Education Week - December 12, 2018 - 14

GOVERNMENT & POLITICS
George H.W. Bush, the 'Education President,' Dies at 94

Centerpiece Goals
Upon taking office, Bush would
soon begin planning a major policy
summit on education goals, held in
September 1989 on the campus of
the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville.
The two-day summit included the
participation of 49 of the nation's
governors (Democrat Rudy Perpich
of Minnesota was the lone absence),
as well as business leaders and policymakers. However, it did not include education leaders or members
of Congress.
The summit concluded with an
agreement to develop national education goals and take other steps to
improve the nation's schools.
"The American people are ready
for radical reforms," the president
said after the two-day summit. "We
must not disappoint them."
A key participant in the summit
and the ensuing efforts to hammer
out the details of the goals was Bill
Clinton, then the 43-year-old Democratic governor of Arkansas who
would go on to defeat Bush in the
1992 presidential election.
After months of post-summit meetings that generally included Clinton,
at that time a leader of the education
task force of the National Governors
Association, and Roger B. Porter,

Doug Mills/AP-File

George H.W. Bush, who styled himself as the "education president" and
spearheaded a historic 1989 summit
meeting with governors that helped
propel the standards-based education improvement movement, has
died at age 94.
Bush died in Houston on Nov. 30.
Bush's wife of 73 years, Barbara
Pierce Bush, died April 17 at age 92.
"George H.W. Bush was a man of
the highest character and the best
dad a son or daughter could ask
for," his eldest son, former President
George W. Bush, said on Instagram.
Bush served a single term as the
41st U.S. president, from 1989 to
1993, after years of government service that included member of Congress, ambassador, director of the
Central Intelligence Agency, and
vice president for eight years under
President Ronald Reagan.
He was seeking to seize an issue
for his 1988 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination when
he stood before an audience of high
school students in New Hampshire
and declared, "I want to be the education president."
"I want to lead a renaissance of
quality in our schools," Bush said at
Manchester High School in January
of that year.
The candidate would return to the
theme and to the "education president" tagline throughout the primary season and the general election
campaign, in which Bush defeated
Democrat Michael S. Dukakis.

Bush's domestic-policy adviser, the
goals became a centerpiece of Bush's
State of the Union address in January 1990.
By 2000, Bush told the country,
every child in the United States
would start school ready to learn,
and the high school graduation rate
would rise to at least 90 percent.
Every American adult would be a literate and skilled worker. The nation
would lead the world in math and science achievement. Schools would be
safe and drug-free.
And, most critically: Every student would leave grades 4, 8, and 12
having demonstrated competency in
English, mathematics, science, history, and geography.
"Ambitious aims? Of course. Easy
to do? Far from it," Bush said in the
address before Congress. "But the
future's at stake. The nation will not
accept anything less than excellence
in education."

'Cocky' and 'High Hat'
George Herbert Walker Bush was
born June 12, 1924, in Milton, Mass.,
the second of five children of Prescott
Bush and Dorothy Walker Bush. The
elder Bush was a businessman who
was elected to the U.S. Senate from
Connecticut in 1952 and served until
January 1963.
Bush was 5 years old when he entered Greenwich Country Day School
in Connecticut in 1929, starting 1st
grade a year early so he could be
with his older brother, Prescott Bush
Jr., according to Jon Meacham's biography of the president, Destiny
and Power: The American Odyssey of
George Herbert Walker Bush.
The boys were chauffeured by the
family driver to the elite private
school, where they learned Latin. In
1937, Bush entered Phillips Academy, an Andover, Mass., boarding
school founded in 1778 that extolled
its motto of accepting "youth from
every quarter."
Bush struggled there at first, according to Meacham's biography,
with a counselor's report that the
young student was "not well measured in all respects" and was "cocky
and 'high hat.' " By his second year,
he had improved considerably. But
Bush missed much of his junior year
due to illness, which pushed his
graduation back to 1942.
His yearbook entry reflects an
abundance of extracurricular activities: president of the senior class,
captain of the baseball and soccer
teams, member of the basketball
team, chairman of student deacons, and treasurer of the student
council.
Bush visited Andover as president
in November 1989 to help the school
mark the bicentennial of a visit by
George Washington.
"The Andover Mission states that
education has always been the great
equalizer and uplifter," the president
said. "And that, public or private,

14 | EDUCATION WEEK | December 12, 2018 | www.edweek.org

ABOVE: President George H.W.
Bush, U.S. Secretary of
Education Lauro F. Cavazos,
center, Iowa Gov. Terry
Branstad, right, and Arkansas
Gov. Bill Clinton, behind right,
arrive for ceremonies
concluding Bush's 1989
education summit with
governors in Charlottesville, Va.
AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson, File

By Mark Walsh

Bush's emphasis on education
as a domestic issue helped
jump-start the school
accountability movement that
came to fruition under his son,
President George W. Bush, and
the No Child Left Behind Act.

large or small, the schools of America
are precious centers of intellectual
challenge and creativity."
"And yet, they're more than that,"
he continued. "For it is in school, as
it was for me here at Phillips Academy, that we come to understand
real values. The need to help the less
fortunate, make ours a more decent,
civil world."
Bush was in his senior year at
Phillips Academy when the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor occurred on
Dec. 7, 1941. He quickly decided he
wanted to serve his country, and that
he would join the U.S. Navy to become a pilot. In a 1944 attack on the
Japanese in the Bonin Islands, the
plane Bush was piloting took antiaircraft fire and his engine caught
fire. Bush opened a gash on his head
as he parachuted out of the plane,
and he was rescued from a life raft
by a U.S. submarine. Bush's two fellow crew members were never found,
a loss that had a profound effect on
him.
Bush's military service put off his
college education, but not his marriage to Barbara Pierce of Rye, N.Y.

They had met at a Christmas dance
in 1941 in Rye while Pierce, then 16,
was home from Ashley Hall School
in Charleston, S.C., and Bush was at
Andover.
Bush and Pierce married in 1945.
Bush enrolled in Yale University,
where he studied economics, was captain of the baseball team, and graduated on an accelerated schedule after
2 ½ years.

Public Service
After a career in the Texas oil business, two terms in Congress, and
service as ambassador to the United
Nations, chairman of the Republican National Committee, envoy to
China, and director of central intelligence, Bush ran for the Republican
presidential nomination in 1980. He
defeated Ronald Reagan in the Iowa
caucuses and declared that his campaign had gained the momentum, or
"Big Mo."
But Reagan won the nomination,
and he selected Bush as his running
mate at the Republican convention.
Bush had not shown a great interest

in education policy as a presidential
candidate or throughout eight years
as Reagan's vice president.
In September 1988, Bush accepted
the Republican nomination for president at the party's convention in New
Orleans. In a forum during the convention, Terrel H. Bell, Reagan's first
secretary of education, declared that
he believed Bush was sincere in his
often-stated commitment to improve
education based on evidence from his
years as vice president.
"Every time education matters
came up at Cabinet meetings," Bell
said, "Bush was on the edge of his
seat, telling Cabinet members and
the president that human resources
is the whole ballgame. I believe he
means it when he says 'I want to be
the education president.' "
Bell, who was at the helm of the
Education Department when the
groundbreaking report "A Nation at
Risk" was released in 1983, joined
his successor as secretary, William
J. Bennett, in a coalition of educators in support of Bush's presidential
campaign.
Lamar Alexander, then a former

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Education Week - December 12, 2018

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