National Journal interviews Sec. Spellings: "Improving on '99.9 Percent Pure'"

As President Bush's chief domestic policy adviser, Margaret Spellings led negotiations on his signature domestic achievement, the 2002 No Child Left Behind education law. Promoted to Education secretary for Bush's second term, Spellings is urging Congress to reauthorize the law. She discussed the legislative prospects, as well as her plans for the future, in a recent interview with National Journal's Lisa Caruso. Edited excerpts follow. For previous Insider Interviews, click here.

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Q: Is it still possible to reauthorize No Child Left Behind this year? What can the administration do to jump-start the process?

Spellings: I surely hope so. First, the law doesn't expire. It's a good law. It's a strong law. So to the extent we can improve it, I'm all for it. But any old anything is not necessarily worth having. The second thing I would say is that there's a ton of consensus about the areas that need to be improved. We agree that a better way to chart [a school's] progress over time might be to use a growth model. The other thing we agree about is the need to go from No Child Left Behind being a pass-fail system to a more nuanced accountability system that makes distinctions between those chronic underperformers and those schools that are within range. There's also a lot of agreement about the need to start talking about highly effective teaching -- the idea about rewarding our best people who do the most challenging work.

Q: When it comes to testing students, would the administration support going beyond annual reading and math tests to look at other measures?

Spellings: We tried for 40 years the kind of do-your-own-thing approach, and there was a lot of fungibility in that system. What I worry about is, what are these multiple measures? Are they valid? Are they reliable? Are they comparable? Can we make decisions based on them?

Q: What about the additional measures in the draft legislation by House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., and ranking member Buck McKeon, R-Calif.?

Spellings: My issue with the discussion draft is the multitude of ways that schools get over the bar of meeting the targets. It's all these variations on the theme that are confusing and mitigate against this clarion call of kids reading and doing math on grade level. I haven't met a parent -- rich, poor, black, white, or any other kind of modifier -- that didn't want that for their kid. This law says we're going to get children on grade level in a 12-year trajectory. It was signed in 2002, and by 2014 we said we are going to get the kids to grade level. This is not undoable. It's not unheard of. It's not wildly ambitious. So the idea that we have to find ways to mitigate against this basic, necessary, do-able goal is puzzling to me.

Q: But many schools and school districts say it is not do-able within that timeframe and that keeping the goal of 2014 just sets them up to fail.

Spellings: That's what the president calls the "soft bigotry of low expectations," and I surely do hope that somebody with that attitude is not in front of my child. Parents want teachers who believe their child can perform on grade level. We're not talking about nuclear physics. We're talking about basic reading and math skills. So it is a do-able deal. The second thing I would say is, I'm the one who approves plan amendments from states and who is looking at the kind of quality -- and, in some cases, lack of quality -- work that's been done on assessment systems across the country. I think the state of the art in the field is maybe a little behind where Chairman Miller might hope it is, and where I would want to get it myself.

Q: What do you think about Miller's proposal to offer teachers performance bonuses if their students are successful academically? He's taken a lot of flak from the teachers unions.

Spellings: I'm for it. I'm for things that reward the people who do the most challenging work in education. If we're going to make these great goals of grade-level achievement for kids by 2014, we're going to have to use time and people better and more effectively. The dirty little secret in education is, we often have our most experienced, most skilled personnel doing the least challenging work, and vice versa. That's how our urban districts often work. The new news about that is that Miller is a key Democrat and he's the one taking that position. Folks on my side of the aisle, including me and the president, we've been for this sort of thing for a long time. The unions obviously are fiercely opposed to it. So people expect Republicans to be for merit pay. We are. We've pushed it. People expect that less from the other side of the aisle.

Q: Politically, what do both parties need to do to move the reauthorization process forward and remain bipartisan?

Spellings: It has been a huge asset to this law and to this department for [Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Chairman Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.] and for Chairman Miller to stay strong on this policy. Obviously, they were at the birth and have continued to watch their child grow up. And so it's been important and will be important going forward. But we need to find the sweet spot here, the consensus things, and work together around those things that are in keeping with the core principles -- which are working -- and move forward in that way.

Q: Is the administration willing to put more money into the law, since the Democrats' primary criticism seems to be that the administration hasn't provided enough funding to carry it out?

Spellings: The best time to get a ramp-up in resources is when policies are affirmed and debated and refreshed or renewed. Resources and reform go together. There's a better prospect for more resources if we have a No Child Left Behind bill that is sustained for the president and lives on around these core principles.

Q: Are we better off with the existing law than with the discussion draft? If that came to the president, would you recommend that he veto it?

Spellings: That's a call for the president to make. We are so far away from any kind of decision like that. I am working in good faith, as they are, because we all know that if you care about resources, this is the time to act. If you care about perfecting the policy, making the law work better for real live educators and addressing legitimate things that they want to see fixed -- or if you care about math and science or high schools or competitiveness, all the things that business leaders around the country are on fire about -- this is the time to act. I'm also presuming that [the next president] is not going to want to come up to the Hill and work on George Bush's No. 1 domestic achievement. So this is a good time to get it done.

Q: Are you going to stay through the end of the administration?

Spellings: That's up to the president.

Q: Do you want to?

Spellings: I feel very passionate about this law and it's certainly the most important thing I've done professionally, and it's had a profound impact on education, in my humble and modest view. So, yes, I want to see it through.

Q: There's been some speculation that you'll run for governor of Texas -- is that your plan?

Spellings: I have no plans to run for anything but the city limits as soon as my time is up. All kidding aside, I am so busy I haven't had a chance -- I mean, I do hope to have some interesting, exciting something to do. I hope whatever I do will pay some money, too. So we'll have to see.

Q: Earlier this year you faced off against the state of Virginia, and your own home school district of Fairfax County, over their refusal to test English-language learners in English. The state was willing to forfeit its federal education money, and even Virginia Sens. John Warner and Jim Webb were prepared to intervene. Although the state ultimately backed down, that couldn't have been easy for you.

Spellings: I do a have a passion for poor and minority kids, and for getting them a high-quality education. That's been my life's work. And when I know that two-thirds of these kids are born in the United States and that three-quarters of them have been here for at least five years, certainly it's not unreasonable for citizens of this country to get to the end of the third grade and read on grade level.

Q: Wouldn't it have been easier for you politically to let the state have its way?

Spellings: Politically for whom? In the neighborhood? But politically on behalf of Hispanic kids, it would have been a very bad call, and the wrong thing to do, and by the way, not what's on the law books. This is what is so powerful about this law. The mighty Fairfax has done a damn good job of educating Anglo students and kids from affluent families, and we say, hooray, congratulations. What this law is about is those who have been left behind. It's about Hispanic kids. It's about poor kids. It's about special-ed kids. It's about African-American kids. And that has caused discomfort in suburbia. But [only] half of our African-American and Hispanic kids are getting out of high school on time, and we just can't sustain that as a country when we're getting more diverse by the year and when most of the jobs require post-secondary education.

Q: Are you ever sorry that you used the phrase "99.9 percent pure" to describe the law? You've certainly been criticized for it.

Spellings: When I say "99.9 percent pure," these core principles -- give ourselves a deadline of 2014; [count] every kid; annual assessments are the way to do that; disaggregate the data -- I mean that those are 99.9 percent pure. And they're here to stay, and we're not advocating that they be changed. Why? Because they're working.

Q: I understand the president's nickname for you is Margarita -- how did that come about?

Spellings: It's the national drink of Texas!