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Thompson Pushes Education Reforms

February 12, 2007 11:26 PM

ABC News' Teddy Davis Reports: Former Gov. Tommy Thompson, R-Wis., is running for the GOP's presidential nomination as an avowed proponent of school vouchers. But when he unveils the findings of the Commission on the No Child Left Behind Act Tuesday, President Bush's former Secretary of Health and Human Services refuses to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

"If you were a benevolent dictator," Thompson told ABC News, "you could do all these great things, but you're not, you're co-chair of a commission that's trying to do things. You do the best that you possibly can, and try to get as much as you can, and then decide if, at the end of the day, you can support the total project."

The Commission on No Child Left Behind, which Thompson has co-chaired over the past year with former Gov. Roy Barnes, D-Ga., is a bipartisan effort to make President Bush's signature education law a more useful force in closing the gap that separates the academic achievement of disadvantaged children from that of their peers.

After a year's worth of hearings, analysis and research, Thompson's panel is set to make a series of recommendations pertaining to accountability for teachers and principals, academic standards for students, and more aggressive interventions for what the report calls "chronically struggling schools." Additional recommendations, according to Thompson, include implementing a 12th grade assessment, giving principals the power to "refuse the transfer of a teacher into their school," and "allowing the average yearly progress" assessment to take place "every three years" instead of every year.

The commission, which was aided by the Aspen Institute and consisted of 13 members in addition to the two chairs, considered moving towards a national assessment rather than a state-based system of tests. In the end, however, the panel could not come to a consensus on the issue.

"I was pushing it," Thompson told ABC News, "but we were not successful in that regards and there were not enough votes for it."

The panel is set to recommend that Congress double funding for research into testing. But beyond that limited area, the Commission steered clear of the funding issue which has sharply divided the two parties ever since they worked together to pass the law during President Bush’s first year in office.

When Thompson and Barnes unveil the commission's findings tomorrow, they will be joined by the four members of Congress with the most seniority on education issues: Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass, Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wy., Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., and Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif.

A member of Kennedy's education staff told ABC News that the chairman of the Senate’s Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee is not ready to adopt the panel's recommendations wholesale, but this Kennedy aide praised the group for the "deliberative" and "sophisticated" process by which it studied the law’s accountability provisions as well as its treatment of disabled learners and the role of teachers. 

Even though the recommendations do not represent everything he would push if he were deciding policy entirely on his own, Thompson expressed enthusiasm about the commission’s work.

"I can assure you emphatically," Thompson told ABC News, "I'm enthusiastic for this report because if Congress would pass 90 percent of this, 'No Child Left Behind' would be a much stronger federal law."

ABC News' Matthew Zavala contributed to this report.

February 12, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (0)

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