Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

An Unlikely Partnership Left Behind

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an excerpt of which fits well with your

"The problem is that memories begin to fade. Yet I refuse to let myself forget the evil
that is George Bush (Iraq, Afghanistan, mushroom clouds and lies, lies, lies !!!!!)"
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'Lies and Lies and Lies and Lies'

In February 2002, a month after he joined Kennedy on a fly-around tour to mark the signing of No Child Left Behind, Bush released a budget without as much money for the program as Kennedy expected.

Kennedy was shocked when an aide came with the news. With Miller, he marched to the press gallery to vent his outrage. Miller recalled it as a seminal moment. "That just really poisoned the well," he said.

The flush of the grand bipartisan compact quickly faded for other reasons, too. Early implementation proved chaotic. The Education Department was slow to issue regulations explaining how to comply, and aggravation in local communities grew. Lawmakers found their town hall meetings jammed with angry teachers and parents.

While schools struggled to make sense of the law, Washington turned to war. After Bush sent U.S. troops into Iraq, Kennedy denounced the "lies and lies and lies and lies," and threw himself into the drive to oust Bush in the 2004 election, campaigning vigorously for fellow Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry. "The only thing we have to fear is four more years of George Bush," Kennedy thundered at the Democratic convention.

[ that from page 2 continues on 3 ]

His anger over the war persisted after the election. But both Bush and Kennedy tried to preserve their alliance on education. Kennedy pressed so much on funding that Bush playfully preempted him when they got together. "I see my friend Ted's joined us," Bush would say. "We're going to talk about increased funding today?"

But the president and his aides dismissed Kennedy's arguments, pointing out that they had increased annual spending on programs that make up No Child Left Behind from $17.4 billion in the 2001 fiscal year to a proposed $24.5 billion in 2008, up 41 percent. "That's a big increase," said White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joel D. Kaplan. Kennedy maintains Bush should have put another $56 billion into the program over six years, based on spending authorization ceilings.

Either way, Bush realized that implementation of the law had not gone smoothly. In 2005, he replaced Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige with Spellings, a close confidant. A tough-talking Texan who boasted of being the first mother of school-age children to serve as education chief, she quickly moved to resolve problems and impressed lawmakers with a pragmatic, blunt style flavored with phrases such as "Hell, yes," and "We damn sure did."

Yet by the time Spellings took the helm, the law had made plenty of enemies with a litany of complaints: It had turned schools into test-taking factories, diverted attention from subjects other than reading and math, promoted dumbed-down standards, crowded some schools at the expense of others and imposed more bureaucracy.

page 2 - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/04/AR2007110401450_2.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/04/AR2007110401450.html

if the NCLB had been introduced with proper training and funding from the start, and if Bush had not
continued to screw Kennedy's vision and hope, could NCLB have had a much better legacy .. maybe, yes ..