Douglas Alexander: “I think it is worthwhile, in addition to this, to give a little credit to former President George H.W. Bush. I still…”

“I think it is worthwhile, in addition to this, to give a little credit to former President George H.W. Bush. I still believe that when the dust settles and history books are written, President Bush's leadership in education will be among his most significant and lasting contributions. His tour of duty was interrupted by the voters in 1992, so he was not able to finish the job. But his America 2000 community effort had a variety of initiatives which set the agenda for American education in the 1990s. They included a new set of national standards in core curriculum subjects, including science, history, English, geography, arts, civics, and foreign languages. It included a national voluntary examination system geared to those new standards. They included new generation, thousands of start-from-scratch, 'break-the-mold schools.' We call them today charter schools, but then there were only perhaps ten such charter schools. It included giving teachers more autonomy and flexibility in their classrooms by waiving federal rules and regulations, something Congress eventually did more of later. It also included a GI bill for children, to give middle and low-income families $1,000 scholarships to spend at any lawfully operated school of their choice, thereby giving those parents more of the same choices that wealthy parents already had. That was an excellent agenda in the early 1990s. It is still a good agenda today.”