principals -- know that they have to be accountable, then all of a sudden it’s ‘Whoa, we better get very worried about it because it’s going reflect on me and it’s going reflect on my school. It’s going be reported to the parents.’ It’s not some indicator out there floating around in outer space. Now, all of a sudden it’s important. And that makes for different kind of behavior by adults, no doubt about it. I saw this in Texas since we have been doing this kind of thing since the mid-1980s. It’s part of the adapting process, where all of a sudden grown-ups -- teachers or principals -- starting to say, “Hey, I can do my job better because I know more about the kids. I know what they need. I know that the textbook we used last year seems to be getting better results than the one we had this year.” Part of this is an adapting process. That’s the first thing I would say.

The second thing I would say is, you need to make sure that there is strong and good alignment between the curriculum standards and the measurement system. And when those two are synched up -- and that’s what we are in the business of out here, “evaluating the alignment” is the code word for that -- between the standards and the assessment, then there’s nothing wrong with teaching to the test. If the curriculum says kids need to know long division, and long division is what the test is on, then teach to the test. We want you to teach to the test. Again, what’s the problem? People feel like we’re narrowing the curriculum, I hear that too. Well, then maybe you need a better test. Maybe you need more stuff on the measuring system. If long division is only what’s focused on, then maybe you need fractions on there, too. I mean there’s nothing inherently long with a standard and a measurement against that standard.

Have you reached out to Senators Cornyn and DeMint to talk about some of their concerns? Are there certain components of A-PLUS that you think are workable?

First of all, Sen. Cornyn is my very own senator. I talked to him three times before he introduced the legislation. I haven’t really had a chance to talk with him after. I think what he is voicing is a need for some flexibility or some recalibrating, if you will, now that we’re five years into No Child Left Behind. And I am for that, in fact here is a whole book load of proposals about perfecting amendments and tweaks that we think ought to be made. But I vehemently disagree with this view, ‘Don’t get to 2014, don’t hold ourselves accountable for all kids and disaggregation of data and so forth.’ I think there’s certainly some room to provide some flexibility and some more nuance to the accountability system. We’re for that, but we can’t turn back the clock.

Would President Bush sign a bill reauthorizing No Child Left Behind without a majority of Republican support in Congress?

I’m not going to answer a hypothetical question, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I really don’t. We’re going have a lot of Republicans and a lot of Democrats who support this, as we currently do have. This law passed by 87-10 in the Senate last time and 381-41 last time. I don’t expect those kind of margins, but we’re going to have some strong bipartisan support. We’re also going to make the law better. We’re going to make it more workable. This is the opportunity to get resources. This is the opportunity to perfect and fix it. And if we don’t, then we’re going to have these horror story-type things that you’re coming and asking about now.

You mentioned the NEA earlier, and the previous secretary had what seemed like a very contentious relationship with the teachers’ unions. Do you feel your relationship is better? Do you feel that you’re able to communicate?

I’d let you ask them about how their relationship is with me versus him. But I will say that my approach to them and to groups generally is to find what we can agree on work on it, and disagree agreeably about what we can’t. And one of the things that we agree on and maybe the NEA and John Cornyn or Jim DeMint agree is the need to be more precise and more nuanced about our accountability system. And so, there’s all this talk about a growth model -- the ability to chart progress over time, which, by the way, we can only do now because we have annual measurement everywhere. We couldn’t have done it five years ago. We couldn’t have done it with the snapshot kind of method that maybe Senator DeMint is calling for. But anyway, not withstanding that, we’re trying to figure out together with the education community -- not just teachers, but the administrators and chiefs and whatnot -- the technicalities of doing that. There is a lot of consensus around the ability to do that, but it’s a very sophisticated technical problem and we are meeting with them regularly on how to do that.