Word: bushed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...races, pragmatic "compassionate conservatives" who talk about inclusion, reach out to minorities, spend time on education, mind the environment and are tightfisted with their budgets coasted to easy victories in state after state: Tom Ridge in Pennsylvania, Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin, John Engler in Michigan and, above all, the Bush brothers in Texas and Florida. The darlings of the right, the David Beasleys, Fob Jameses and Dan Lungrens, were shown to the exits...
Education will emerge for the first time as a key issue in the coming presidential primaries, and Bush's success on the subject stands in stark contrast to the dismal record of his party's fallen Washington leaders. Congressional Republicans have backed away from their disastrous plan to abolish the federal Department of Education, and some took strange pride recently in blocking Bill Clinton's multibillion-dollar public-school construction plan. They have remained wedded to conservative shibboleths like education savings accounts and private-school vouchers, which have little appeal to the 89% of Americans who send their children...
...part, he's been lucky. When he took office, Bush was the beneficiary of a decade's worth of reform efforts beginning with Ross Perot's mid-'80s movement to reduce class sizes and install statewide testing and accountability. By 1995 the state education code had been scrapped and the legislature was at work on a new one that would push authority down to the local school districts. Like any gifted politician, Bush commandeered the train, adding some cars of his own and taking credit for laying its track...
...then he drove it further. "Most school systems tend to have no standards and tons of regulations," says Ravitch. "Bush reversed the paradigm, and backed higher standards and fewer regulations, leaving districts free to teach how they want as long as they get results." He reduced the regulatory authority of the Texas education agency but increased accountability by beefing up and enforcing state standards. Most important, he started tracking results by race and ethnicity, rewarding schools that boost performance--especially minority performance. He also took on state teachers' colleges, telling them that 70% of graduates in each minority group must...
Building on those innovations, Bush has been pushing what he calls "the most profound goal I have set as Governor: teaching every child in Texas to read by the third grade." The initiative includes a back-to-basics reading curriculum, a new set of diagnostic tools to identify problem readers in the earliest grades, programs for teacher training, "school-within-a-school" reading academies and after-school programs. So far, however, it has been underfunded. In 1997 and 1998 it received a total of only $32 million from the state, enough to help just a small fraction of Texas...