The former Republican education secretary who wants to save the Education Department

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Margaret Spellings was the education secretary in a distant-seeming era that was actually not so long ago.

Spellings, who led the department from 2005 through 2008, presided over the implementation of No Child Left Behind. It was the heyday of a Washington consensus in which politicians of both parties insisted that schools should face stringent federal oversight for student performance, largely test scores.

That consensus eventually unraveled due to backlash from parents, teachers, and politicians who were concerned about excessive testing, unrealistic expectations, and federal meddling in local schools. In 2015, a new statute, the Every Student Succeeds Act, scaled back federal requirements for school performance.

I wanted to speak with Spellings, who now leads the Bipartisan Policy Center, to get her take on the effort to close the department she once led. She’s not a fan, because in her view it would be inefficient to have other agencies take over the department’s functions, as the Trump administration has contemplated.

I also wanted to explore the argument Spellings and others have been making that we need to return to more stringent federal accountability for student learning. We discussed what Spellings sees as the underappreciated success of No Child Left Behind — and why, if it was so successful, it drew such fierce and widespread backlash.

A spokesperson for the Education Department declined to comment.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Matt Barnum: Do you think we should close the federal Education Department?

Margaret Spellings: I do not, and not because I once held the job and it’s personal. I think that it would be a quite inefficient way to do business, transferring data systems. Also the burden that it would place on school districts and universities and colleges to say, I have a school safety issue, I’m calling the Justice Department. Now I’ve got a youth mental health thing, I’m with HHS [Health and Human Services].

Secretary Linda McMahon has said that schools have not improved since the Department of Education was created. Do you agree with that characterization?

That’s not true when we’ve used the federal role in a smart and responsible and strategic way as we did from 2000 to 2015, when we had accountability — when we held people to a standard, and we had consequences for improvement. You don’t need to take my word for it, you can just look at the NAEP data that had an upward trajectory during that period. Then — and frankly, the decline started well before COVID — we started to slip and slide as we took our foot off the gas.

Have you made this case directly to Linda McMahon?

Yes, I have had just one conversation with her in the early days, and obviously, told her much of this. What people are really looking for in a leader is what I call a ‘for’ agenda. We know what a lot of people are against, but what are they for?

When I hear things like, ‘Let’s send it back to the states,’ I think, well, it’s in the states. The Department of Education has express prohibitions from mandating curriculum, although fast forward to now, we are mandating some other particular things, like approaches on DEI and whatnot.

My reading of the evidence is that No Child Left Behind improved math achievement, but its effects in reading were minimal and maybe were even zilch.

Here’s my thesis about that: We started down that path through Reading First [an effort to promote phonics-based instruction], but it became associated with a Republican agenda, President Bush, and you’re right, we didn’t see the kind of traction that I think we’d hoped for.

The more encouraging news is that we are now seeing some real good evidence in states that when you embrace that science of reading, you can improve reading instruction for all kids.

If No Child Left Behind worked so well, why did it become so unpopular so quickly? As you know, one of the architects said in 2007 that it was the ‘most tainted brand in America.’

Well for starters people and especially adults don’t much care for accountability and having to bear responsibility for underperformance.

A lot of parents were not thrilled with it.

Where do parents get their information about what’s happening in schools?
Teachers.

So they were duped by the teachers?

No, I think there was a lot of testing hysteria that was overwrought and frankly, unnecessary. If you were following the curriculum and doing a good job of teaching the curriculum and the curriculum was accurately measuring what you wanted the kids to know, then the assessment would take care of itself. But it had an outsized sort of boogeyman feature during that period.

One common criticism of No Child Left Behind is that it set a bar of 100% proficiency or close to it. Should schools be on the hook for reaching 100%?

No, they shouldn’t be, and they’re not. If I were a policy maker with some authority at the Department of Education right now and I saw a state with a 35% reading proficiency rate, I’d say, let’s get to double. Let’s get to 70%.

If you chat with parents about what they want for their kids’ schools, I’m not sure you’re going to hear a lot saying we need more testing and accountability.

Well, you hear, ‘I sure wish they could read and do math at grade level.’

Yeah, though, actually, I think some surveys show that parents are a little less concerned about student test scores than policymakers and journalists.

There’s kind of false advertising. [Former education secretary] Arne Duncan talks about this all the time, that we’ve lied to families about how well prepared their kids are. That’s our fault, not theirs.

Is there real opportunity for bipartisan education reform efforts anymore?

Yes, I think so. I wouldn’t have shown up to work today if I didn’t think so.

The last meaningful bipartisan effort on K-12 education at the federal level was, of course, the Every Student Succeeds Act — which is bipartisanship in the way that you would not like, right?

Yes, they retreated from a lot of the accountability muscle. But we have had a national requirement for annual assessment in reading and in math, reporting it in a disaggregated way, requiring all 50 states to participate in NAEP. There are some very powerful elements that have been bipartisan and supported now for more than two decades.

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Thumbnail photo by Kimberly White / Getty Images for Common Sense Media