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:
“Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Institutions of higher education in the United States are products of Western society in which masculine values like an orientation toward achievement and objectivity are valued over cooperation, connectedness and subjectivity.”
—Yolanda Moses (b. 1946)