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Margaret Spellings: Media Star Ronald Kessler WASHINGTON -- When President Bush announced in November 2004 that he was nominating Margaret Spellings to be education secretary, he famously kissed his domestic policy advisor on the lips. Two years later, Spellings is still close to Bush but has managed to carve out a separate identity as a more flexible, less ideological administration official. "Some of it is kind of a Venus thing," Spellings said in a NewsMax interview. "I'm a real live soccer mom with school age children. I think I have some real-time understanding of what the issues are and how they trickle down from a policy level to your own child's back pack."
Spellings, with her edgy, rectangular tortoise shell glasses and sassy blond haircut, projects like an educator — but speaks like a college president rather than a school teacher. Since leaving the White House, she has lost some of her Texas twang and does not swear quite as often. The Butt of the Joke Her relationship with Bush is legendary. Spellings, who goes back with Bush to his first days as governor of Texas, was in Bush's office in the Governor's Mansion one day. She noticed an odd jar on his desk. Inside, suspended in clear liquid, were what looked like a dozen tiny human buttocks.
"What the hell is this?" she asked Bush.
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He picked up the jar and showed her the label: "Pickled Fresh Big Spring Heinie Farms." Bush took out a black felt pen, signed the red metal cap, and handed her the jar.
"From one heinie to another. George Bush," the inscription said.
Spellings still keeps the strange-looking, two-inch high jar on her bookshelf.
Back when she was in the White House, Spellings rarely talked to the press.
"The press office and I have a deal," Spellings told me then. "They don't do policy, and I don't do press."
When she took over as Education secretary in January 2005, she recognized that media attention would be critical to furthering her goals as secretary. She wooed Kevin Sullivan to be in charge of communications. Sullivan was in charge of media relations at NBC Universal. Before that, he had led the communications efforts for NBC Sports, which included three Olympic games and other marquis properties.
In contrast to many in the Bush administration, Spellings has managed to obtain glowing press, a tribute to the way Sullivan and Spellings worked with even hostile reporters and gave them material that would make good copy. "We met for lunch in early '05 at the Majestic Café in Old Towne in Alexandria," said Sullivan, who was recently hired by Dan Bartlett as White House communications director. "One of her first statements to me was, ‘I don't know what you'll do after NBC, but this'll be the most important thing you've done so far.' That was sort of her opening salvo. And she said, ‘I'm putting a team together; the work is important, it's gonna be fun, and you've gotta come do this. It'll be the experience of a lifetime.' She had this look in her eye. I thought she would be a great person to work for — the drive, the energy, her relationship with the president. She's smart; she's tough; she's funny."
Spellings met Bush through her friend Karl Rove when Bush was thinking of running for Texas governor in 1990. A graduate of the University of Houston, she was then associate executive director of the Texas Association of School Boards, working with the Texas legislature on school accountability issues. Spellings became Bush's political director during his first campaign as governor and then became his education advisor in Austin.
The divorced mother of two, Spellings married Austin-based attorney Robert Spellings in August 2001. Bush's nickname for her — La Margarita — melded her first name of Margaret with her previous married name, La Montagne. As Education secretary, Spellings has signaled that she can be flexible on some issues. She eased regulations for testing disabled students and tinkered with rules covering tutoring programs to help students in some struggling schools. But she remains as committed as ever to the basic principles of the No Child Left Behind Act and points to improvements in reading scores — especially among blacks and Hispanics — to show that it is starting to work. "The reading programs we've put in place are getting results," she said in an interview in her office on the seventh floor of the Education Department. "It's not a flippin' accident that for the first time in history, we've made more progress with our nine-year-olds in the last five years than in the last 28 years in reading. Is that an accident? I don't think so." The No Child Left Behind Act has been widely misinterpreted by politicians and the media. It goes back to before Bush was governor, when he became interested in why so many kids couldn't read. Bush met then with Barnett "Sandy" Kress, a lawyer and former Democratic member of the Dallas school board. Kress told me that Bush asked him dozens of questions: What are the best ways to teach reading? What are other states doing? Taking notes on a legal pad, Bush wanted to know who had studied the issue. Kress mentioned six experts in the field. "People think he shoots from the hip or that he's not smart," Kress said. "It baffles me . . . He was an incredible student of these issues. He had a voracious appetite for information. He looked into the problem and researched it . . . I gave him six names. He called them all. They were as stunned as I was."
If Kress was amazed, Dr. G. Reid Lyon, a reading expert at the National Institutes of Health, was even more astonished when he answered his phone in Rockville, Md., in 1995 and was told the governor of Texas was calling.
Bush had heard that Lyon, a research psychologist and former teacher, had studied the reading problem and had found that a faddish, liberal approach to teaching kids to read was behind the poor reading scores. Misguided Methods Introduced in the 1970s, the whole language method held that the traditional, phonics-based method of teaching kids to sound out letters — "a" has the sound of "ay" as in "bay," or "ah" as in cat — is boring. Instead, nutty as it sounds, under the whole language approach, kids were taught to read by simply giving them books and expecting that they would become so enthralled that they would figure out the words all by themselves. Essentially, that meant kids were not being taught to read at all.
The non-teaching method of whole language is particularly hard on minorities. Without being able to read even driving directions, they potentially face a lifetime of failure.
Based on Lyons' advice, Bush developed a way to restore phonics to reading instruction in Texas. The results were dramatic. In 1995, 23 percent of third graders could not read. By 2003, that figure had improved to 10 percent, according to state testing figures compiled by Kress, who became Bush's unpaid education advisor. After additional help for kids who failed, only 2 percent could not read. The greatest beneficiaries of restoring phonics to reading instruction — which includes work on comprehension, spelling, and actual reading — were minorities.
When Bush became president, he tried do the same thing nationally through the No Child Left Behind Act. Under the law, local school systems receive federal money for reading programs if they adopt teaching methods that have been scientifically proven to work. Based on NIH-supported research on more than 44,000 students, that method is phonics. In addition, because of regular testing required by the law, schools can be penalized if they don't do a good job of teaching. The idea is that if they are held accountable, they will adopt the reading instruction method that works.
Despite the law, because of foot-dragging by teachers and their unions, which resist change, most public school systems continue to teach whole language. Rather than use a method that works, New York City, in the vast majority of its public schools, stubbornly clings to what is essentially a whole language approach, turning out hundreds of thousands of illiterate kids over the years. To the confusion of everyone, the New York City school system calls its program "Month-by-Month Phonics." It is, according to Lyon and other experts, whole language in disguise.
Meanwhile, the toniest private schools in New York — the Collegiate, Brearley, St. David's, and Dalton schools — all use phonics to teach reading.
"Of course we teach phonics," Beth Tashlik, head of the Collegiate School's lower school, told me. "You can't teach reading without it."
Ironically, unless they are wealthy and send their kids to private schools, New York liberals who most oppose Bush are the ones whose kids cannot read, because their own public schools resist Bush's efforts to restore phonics.
Unlike Bush, the media rarely dig into the subject.
"Nobody wants to write the real story of why kids can't read," Spellings said. "I don't know if it's too hard." The Sound of a Better Way Because teachers widely view phonics as a conservative plot, the Bush administration has used euphemisms like "research-based instruction" to describe phonics. In the view of Robert W. Sweet Jr. of the National Right to Read Foundation, that has not helped the cause.
"People should be told clearly that their children should be taught that ‘a' has the sound of ‘ay' as in bay, or ‘ah' as in cat," said Sweet, who helped write the No Child Left Behind Act when he was a staffer in the House. "If they are not being taught that way, they should pressure their school boards to adopt phonics."
Because so many schools call their reading program phonics when it is not, no one knows how many schools have adopted phonics as a result of the provisions of No Child Left Behind Act. Lyon and Sweet estimate that more than half the public schools still teach whole language. One reason is that education colleges and reading textbooks still by and large emphasize whole language.
"The teachers have been taught to do the wrong kind of thing by their teacher colleges," Spellings said.
One way to increase the number of schools that teach phonics would be for President Bush to explain the issue in a nationally televised speech. If voters were aware of the issue, school board members who do not advocate phonics could be voted out of office. Asked about that, Spellings said, "Ask Karl Rove." Appealing to the Higher Ups Spellings' next big challenge is higher education. One of her major concerns is the fact that the United States is in the lower half among developed nations in rates of college completion. The percentage of people who have completed college among 25- to 34-year-olds is seventh among developed nations.
Many college presidents make $1 million a year or more, yet more than half of college graduates cannot calculate the change from $3 for a $1.95 sandwich. A Zogby poll found American college seniors are just slightly more knowledgeable than high school seniors were half a century ago. Colleges do little to impose high standards and try to avoid testing students.
A confidential study by the RAND Council for Aid to Education found that at most colleges, professors know little about how to teach effectively.
"The real reason we don't test is, we would rather not know," said Frank Newman, a former president of the Education Commission of the United States who, as head of the Futures Project at Brown University, tries to promote accountability in higher education.
Businesses throughout the country have become concerned about the poor quality of college education. Many have contributed to programs meant to elevate college standards or to train graduates who lack fundamental skills.
A year ago, Spellings announced formation of a commission to develop a comprehensive strategy for improving post-secondary education and making it more accountable. Last month, the Commission on the Future of Higher Education made its report, focusing on ways to improve the accessibility, affordability, and accountability of colleges.
"We have accountability for everybody and every endeavor except higher education," Spellings told me. "We put $120 billion a year out the door for higher education and kind of hope for the best. And that's the way they love it. Ask no questions. We have no strategy in American higher education. "These institutions are highly federally subsidized. Yet we are backsliding against the world on the number who can get in and get out of American higher education."
Ronald Kessler is Chief Washington Correspondent for NewsMax.com. Get his dispatches FREE sent to you via e-mail – Click Here Now.
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