President Bush at a high school in Falls Church, Va. He was accompanied by outgoing Education Secretary Rod Paige, incoming Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, and his former-librarian wife, Laura. Bush said he wanted to "enhance'' Pell Grants for low-income college students. He said he wanted to add $1.5 billion to his No Child Left Behind program to impose national testing standards on high school students, to go along with current monitoring of elementary and middle schools. "We've got money in the budget to help the states implement the tests,'' Bush said. "There should be no excuse saying, 'Well it's an unfunded mandate.' Forget it. It will be funded.'' Really? Tell us it is really so, because so far it has not been so. The same Bush who suddenly tells us that No Child Left Behind will get an additional $1.5 billion is the same president who let the act go underfunded by at least $32 billion since he signed it in his first term, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Bush said he wants to enhance Pell Grants so that a student could receive up to $4,550 by the year 2010. The grant maximum is currently $4,050. This is the same Bush who in 2000 said if he won the White House, he would launch a five-year plan that would raise the Pell Grant maximum to $5100. Bush may lecture students to "aim high in life,'' but so far, he has lowballed them at almost every turn. The Education Department seemed more interested in paying African-American conservative commentator Armstrong Williams $240,000 to brainwash black people on the empty promises of No Child Left Behind. [more]
- The National Priorities Project (NPP) reported, the George No-Child-Left-Untested Bush administration’s illegal, immoral, and imperial war of choice in Iraq had cost more than $151 billion. With that same sum of money, the NPP calculated, the United States could have: enrolled 20,037,391 US children in Head Start for one year; provided health insurance for one year to 90,588,264 children; built 1,362,157 public housing units; and hired 2,621,749 additional public school teachers for one year. [more]