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Margaret Spellings argues for renewing the No Child Left Behind Act.
 

Tavis: Margaret Spellings is the current U.S. Secretary of Education, and the first education chief who is a mother of school age children. Imagine that. (Laugh) Prior to her current post, she served as a domestic policy advisor to President Bush in the White House, and helped to create, in fact, the No Child Left Behind Act. Madam Secretary, nice to have you on the program.

Margaret Spellings: Tavis, great to be here.

Tavis: What brings you to Los Angeles?

Spellings: Well, I'm here to talk about providing supplemental services, more tutoring help to kids in Los Angeles. So I'm here to meet with folks in the business community to talk about why we need to strengthen and improve and renew No Child Left Behind next year when the Congress comes in.

Tavis: Tell me why. Give me your case, and I'll challenge you respectfully here. But tell me why you think No Child Left Behind ought to be renewed.

Spellings: Well, it's working for students, that's the first thing, for sure. Scores are up for African American and Hispanic kids. Highest ever. We've made more progress in the last five years than in the previous 28 years on our national education report card. The achievement gap is closing, and it's working. Kids are spending more time doing reading and focusing on these basic skills that are the gateways to really all other learning. So we're well on our way.

Tavis: There are folk watching right now who would no doubt take you on respectfully and say that testing, which is obviously hotly debated even as we sit here, cannot be the answer. It is not the end-all, be-all.

Spellings: It isn't, and I've never said that. But I'll tell you what; you can't solve a problem until you know that it exists. And our approach prior to No Child Left Behind was kind of put the money out, and hope for the best. Now we know is who is being served, and how well. And if we don't start to close this achievement gap, we are not gonna live in a very prosperous country, or in a very civically-engaged country.

Tavis: There's still a lot of - I was just reading prior to our conversation, there's still a lot of states and a lot of schools where that money that's been allocated has, in fact, not been spent. For what reasons?

Spellings: Well, one of the things, in fact, it's one of the reasons I was out here in Los Angeles today is the law says that when a school is underperforming for three years, that the parents and students in that school have the option to get extra tutoring or extra help. Sometimes, schools have been reluctant to tell parents about that, because it costs the school money.

There are financial resources that can go to a private provider, someone who can get that tutoring assistance. So, some have suggested there's a little bit of a conflict of interest between the school and the parent in a situation like that, where resources are coming out of the school to get extra help for the student.

Tavis: With all due respect to the intent of a program that funds tutoring, tell me why it is that spending money on tutoring is better than spending money on bringing these classes up to speed to begin with. Tutoring is extra help. One could argue, if one - I'm not a cynic, but one could certainly argue that if we have money that can be allocated for stuff outside the classroom for extra tutoring, why don't we spend that money to bring these kids up to speed in the classroom, where we're clearly failing?

Spellings: Well ideally, that's exactly what we do. The idea here is not to make every child in America eligible for intervention programs. The idea is to get it right in the first place. And with No Child Left Behind, we've built an appetite for doing that. But I think moms and dads, and rightfully so, are saying well, what about my kid? I mean, I've waited long enough. I need extra help right now, today.

So, we really have to do both of these things simultaneously. We have to improve the academic day, core instruction. Research-based reading, and so forth. And while we're doing that for those kids who have fallen behind, they want, need, and deserve extra help.

Tavis: Tell me how No Child Left Behind impacts the core things that we know are wrong with education. Oversize classrooms; kids not having books that they need in certain schools. Too many schools around the country, certainly in the wintertime, that don't have heat. I just saw a story about schools in Chicago the other day; don't have heat in some of these schools.

Teachers that are under-qualified. There's stuff that you know better than I do. How does No Child Left Behind impact those core concerns about what's wrong inside these schools?

Spellings: Well, and those issues are things that are gonna be addressed locally, and they're gonna be different locally. But what No Child Left Behind has said is as a nation, we're gonna hold ourselves accountable for the grade level achievement of every single student, and we're gonna hold ourselves - give ourselves a deadline, that's 2014, to do that work. And so all the conditions that have to be created to have that great goal occur need to be attended to by states and localities.

Things like teacher quality, textbooks and materials. Those sorts of things. But we've said do the job, do what it takes, and those are issues that are gonna be resolved at the local level, not at the state level. I'm not the superintendent of schools; I'm not the superintendent of heating or school buses, or class size. But I am the person who is charged with keeping our eye on how well are we doing for every kid in this country.

Tavis: I know you didn't mean to be flip by that comment, but those two things are inextricably linked together. The Education Secretary cannot be divorced from these local decisions. What I mean by that is Tip O'Neill famously once said, as you know, 'All politics is local.' So at the end of the day, what matters is what happens in that classroom, in that school district.

And to that point, what No Child Left Behind does or doesn't do, quite frankly, is change this notion that there are 50 different ways to educate all of our children. You subscribe to that notion?

Spellings: Well, I do, because I believe that it's the old he who has the gold makes the rules principle. We at the federal level are an eight percent investor in K-12 education. Ninety-two percent of the money is coming from you, a local taxpayer, and a state taxpayer. And people believe that they ought to have a voice, input, set standards, have involvement.

It's the closest to the people. And so I think a lot of these tactical issues, and I don't mean to minimize them at all, those are the things that have to be in place for us to get results. But the proper role for the federal government is to ask how are we doing? Not to prescribe thou shalt have this or that, and so forth. We're not the primary investor.

Tavis: And yet some who see No Child Left Behind as setting standards to qualify for X amount of money see the federal government doing exactly what you say the federal government doesn't wanna do.

Spellings: Well, there's a balance here. There clearly is a balance. Some people think we have too vigorous a role, and some people think we don't have a vigorous enough role. And so, those were things that we're gonna talk about in Washington. We're gonna talk about them next year when the act comes up for renewal. But what I know for sure is we for the first time ever are on a trajectory to ask ourselves as Americans, do we believe every kid and ought to get a high quality education. And should we hold ourselves accountable for doing that as a nation.

Tavis: To that point, let me raise this issue. There are, and you said you subscribe to this notion, but there are 50 different states, obviously. Fifty different ways of doing this. And you and I both know if we're honest with each other that a child in Mississippi is never gonna have the money invested in his or her education that a child in the state of Washington will, primarily because the tax base in the state of Washington, with Microsoft and, well, of course Boeing isn't there anymore.

But Microsoft and Starbucks and America Online, and so many other major companies headquartered in the state of Washington. In Mississippi, their biggest export is catfish. Which means that folk gotta get a lot more cholesterol to raise money to support education in Mississippi. So the point is in Mississippi, there's never gonna be the kind of resources to invest in education that there are in the state of Washington.

Which means whether I'm Black, White, or otherwise, if I live in Mississippi, which I have no control over as a kid, I'm never gonna be as well educated as a kid in Washington state.

Spellings: Well, let me say a couple things about that. In No Child Left Behind, we did something really important. We said every state in this country is gonna participate in our national education report card. And we've done that. And now we've looked at the data, and you'd be surprised. Some of our southern states, Louisiana, South Carolina, have very high standards. They have high failure rates, too. They have very challenging work down there, no doubt about it.

But they're holding themselves to high standards. And that's not always true, anywhere in our country. But now we know. We have a federal yardstick that says, how rigorous are these state standards. And I'm confident that the good people of Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, where I'm from, are gonna act on that information. Again, it's back to what is the proper balance between state and federal policy makers as it relates to all this?

Now, the other thing I wanna say is that not withstanding the industrial base and so forth, I think we now live in a very small world, a very flat world, and these skills, whether you're gonna be in advanced manufacturing, in an automobile manufacturing plant in Alabama, or working at Microsoft, you need more math, more science, more rigorous coursework, and the ability to get it in a more convenient way in our 24-seven kind of world. And that's what we're driving toward.

Tavis: Let me ask you how in that administration that is bogged down now with the Iraq Study Group and the crisis in Iraq, etcetera, etcetera, how, when you sit around the big table in the White House with the president does education even cross his mind? And how do you legitimately and realistically get any kind of respect when everybody in the country and the world knows his attention is on this other matter?

Spellings: Well, Americans know, and I think we all believe this in our heart, that education - this was certainly true for you, Tavis - that education is the game-changer in our country. Education is the way to opportunity for everybody. And that that can't be minimized. In fact, I would argue, and I certainly have done some international things that education is a universal shared value.

And that is fundamentally what's gonna change the way people think. Tolerance. All of the things that we do in schools. So, it's not to be minimized, and the president does pay a lot of attention to it. I'll tell you one thing that's been a huge asset for this issue is this is a bipartisan issue. I'm out here in Los Angeles today, Eli Broad, obviously a big Democrat, he's hugely supportive of No Child Left Behind.

I've met with Senator Kennedy and Congressman Miller, the two soon to be chairmen of the relevant committees. They are as committed to No Child Left Behind today as they were when they were the co-authors of it five years ago. And we know what is at state for our country. Sure, we're gonna argue about resources, we're gonna argue about tactics, and so forth. But there are some non-negotiable things in this law, and I'm glad to be working on this issue right now, 'cause it's so super-critical.

Tavis: Senator Kennedy, to your point, though, clearly has had some criticism since the law got passed, since the bill got passed into law. We won't debate those now. The point, though is, or the question, rather, is whether or not in this divided Congress now, it's one thing to pass No Child Left Behind, get it financed, get it funded, that is to say, when the Republicans controlled the House and the Senate. We, as you well know, have a divided government in Washington, which portends what for the passage of No Child Left Behind next year?

Spellings: Well, I think No Child Left Behind is here and here to stay, and will be strengthened. The Civil Rights community knows that there is a focus on our neediest students, which has always been the primary place for federal involvement. That this is working for African American and Hispanic kids, for special education students. It's pulling our country forward, educationally.

And the proof is in the pudding. And I'm confident that we're gonna have bipartisan discussions, and my hope and prayer at the end of the day is that we'll get this all reauthorized and strengthened this year. Because we also need to go to the next level. We need to start talking about how we're gonna have more rigor in our high schools. No Child Left Behind is about the early grades, reading and math, three through eight. We've gotta start talking about high school and opportunity. Math and science, the competitiveness things that are gonna keep our country great.

Tavis: Well, we're glad to have the Education Secretary in L.A., glad to have you on the program.

Spellings: Thank you, Tavis.

Tavis: Nice to see you. Up next on this program, director Catherine Hardwicke on her new film, 'The Nativity Story.' Stay with us.