George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

the Drug Enforcement Administration. This was George Bush, the friend of Felix
Rodriguez, Hafez Assad, Hashemi Rafsanjani, and Don Aronow. The funds and the
targets set for Bush's program were minimal. A real war on drugs remained a vital
necessity, but it was clear that there would be none under the Bush administration.
Later the same month, on September 27-28, Bush met with the governors from all 50
states in Charlottesville, Virginia for what was billed as an "education summit." This was
truly a glorified photo opportunity, since all discussions were kept rigorously off the
record, and everything was carefully choreographed by White House image-mongers.
The conference issued a communique that called for "clear national performance goals,"
and the substantive direction of Bush's "education presidency" appeared to resolve itself
into a nationwide testing program that could be used to justify the scaling down of
college education and the exclusion from it of those whom Bush might define as "mental
defectives." Would the testing program be used to finger and list the "feeble minded,"
perhaps over a generation or two? Was there a veiled intent of "culling" the hereditary
defectives? With Bush's track record on the subject, nothing could be excluded.
One of the themes of the "education summit" was that material resources had absolutely
nothing to do with the performance of an educational system. This was coming from
preppie George Bush, who had enjoyed a physical plant, library, sports facilities, low
average class size and other benefits at his posh Greenwich Country Day School and
exclusive Phillips Academy in Andover which most schoolteachers could only dream of.
When, during the summer of 1991, it was found that national average scores for the
Scholastic Aptitute Test had continued to fall, Bush was still adamant that increased
resources and the overall economic condition of society had nothing to do with the
answer. At that time it also turned out that Bush's reshuffled Secretary of Education,
former Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander, was sending his children to an elite day
school associated with Georgetown University, where the tuition exceeded the yearly
income of many poor families.
Many governors joined James Blanchard of Michigan in complaining that under
Reaganomics, the federal government had unloaded whole sectors of infrastructural
expenditure, including education, on the states. "We do not come to [Charlottesville] to
rattle a tin cup," said Blanchard. "But we cannot afford to have our education revenues
'bled' by the federal government. Over the past decade, the federal committment to
education has declined from 2.5% of the federal budget to less than 1.8%. If education is
to become a national priority, you and the Congress should reverse that decline." [fn 19]
Ironically, the best perspective on Bush's "education summit" eyewash came from within
his own regime. Obviously piqued at the bad reviews his previous performance as
Reagan's Secretary of Education was getting, Bush Drug Czar William Bennett told
reporters that the proceedings in Charlottesville were "standard Democratic and
Republican pap --and something that rhymes with pap. Much of the discussion proceeded
in a total absence of knowledge about what takes place in schools."