11/23/04 -- In nominating Margaret Spellings to be the next U.S. Secretary of Education, President Bush picked "an energetic reformer" who was one of the chief architects of the No Child Left Behind Act.
"I have relied on her intellect and judgment throughout my career in public service," Bush said Nov. 17. "She has my complete trust."
Spellings, 46, has been assistant to the President for domestic policy since 2001. If the position is confirmed by Congress, which appears certain, Spellings would succeed Rod Paige as the nation's eighth education secretary. Paige, 71, was the first African-American to hold that position.
Spellings grew up in Houston, majored in political science at the University of Houston, and worked as an aide to the Texas House Public Education Committee.
In the early 1990s, she was a lobbyist with the Texas Association of School Boards.
Spellings left that position in 1994 to work on Bush's first campaign for Texas governor. After Bush was elected, Spellings served as his education adviser. In that position, she pushed for stronger accountability measures that later became the model for NCLB.
During her tenure in the White House, Spellings oversaw a range of issues, including health care, immigration, and job training, as well as education.
At the press conference announcing the nomination, Spellings told the President, "I share your passion for education and your commitment to seeing that each and every child has the skills and qualities necessary to realize the American dream."
Spellings will take over leadership of the Education Department at a critical time -- there is growing criticism of NCLB and frustration with the Bush Administration for its failure to fully fund the law.
During his re-election campaign, Bush often referred to NCLB as one of his top accomplishments in his first term. He has not proposed any major education initiatives for his second term other than to expand NCLB to include more testing in high school.
In his resignation letter to the President, Paige cites the launch of NCLB as one of his chief accomplishments and notes that "the academic achievement gap between minority students and their white peers, essentially stagnant throughout the period between 1992 and 2000, has begun to close."
Before joining the Bush cabinet, Paige spent seven years as superintendent of the Houston school district and previously had been a member of the Houston school board. Before that, he was dean of education at Texas Southern University.
As secretary, Paige traveled across the country promoting NCLB and the law's objective of closing the achievement gap between white students and minorities and between the poor and more affluent.
Much of his strong feelings about eliminating the achievement gap stem from his experiences growing up in segregated schools in Mississippi.
Paige responded harshly to critics of the law who complained that NCLB is too rigid and unfairly labels schools making progress as failing. He compared critics of NCLB with segregationists who were "on the wrong side of history," and called the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, a "terrorist organization." He later apologized for that remark.