It must be kiss-and-tell season, what with Scott McClellan’s recent riposte to the Bush White House, and now with former education department official’s Susan Neuman’s revisionist history as reported by Time:*

Susan Neuman, a professor of education at the University Michigan who served as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education during George W. Bush’s first term, was and still is a fervent believer in the goals of NCLB. And she says the President and then Secretary of Education Rod Paige were too. But there were others in the department, according to Neuman, who saw NCLB as a Trojan horse for the choice agenda—a way to expose the failure of public education and “blow it up a bit,” she says. “There were a number of people pushing hard for market forces and privatization.”

I know and like Susan (we overlapped at the Department and worked on some issues together), but what a ridiculous statement. Of course “there were a number of people pushing hard for market forces”—like, say, the President himself. What Neuman apparently failed to realize when she agreed to serve was that she’d been asked by a Republican Administration--you know, the party in favor of vouchers and such. President Bush campaigned for school choice during his 2000 run—right out there in the open. But that doesn’t mean that NCLB’s focus on accountability was meant to soften up the country for vouchers. Nor is there any evidence anywhere that tough accountability leads to more school choice. The debates just aren’t joined that way.

Reading between the lines, I suspect the “number of people” she refers to as supporting “market forces and privatization” includes Gene Hickok, the former undersecretary who was her boss, and Bill Hansen, the former deputy secretary who was my boss. Yes, they support school choice, big time. That’s one reason why they served in senior positions in Bush’s Administration.

What was never clear was why Neuman, who obviously has no love for parental choice, nor had any management experience, was given the reins of the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education—one of the largest and most important divisions in the education department, and one that, at the time, even had responsibility for choice and charter school programs. (We moved those to the Office of Innovation and Improvement when it was created in 2003.) Yes, she was a reading expert, but that is a slim reason to give someone such an important job.

Neuman and Hickok—who together chaired the department’s NCLB implementation team—clashed endlessly. And understandably: they saw the world and the task at hand completely differently. I can’t ever imagine Hickok saying this, for example: “Pinning all our hopes on schools will never change the odds for kids.” What defeatism. Yet that choice quote from Neuman is what closes the Time article.

So what’s the lesson for the McCain or Obama Administration? It’s simple: make sure you select people for senior appointments who share your policy agenda. It’s going to be hard enough to sell your education proposals to Congress and the American people. It’s more than a little crazy to have to sell them to your own staff, too.

* Some might say, wait, isn’t this the same Mike Petrilli who wasted no time criticizing the Administration when he left and “turned in his NCLB lapel pin” on the law’s fifth anniversary? Well, fair enough, except my beefs with NCLB and with the Administration tend toward the details, whereas Neuman’s disagreements are much more global. As far as I can tell, the one thing she agreed with was Reading First. As important as that was, that’s not nearly enough, not for the position she held.

Today at a big wing-ding on federal education research sponsored by Education Sector and several other groups, former Deputy Secretary of Education Marshall (Mike) Smith agreed that it was probably a mistake to have carved the Education Department (ED) out of the old Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

I was half-serious when I first said this, citing Moynihan and Califano (celebrated opponents of ED’s creation, both) and teeing off Russ Whitehurst’s comment that the Department of Health and Human Services now spends a vastly larger fraction of its discretionary budget on R & D than does ED. Smith was serious, citing evidence that one of the largest contributors to weak student achievement and even worse problems for kids and school systems is health issues (he focused on tooth decay leading to rampant infection leading sometimes to death) besetting American children, especially poor ones.

Nancy Zuckerbrod at the Associated Press previews today’s regulatory actions by the U.S. Department of Education here. Mostly these are initiatives that have already been announced—moving toward a common graduation rate, for example, and tightening the rules regarding how many students states can exempt from schools’ Adequate Yearly Progress calculations (a.k.a., limiting “n” sizes). Most important, in my view, is the Department’s intention to curtail one of the law’s most perverse incentives—allowing school districts to keep Title I money that’s supposed to go for “free tutoring” if not enough students show interest. It appears that the Administration would move toward a “use it or lose it” policy:

The regulations also call for school districts to demonstrate that they are doing all they can to notify parents of low-income students in struggling schools that free tutoring is available. If the districts fail to do that, their ability to spend federal funds could be limited under the proposal. The department estimates only 14 percent of eligible students receive tutoring available to them.

These changes could have an especially large impact if they demand that states sign off on districts’ actions and “certify” that they have indeed done all they can to advertise the free tutoring before they can use the funds for other purposes. I’d like to see a state official claim that school districts have done “all they can” when less than 10 percent of eligible students are using the free tutoring.

What today’s actions all have in common is that they mean less flexibility under the law—so don’t expect the cheers that accompanied the Department’s moves toward “differentiated accountability” (a.k.a., the Suburban Schools Relief Act) or measuring student progress over time. But they deserve to be lauded nevertheless. Yes, I’m known to have criticized Secretary Spellings in the past for her implementation of NCLB (see here, here, here, here, and here, for a small sampling) but this time around, it looks like she’s getting it right.

Do you remember the Postcards from Buster controversy of 2005? A popular PBS children’s television show—funded in part by a “Ready to Learn” grant from the U.S. Department of Education—was preparing to air a segment in which a (cartoon) bunny visits a (real) married lesbian couple in Vermont. The career staff at the Department caught wind of this, passed the news up the chain of command (a chain that yes, included me), a big internal debate ensued about what to do, urgent phone calls were placed, and eventually (and, in my view, quite regrettably), Margaret Spellings, in her first official act as Secretary of Education, sent a letter to the head of PBS saying that “many parents would not want their young children exposed to the life-styles portrayed in this episode.” (The letter itself was overkill; the Secretary’s office had already learned that PBS was pulling the show. Nor was it necessary to use the “life-styles” code word. But Spellings and her inner circle apparently saw an opportunity to score points with the religious right.)

The whole ugly affair (and my bit part in it) convinced me that it was time to leave government service for the greener pastures of the Fordham Institute (a decision I have regretted not one day).

OK, enough about me. The point is... this riveting story is now being turned into a play, Dusty and the Big Bad World! So I learned from this Weekend Edition Saturday segment on NPR. Here’s the synopsis; sound familiar?

“Dusty” is the most popular animated PBS children’s television show in America. But when Dusty—the genial hero of the program—goes to visit a family with two daddies, the big bad world brings the hammer down—hard. Based on actual events, Dusty is a hilarious, no-holds-barred dramatization of the clash between freedom of speech, art (or at least kids’ TV), and politics.

The play, written by Cusi Cram, will be produced by the Denver Theater Company in early 2009. Spellings should have more time on her hands by then; perhaps she should get some tickets.

Move over, Mike Huckabee. According to this AP story, it looks like John McCain might prefer Jeb Bush as his education secretary—if he manages to win the fall campaign.

Rumors are circulating that the Secretary is about to announce her resignation from the Department of Education. Texas governor’s office, here she comes?

On March 10, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute demanded an inquiry into scandalous efforts by the executive and legislative branches to sabotage the Reading First program.

Margaret Spellings addressed the Reading First state directors on Thursday and complained about Congress’s “devastating” budget cut of the program. It’s about time. If she had shown even an iota of courage 18 months ago, when the so-called scandal first broke, the program might have remained in-tact. But as Sol Stern shows in painful detail, she and the rest of the Administration headed for cover instead. Such decisions have consequences, Madame Secretary, consequences that are all too real for the 4,000-odd schools likely to see their Reading First funds disappear.