Ex-Aides Break With Bush on 'No Child'

Many Republican lawmakers supported the Bush education plan because it proposed publicly funded vouchers for students to attend private schools. The original Bush plan also promised, "States and school districts will be granted unprecedented flexibility by this proposal."

But Bush dropped those ideas in negotiations with lawmakers, and the measure passed both houses of Congress in 2001 with overwhelming bipartisan support. Then-Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige and his lieutenants began to set the law in motion. Hickok and his colleagues said they supported the law at the time, despite misgivings, in part because it focused unprecedented attention on public education and achievement gaps between privileged and disadvantaged students.

But former officials said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, the top White House education adviser in Bush's first term, stymied efforts by top department officials to grant states more control over how they carried out the law. "Margaret wasn't very interested in flexibility," Hickok said.

Spellings and Paige declined to be interviewed.

Yesterday, Bush rejected the criticism that No Child Left Behind is an inflexible federal intrusion. "Quite the opposite," he said. "The federal government has said: 'We believe in local control of schools. You reform them. You fix them. We're just going to insist you measure in return for the billions we spend on your behalf.' "

Former officials say the Education Department is not fighting hard enough for private school vouchers. "It will literally determine whether some kids have a future or not," said Gerald A. Reynolds, assistant education secretary for civil rights from 2001 to 2003 and now chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Katherine McLane, a department spokeswoman, said Spellings is pushing for private school vouchers to be included in the renewal of No Child Left Behind.

Conservatives were also disappointed that a provision of the law allowing companies to receive federal funds to tutor disadvantaged students was not widely used. "We certainly had hoped for more opportunities that parents would have for choice," said Ronald Tomalis, a former assistant education secretary.

Some former senior department officials said they have a strained relationship with Spellings over first-term disputes and her second-term agenda. That friction might hinder her efforts to gain support from key education groups and lawmakers for renewal of No Child Left Behind, several senior officials said. Many of those groups and lawmakers have close ties to top officials from Bush's first term.

The legislation Republican critics introduced in March is drawing support from several former department officials, including Hickok and Brian W. Jones, the department's general counsel from 2001 to 2004, who said he endorses the concept.

"There has been disappointment among conservatives like me," Jones said. "Those of us who consider ourselves federalists believe that at some point, the federal government needs to step back and vest states and local authorities with the power to get to the original goals of No Child Left Behind."

Staff writer Michael A. Fletcher contributed to this report.