Bush promotes education agenda

? President Bush, back on the political money trail, highlighted his education agenda Monday and urged states to embrace an accountability program intended to identify poorly performing schools and provide help for needy students.

Bush collected $1.2 million for his re-election campaign fund at a $2,000-a-person fund-raiser. It was the first of three days of raising money and three days of education speeches this week. Vice President Dick Cheney raised $200,000 in Roanoke, Va.

With Monday’s events, Bush’s political war chest swelled to $59.6 million, more than all the money collected by the nine Democrats trying to win his job. It was Bush’s seventh visit as president to Tennessee, which he carried over native Al Gore in 2000 in a razor-thin national election decided by the Supreme Court.

Before his political event, Bush dropped by Kirkpatrick Elementary School, which has failed to make adequate progress toward state goals for several years and is required to offer special assistance to pupils. Bush praised school officials for owning up to the problem and making improvements, and he urged others to do the same.

“The statistics are loud and clear,” Bush said. “Too many of our fourth-graders cannot read at grade level. The federal government decided to do its part by not only providing the resources but by insisting upon results.” The law calls for increased testing to measure results.

Bush’s visit came just days after Tennessee officials released the results of public school performance tests under the “No Child Left Behind” accountability law pushed by the president. Only 53 percent of the state’s 1,650 schools met guidelines of the new law, and some educators blamed unreasonably high federal standards for the disappointing report.

“I’ve heard every excuse in the book why not to measure,” the president said. “My attitude is that in order to know, in order to diagnose a problem, you have to measure it in the first place. You cannot solve a problem until you measure it in the first place.”

Bush has asked Congress for $53 billion for elementary and secondary education, a 26 percent increase since he took office. “We understand that resources need to flow to help solve the problem,” Bush said.

Under the law, students attending schools that need improvement must be given the opportunity to transfer to better-performing public schools in the school district or to high-quality charter schools in the area.

In addition, supplemental educational services, such as after-school tutoring or academic summer camps, must be made available to students from low-income families who attend schools that have been in need of improvement for more than a year.

President Bush meets with third-graders at a tutoring center at Kirkpatrick Elementary School in Nashville, Tenn. Bush was at the school Monday to promote his No