An excellent and balanced piece in the Wash Post today on Bush's record on school reform as governor of Florida. He put in place a raft of inititiaves--standardized tests, vouchers, and grading individual schools.
Here are the key points:
There was a significant and genuine improvement in 4th grade reading.
A lot of those gains were lost by eighth grade when test scores leveled out to the national average though the scores were significantly below the average in Florida before Bush came to office.
The White-Black and White-Hispanic achievement gap shrunk but no more or faster than the national average. Whatever was going on in Florida was going on everywhere else.
The real reason for the improvements: MONEY! Republicans always do this. They implement their conservative reforms while at the same time increasing the spending on education in the state. They then claim the reforms made the difference when really the additional money explains it, thus proving the liberal point that if we spent more money on our schools, they would get a lot better.