How the NRA and Its Allies Helped Spread a Radical Gun Law Nationwide
—By Adam Weinstein
| Thu Jun. 7, 2012 3:10 AM PDT
"The federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula or to control jobs in the work place. That is why we will abolish the Department of Education [and] end federal meddling in our schools."
--1996 Republican Party platform
"U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings today honored President Lyndon Baines Johnson in a ceremony officially renaming the U.S. Department of Education building . . . as the Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building."
--U.S. Department of Education news release, September 17, 2007[1]
In the 2000 presidential campaign, then-governor Bush aggressively courted the center on education. Drawing on his six years as governor of Texas, where he had earned national recognition as champion of the state's accountability system, Bush used education reform to reassure moderates that Republicans could govern "compassionately," woo constituencies like Latinos and African Americans, and fracture the Democratic coalition by weakening teachers unions. He criticized "the soft bigotry of low expectations" and denounced policies that had left behind millions of minority children, using the language of civil rights and social justice. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson later explained the decision to reject "leave us alone" conservatism for a more expansive vision: "Only this kind of early ideological shock treatment could shift a durable Republican image of heartlessness."[2]
Bush's aspirational position proved to be good politics, allowing him to promise dramatic action while remaining vague about its costs and consequences. However, in a lesson that would have been familiar to an earlier generation of Great Society Democrats, the complex reality of NCLB proved less appealing than its promise. The assault on the racial achievement gap earned plaudits and won allies in the civil rights community, but ultimately at the cost of alienating suburban parents worried that the emphasis on basic skills was harming their children.
Bush's diagnosis was that America's schools were plagued by mediocrity, low expectations, and inattention to the basics. The solution: aggressively reshape their culture by holding schools accountable for raising performance and closing racial achievement gaps in reading and math. Accountability would push educators and public officials to focus on basic skills and marginalized students. For the White House and its progressive allies, the operative concern was less the coherence of program design than the creation of a sense of urgency and cultural transformation through reshaping state and local politics.
President Lyndon Johnson, who signed the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965, would have approved of NCLB's soaring goals, emphasis on racial achievement gaps, and expanded federal role. Most notably, NCLB required each state to define "proficiency" in reading and math, set goals for the percentage of students who are proficient, and increase those goals over time to ensure 100 percent proficiency by 2014.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/06/nra-alec-stand-your-ground?page=2