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.
