Bush Education Secretary Spellings Worried About Obama's 'No Child' Revamp
By Mark Memmott
Bush-era Education secretary Margaret Spellings isn't ready yet to say that the Obama administration has repudiated the No Child Left Behind reforms enacted when her boss was in the White House.
"Too soon to tell," she said to NPR's Linda Wertheimer earlier today, after being asked about President Barack Obama's plans for revamping federal education policy and whether its a full-blown rejection of NCLB. "There obviously are some details lacking" in Obama's plans.
But she does have some concerns about what she's hearing. In particularly, she says, thanks to NCLB "every single school in this country feels some amount of obligation, pressure, responsibility ... on behalf of poor and special ed and minority kids that are in their schools."
The Obama plan, she fears, focuses too much only on the "bottom 10%" of schools -- and "I worry that in the trade off, we've let the other up to 90% of the schools sort of escape any kind of pressure, particularly on behalf of minority, poor and special ed students."