Education
President Bush's domestic agenda carried forward the theme of increased responsibility for performance that had characterised his days as Texas governor, and he worked hard to lobby for the adoption of the No Child Left Behind Act, with Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy as its chief sponsor. This legislation aimed to close the achievement gap between the most and the least able children, measure student performance, provide options to parents with students in low-performing schools and target more federal funding to low-income schools. President Bush also increased funding significantly for the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, creating education programs to strengthen the grounding in science and mathematics for American high school students.
Looking back on his first term, on August 1, 2005, in response to a question from the media about the teaching of intelligent design versus evolution in public schools, Bush answered, "Both sides ought to be properly taught... so people can understand what the debate is about.... I think that a part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought." Bush did not elaborate upon his personal views concerning "intelligent design".
President Bush heavily promoted his No Child Left Behind education program in 2001, visiting schools across the country. This program was endorsed by Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy and during this period of his presidency, Bush's approval ratings rose at times to 63 percent. In terms of overall performance, however, the Associated Press noted that, of Bush's campaign promises for the first 100 days in office, he managed to keep about a quarter of them while shelving all the others. The political climate in Washington, it argued however, had changed since the campaign.
Read more about this topic: George W. Bush's First Term As President Of The United States
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“What education is to the individual man, revelation is to the human race. Education is revelation coming to the individual man, and revelation is education that has come, and is still coming to the human race.”
—Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781)
“Until we devise means of discovering workers who are temperamentally irked by monotony it will be well to take for granted that the majority of human beings cannot safely be regimented at work without relief in the form of education and recreation and pleasant surroundings.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.”
—Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881)