Margaret Spellings

Based on Wikipedia: Margaret Spellings

The Education Secretary Who Picked a Fight with a Cartoon Bunny

On her very first day as United States Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings did something extraordinary. She wrote a stern letter to the Public Broadcasting Service about a children's show featuring an animated rabbit named Buster.

The offending episode? Buster visits Vermont to learn about maple syrup and meets some kids who happen to have two moms.

That's it. A bunny, some maple trees, and a family that looked different from what Spellings thought American children should see. The children in the episode simply mention that one of them has a "mom and stepmom" and that she loves her stepmother. No political commentary. No agenda. Just a kid talking about her family.

Spellings reminded PBS that her department helped fund the show, and that "many parents would not want their young children exposed to the life-styles portrayed in the episode." PBS pulled the episode from national distribution, though Boston's public television station defiantly aired it anyway, offering the episode to any station "willing to defy the Education Department."

The controversy became famous enough that a playwright named Cusi Cram, who wrote for the show Arthur (the series that spawned Postcards from Buster), turned the whole affair into a play called "Dusty and the Big Bad World."

Years later, in 2022, Spellings offered something resembling an apology. Speaking to NPR about the show's final season, she said "the world is very different today" and that the government "now reflects a greater openness to the multi-faceted, diverse stories that Americans can tell about themselves."

It was a remarkable admission from someone who had once wielded federal funding as a weapon against a cartoon rabbit's field trip.

The Woman Behind No Child Left Behind

Margaret Spellings wasn't some random political appointee who stumbled into education policy. She was one of the principal architects of the most sweeping education reform in a generation: the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

To understand what that law tried to do, you need to understand the problem it was trying to solve. For decades, American public schools operated with minimal federal oversight. Local school boards made most decisions, state governments set standards, and the federal government mostly stayed out of it. The result was a patchwork system where the quality of education a child received depended enormously on where they happened to live.

No Child Left Behind, often abbreviated as NCLB, changed that equation dramatically. The law required states to test students annually in reading and math, publish the results publicly, and face consequences if schools didn't show improvement. The idea was elegantly simple in theory: if you measure something and attach consequences to it, people will work harder to improve it.

The reality proved far messier.

Spellings had worked her way up through George W. Bush's orbit for years before becoming education secretary. She helped run his first campaign for Texas governor in 1994, then served as a senior advisor during his six years in Austin. When Bush moved to the White House, she came along, eventually becoming his Domestic Policy Advisor—the person who coordinated all the administration's priorities on issues that weren't foreign policy or national security.

She was confirmed as Secretary of Education on January 20, 2005, the same day Bush began his second term. She was only the second woman ever to hold the position.

The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

Spellings had a gift for memorable phrases, even if she borrowed them from her boss. When Connecticut pushed back against No Child Left Behind's testing requirements, she accused the state of practicing "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

The phrase, originally coined by Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, captured a real phenomenon. For generations, schools had quietly expected less from poor children and minority children. They were tracked into remedial classes, given easier assignments, graduated without basic skills. The schools weren't overtly racist—they were "softly" bigoted, assuming these kids couldn't handle challenging material.

No Child Left Behind was supposed to end that. By requiring schools to report test scores broken down by race and income, the law made it impossible to hide achievement gaps. A school couldn't claim success if its white students performed well while its Black students fell behind. Every subgroup had to make progress.

But Connecticut wasn't arguing for lower standards. The state claimed its existing testing system was more rigorous than what the federal law required, and that switching to the federal approach would actually be a step backward. Spellings wasn't interested in that nuance.

I think it's regrettable, frankly, when the achievement gap between African-American and Anglo kids in Connecticut is quite large. And I think it's unfortunate for those families and those students that they are trying to find a loophole to get out of the law as opposed to attending to the needs of those kids.

It was effective rhetoric. But it also revealed something about Spellings's approach: she was more interested in compliance than collaboration, more focused on forcing states to follow the federal playbook than on understanding why they might resist.

Higher Education Gets Its Turn

Having reshaped elementary and secondary education, Spellings set her sights on colleges and universities. In September 2005, she announced the formation of what became known as the Spellings Commission—formally the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education.

The commission's charge was to figure out how well American colleges were preparing students for the modern workforce. Its recommendations proved controversial, particularly the idea that universities should focus more on training students for specific jobs and supporting research with obvious commercial applications.

This touched a nerve in academia. Universities have always balanced two missions: preparing students for careers and pursuing knowledge for its own sake. The Spellings Commission seemed to tip the scales decisively toward the first goal, treating higher education primarily as job training rather than intellectual development.

Spellings described the commission's work as "a natural extension into higher education of the reforms carried out under No Child Left Behind." Her colorful summary of the approach: "It's time we turn this elephant around and upside down and take a look at it."

The commission's report called for more transparency about graduation rates and learning outcomes, more accountability for how federal financial aid was spent, and more focus on whether students were actually learning anything useful. Some of these ideas eventually made their way into policy. Others remain contentious to this day.

The Student Loan Scandal

Not all of Spellings's tenure was spent on grand policy initiatives. Sometimes she had to answer for more mundane failures—like the Department of Education's oversight of the student loan industry.

In May 2007, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo accused the Education Department of being "asleep at the switch." His investigation had uncovered widespread corruption in the student loan business: lenders paying kickbacks to college financial aid officers, universities steering students toward specific lenders, conflicts of interest everywhere you looked.

The department's Inspector General recommended holding loan companies accountable for their misconduct. Spellings went on record saying she would disregard that recommendation.

Her post-government career raised additional questions. After leaving office, Spellings joined the board of directors of the Apollo Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix. This was one of the largest for-profit colleges in the country—an industry that would later face massive criticism for predatory practices, misleading marketing, and leaving students deep in debt without marketable degrees.

Apollo paid Spellings more than three hundred thousand dollars for her board service. Critics pointed out the irony: the former education secretary was now profiting from an industry that many believed was exploiting the very students she had once been charged with protecting.

North Carolina: A Controversial Homecoming

In October 2015, the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina system elected Margaret Spellings as its new president. She would oversee seventeen campuses, from the flagship research university at Chapel Hill to regional institutions across the state.

The selection process was a disaster from the start.

The search had been conducted in secret, with minimal faculty input. At the board meeting where Spellings was chosen, several professors attempted to read a statement of opposition before being escorted out by campus police. More than a hundred faculty protesters gathered outside, shouting loud enough to be heard through the closed doors.

The protesters argued that Spellings "represented everything that is troubling in the direction of public higher education in this country." Faculty leaders complained they had been completely ignored during the selection process. Even the outgoing president, Thomas Ross—who had himself been controversially forced out in what many believed was a politically motivated firing—warned that Spellings was entering a "hostile" environment.

On her first day, March 1, 2016, students and faculty walked out of classes on six different campuses. In Chapel Hill, demonstrators gathered on the steps of Wilson Library.

The board chairman who had overseen the botched search, John Fennebresque, resigned the day after Spellings's election. It was an inauspicious beginning for a job that paid seven hundred seventy-five thousand dollars a year.

The Bathroom Bill

Just weeks into her new role, Spellings faced a crisis that would define her tenure in North Carolina.

In March 2016, the state legislature passed House Bill 2, commonly known as HB2 or "the bathroom bill." The law required transgender people to use public restrooms corresponding to the sex listed on their birth certificates rather than their gender identity. It also blocked local governments from passing their own anti-discrimination ordinances.

The law sparked immediate national outrage. Major corporations threatened to pull business from North Carolina. Performers canceled concerts. The National Basketball Association moved its All-Star Game out of Charlotte. The National Collegiate Athletic Association relocated championship events.

In early April, Spellings sent instructions to all seventeen UNC campuses to comply with the new law. The next day, facing criticism, she clarified that her compliance order didn't mean she personally endorsed HB2.

It was a distinction without much practical difference. The university system would enforce a law that many students, faculty, and staff found discriminatory.

Then the federal government got involved.

On May 4, the United States Department of Justice informed Spellings that the University of North Carolina system was violating Title IX—the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education. By enforcing HB2, the university was discriminating against transgender students.

The stakes were enormous. Title IX violations could cost the university system billions of dollars in federal funding.

Spellings reversed course. By the end of May, she announced that the university system would not enforce HB2. The former enforcer of No Child Left Behind, who had once accused Connecticut of seeking "loopholes" to avoid federal requirements, found herself on the other side of a federal compliance battle.

Silent Sam Falls

The final major controversy of Spellings's North Carolina tenure came in August 2018, when anti-racist protesters toppled a Confederate monument known as Silent Sam on the Chapel Hill campus.

The statue had stood since 1913, honoring University of North Carolina students who had fought for the Confederacy. At its dedication, a speaker had boasted about whipping a Black woman who had "ichased" him as he left for war. For decades, the statue had been a flashpoint for protests about racism and the university's relationship with its past.

Spellings condemned the protesters in a joint statement with the system's Board of Governors: "The actions last evening were unacceptable, dangerous, and incomprehensible. We are a nation of laws and mob rule and the intentional destruction of public property will not be tolerated."

Two months later, Spellings announced her resignation, effective March 2019. She had survived barely three years in one of the most contentious jobs in American higher education.

Before and After

Understanding Margaret Spellings requires understanding where she came from. Born Margaret Dudar in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1957, she moved to Houston, Texas as a child and graduated from Sharpstown High School in 1975. She earned a political science degree from the University of Houston and worked her way through the Texas education policy world—serving on an education reform commission under Governor William Clements and as associate executive director of the Texas Association of School Boards.

Those jobs gave her deep knowledge of how schools actually worked, how policy decisions played out in real classrooms, and how the various stakeholders in education—teachers, administrators, parents, politicians—interacted with each other. When she later joined George W. Bush's team, she wasn't a political operative learning education policy on the fly. She was an education policy expert who had learned politics.

After leaving government in 2009, Spellings founded a consulting firm in Washington, D.C. She advised the Boston Consulting Group and the United States Chamber of Commerce. She joined corporate boards, including the controversial Apollo Group position.

More recently, she has served as president and CEO of Texas 2036, a nonprofit focused on long-term planning for the state, and then as president and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank that tries to find common ground between Republicans and Democrats on major issues.

She also co-chairs the Future of Tech Commission alongside Jim Steyer of Common Sense Media, working on technology policy issues like privacy, antitrust enforcement, digital equity, and content moderation. It's a reminder that Spellings has always been interested in how policy shapes the lives of children and families—even when her specific policy positions have generated fierce opposition.

The Game Show Secretary

There's one more side to Margaret Spellings that deserves mention: she was surprisingly willing to appear on television shows that most Cabinet secretaries would avoid.

In November 2006, while still serving as Secretary of Education, she appeared as a contestant on Celebrity Jeopardy! She became the first sitting Cabinet member ever to compete on the show. She finished second, earning eleven thousand one hundred dollars for charity but losing to actor Michael McKean, who accumulated thirty-eight thousand eight hundred dollars.

She was also the only active member of the Bush administration to appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, stopping by in May 2007. The following year, she appeared on Stephen Colbert's Colbert Report. She even called into NPR's comedy quiz show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!

These appearances revealed something about Spellings that her policy battles often obscured: she had a sense of humor about herself and understood that connecting with the public sometimes meant meeting them where they were—even if that meant losing to the guy who played Lenny in Laverne & Shirley.

Legacy

Margaret Spellings's legacy is complicated, as legacies of consequential people usually are.

No Child Left Behind, which she helped create and then spent four years implementing, is now widely considered a failure—or at best a noble experiment that taught us important lessons about the limits of test-based accountability. The law's successors have pulled back from its more punitive provisions while keeping its commitment to transparency about student achievement.

Her tenure at the University of North Carolina showed both the difficulty of leading a major public university system in polarized times and the way that past positions can haunt leaders when circumstances change. The woman who enforced federal education mandates found herself trapped between federal civil rights law and state legislation.

Her evolution on LGBTQ issues—from attacking PBS over a cartoon bunny's visit to a family with two moms to expressing regret decades later—mirrors a broader shift in American society. Whether that evolution represents genuine growth or political expedience probably depends on your prior assumptions about politicians.

What seems clear is that Spellings has been a consequential figure in American education for three decades. She shaped policy at the state and federal level, led one of the largest university systems in the country, and repeatedly found herself at the center of the most contentious debates about what schools should teach and who should control them.

She picked fights with cartoon rabbits and Confederate statues, with recalcitrant states and transgender students, with for-profit colleges and faculty protesters. Not all of those fights reflected well on her. But none of them were boring.