An Unlikely Partnership Left Behind

His anger over the war persisted after the election. But both Bush and Kennedy tried to preserve their alliance on education. Kennedy pressed so much on funding that Bush playfully preempted him when they got together. "I see my friend Ted's joined us," Bush would say. "We're going to talk about increased funding today?"

But the president and his aides dismissed Kennedy's arguments, pointing out that they had increased annual spending on programs that make up No Child Left Behind from $17.4 billion in the 2001 fiscal year to a proposed $24.5 billion in 2008, up 41 percent. "That's a big increase," said White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joel D. Kaplan. Kennedy maintains Bush should have put another $56 billion into the program over six years, based on spending authorization ceilings.

Either way, Bush realized that implementation of the law had not gone smoothly. In 2005, he replaced Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige with Spellings, a close confidant. A tough-talking Texan who boasted of being the first mother of school-age children to serve as education chief, she quickly moved to resolve problems and impressed lawmakers with a pragmatic, blunt style flavored with phrases such as "Hell, yes," and "We damn sure did."

Yet by the time Spellings took the helm, the law had made plenty of enemies with a litany of complaints: It had turned schools into test-taking factories, diverted attention from subjects other than reading and math, promoted dumbed-down standards, crowded some schools at the expense of others and imposed more bureaucracy.

Egged on by the National Education Association, the powerful teachers union, school districts filed lawsuits and states openly resisted. Bush is "trying to prove he's the education president, but the way he's trying to do it is not consistent with what we would think of as an education president," said NEA President Reg Weaver.

The NEA steered $5.4 million into the 2006 elections, hoping the ouster of the Republican Congress might spell the end of No Child Left Behind. "They thought, 'Yay, that's it, we won, we're going to move forward,' " said Rep. Jason Altmire (D-Pa.), a freshman elected with union help. "They didn't factor in the fact that both Senator Kennedy and Chairman Miller have an ownership stake in this as well, and they don't want to scrap it."

'Could Be a Real War'

Kennedy and Miller arrived at the Oval Office this past Jan. 8 to celebrate the fifth anniversary of No Child Left Behind and map out a strategy to renew it, along with Spellings, Laura Bush, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) and Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon (R-Calif.). Bush congratulated Kennedy and Miller on their ascension to chair their respective education committees. "It was kind of a kumbaya moment," McKeon recalled.

Kennedy had warned the administration that it was vital to reauthorize No Child Left Behind before the presidential race really got underway. But he and the president had different ideas for how to revise the law. Bush, among other things, wanted to require testing on science and to give money to low-income students in bad schools to go to private schools. Kennedy wanted to expand the criteria for judging schools beyond just test results and do more to help struggling schools avoid being labeled failures.

For all that, it became clear that neither controlled his own party. Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) worked the floor, collecting 65 Republican signatures on a bill to let states opt out of the program. "This president is so confident -- he's never wrong," Hoekstra said derisively. As for Spellings, "she probably blended the Kool-Aid and then drank it and tried to give it to as many members as possible."

Among those joining the revolt was House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), a Bush ally. "I always had misgivings," he said. "But I did vote for it on the basis that maybe he was right and this was his big domestic initiative and let's give him a chance. But all my concerns . . . have proven to be justified."

DeMint, who backed down in 2001, has since been elected to the Senate and has his own alternative bill. "I'd love to help the president on this," he said. But "with the Democrats in control, he may have to agree to even more federal control, and that's going to cause a real split among the Republicans, and that could be a real war."

The White House responded by deploying its "huge asset," as Kaplan put it -- Laura Bush, a former schoolteacher who hosted three White House coffees to lobby key Republicans. Spellings, meanwhile, ran a virtual war room at an Education Department headquarters so fixated on the issue that the words "No Child Left Behind" are emblazoned everywhere from the faux red schoolhouses in front of the building to the elevator doors.