Margaret Spellings to Education
By streiff Posted in User Blogs — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
President Bush has announced the appointment of longtime education advisor Margaret Spellings to replace Rod Paige as Secretary of Education.
Admittedly, I know nothing about her other than she has the president's trust. A big plus.
The folks over at National Review seem to have their knickers in a knot over what they perceive as her reluctance to take on the Title IX monster and this quote from the LA Times:
Spellings' impending appointment was hailed by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who worked closely with her and the White House in crafting No Child Left Behind. 'Margaret Spellings is a capable, principled leader who has the ear of the president and has earned strong bipartisan respect in Congress. I look forward to working with her to strengthen our public schools,' Kennedy said. ... Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Assn., a 2.7- million-member teachers union, said Spellings' nomination was 'a great opportunity for the administration to change the tone of its discourse with the education community.
As you can see not everyone here is as generous and trusting.
My assessment is that she is going to have very limited discretionary money to play with and without money to parcel out in grants Education isn't a player in setting education policy.
Bush is in favor of school vouchers and that is the only big "to do" left on his education program. I suspect that is where we'll see her go.
Inre: the voucher program. It's the most important thing she could do. This is a generational fight, also. That's why I think Bush picked someone who wasn't easily portrayed as a right-wing loony. But I still think the priniciple of supporting homeschooling obtains in the even things don't work out.
We are considering it for our kids.
And there are plenty of RS home schoolers about, so feel free to post a diary with questions.
As a compromise, and not necessarily a good one, that's going to require a lot of vigilance in the next few years. If she truly wants to rebuild public schools, and her words are backed up by some actions, fine. But she's got a lot of tough battles ahead of her: the multiculturalists/Title IX/genderbenders are bigtime in education right now. They're completely entrenched and they're not going to give up easy.
If she fails, and things start to go sour, it's time to start homeschooling on a countrywide basis. In fact, as the stick to this carrot, one of the things I think conservatives should do is give some support to the home-schooling movement.