What that means, practically speaking, is that the most targeted and resource-heavy programs are poured into turning around the bottom 5% of schools in every state, including those with chronically bad graduation rates and those where certain subgroups of students languish below grade-level. 

On its face, that’s not a bad priority — though being identified as such has historically meant being targeted with drastic policy changes, including state takeovers. But in many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic scrambled the traditional school landscape: Suddenly, math and reading scores plummeted across the board for students in every school, and chronic absenteeism soared. Four years later, the U.S. education system is still trying to claw its way back to pre-pandemic achievement levels. 

It’s no longer just the bottom 5 percent of schools in each state that are in trouble — it’s the majority of them. Recognizing this, Illinois developed a universal model of continuous school improvement to ensure that every school in the state — not just those identified for support by being the very worst — benefits from evidence-based improvement strategies. The goal of extending that type of focused support to every school, unique to Illinois, was developed in partnership with administrators, school boards, superintendents and principals. 

So when the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University announced it was planning a new state collaborative aimed at helping states identify, study and share their most effective school improvement policies, Illinois knew it would have something special to share.

The state is one of nine — along with Alabama, Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Texas — participating in “States Leading States.” The goal of the initiative is ambitious: to work alongside state leaders to evaluate policies meant to solve their most pressing challenges and make those lessons rapidly accessible via a series of rolling policy reports to lawmakers and practitioners across the country.

“We are in a crisis moment in education,” said Scott Sargrad, director of States Leading States. “Now is really the time to double down on what works. And so in order to double down on what works, we need to know what works.”

The effort comes as the most recent math and reading scores for high schoolers plummet to record lows, chronic absenteeism soars and more and more students graduate without the skills necessary to be successful in college or the workplace. And it’s all occurring against the backdrop of a significantly diminished federal role in education under the Trump administration — both in terms of funding K-12 programs and prioritizing research to elevate best practices.

Take the myriad state efforts to boost reading scores by adopting policies better aligned to the science of reading. “It’s not totally clear what the best policy levers are to pull at the state level to actually get better teaching in the classroom, instructional coaching,” said Sargrad. “Is it tutoring? Is it high-quality instructional materials? Is it all of those things combined? We’re trying to figure out what the most effective state policies are on a bunch of pressing issues.” 

In addition to its continuous improvement plan, Illinois, for example, is in the process of developing a so-called “Comprehensive Numeracy Plan.” Modelled after a literacy program by the same name, the numeracy plan will establish a roadmap for strengthening math teaching and learning across the state, which right now, most states haven’t attempted. 

Harvard’s initiative is already garnering praise from both sides of the edu-political spectrum, with Margaret Spellings, former Education Secretary under President George W. Bush, and John B. King Jr., former Education Secretary under President Barack Obama, both backing the plan.

“At a time when too many students are not reading at grade level or able to do basic math and the gaps between highest and lowest performing students are growing, we need to make student achievement a priority again and develop evidence-based strategies that help all students succeed,” said Spellings, who is now the president and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center. King, who is currently the Chancellor of the State University of New York, said the initiative “sets a powerful example for the country.” 

States Leading States plans to publish research reports and practical policy solutions, sharing what works and what doesn’t. Attracting the right mix of states was important, Sargrad said, since ensuring geographic, demographic and political diversity of states participating in the initiative increases the likelihood for other state education leaders to glimpse how these policy lifts might play out in their state or district.

During this first year of collaboration, states are focusing on a variety of K-12’s biggest challenges. With social media and cell phone bans top-of-mind right now, a handful of states are focusing their initial efforts on identifying the most effective policy: Ohio is preparing to implement a statewide bell-to-bell cell phone ban, while Illinois and Delaware school districts are testing alternative cellphone policies, like requiring students to use phone pouches or keep them turned off and stored by the teacher. 

The current federal landscape puts “an urgent responsibility” on states to collaborate, try new ideas, measure their impact and share what works, said Angélica Infante-Green, commissioner of elementary and secondary education for Rhode Island. Beyond the current federal government shutdown, which has, among other things, resulted in the near total layoff of staff at the Office of Special Education Programs, the current administration’s efforts to dismantle the entire Education Department portends dire consequences for the ability to identify which state policies are working.

Some of those states are focusing on more traditional academic metrics: To improve reading proficiency in sixth through eighth grade, Indiana is piloting an outcomes-based approach for improving middle school literacy. This is a newer type of education vendor contract that holds service providers and districts accountable for student progress through language that stipulates payment upon literacy improvement on test scores. 

Alabama is requiring every district to offer summer reading and math camps for struggling students. The camps are a component of statewide efforts to improve reading and math proficiency, as mandated by the . For struggling third-grade readers, attending a summer reading camp is one option to avoid being held back and requires passing a second reading test to advance to the fourth grade. Some districts are already seeing significant improvement, including in DeKalb County, where math scores are at an all-time high. 

Meanwhile, Tennessee, Texas, and Rhode Island are taking on a host of challenges, from boosting access to career credentials, to implementing high-quality curriculum and addressing chronic absenteeism.

A key piece of the initiative involves equipping state agencies with the skills and personnel needed to conduct and use data analysis for continuous improvement — a boon for states in search of technical assistance in the wake of a 90 percent cut to the Education Department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences. Each state will host a data project fellow from Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research to help organize data, analyze implementation, and build a community of researchers ready to share insights across state lines.

“We’re not a political action committee, we’re not an advocacy group. What we know how to do is measure the efficacy of policies, and when we find things that work, we’re going to try to make sure other states are aware of it,” Sargrad said. “There are a lot of things we can’t do right now, but one thing we can do is shine a spotlight on things that work. And we can do it well.”

In Tennessee, that would mean a loss of roughly $1.8 billion — close to 20% of the state’s over $9 billion surplus.

“We’re really the first state that can say no and financially not even miss a beat,” said Rep. Scott Cepicky, who chairs the state’s House Education Instruction Committee and worked with Speaker on a bill to create on the issue. Sexton first raised the idea at a speech in February. 

Lawmakers, Cepicky said, are motivated by a combination of “overburdensome” federal regulations and concerns that the Biden administration is advancing a liberal agenda on issues ranging from gender identity to the teaching of American history. 

“It was pushing the whole [critical race theory] down our throats and the sexual indoctrination of our kids,” he said. “Tennessee is just not going to put up with that because we don’t have to.”

Gov. Bill Lee has said he would consider the idea. 

In Oklahoma, meanwhile, state Sen. David Bullard recently made similar remarks, introducing a bill that would — almost $800 million — over 10 years. The legislation has yet to move out of committee, but conservatives, who continue to call for abolishing the education department, say the idea is one that could spread to other red states. Education advocates say that would especially hurt vulnerable youth who are the primary beneficiaries of federal funding: low-income students and those with disabilities.

Gini Pupo-Walker, executive director of Education Trust-Tennessee, which focuses on reducing education inequities, called the idea “bonkers.” 

“It would require so much work to unravel all the ways we’re connected to federal funds,” she said.

While states have threatened to reject education funds in the past, none has ever followed through, and some are skeptical it will happen now.

“Culture wars are one thing. Giving up real money is something else entirely,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the right-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “It would be political suicide to turn down hundreds of milions or billions of dollars for local schools.”

Besides, the rules dictating how states use those dollars are far less stringent than they once were, said Petrilli, who served in the George W. Bush administration during the No Child Left Behind era. That’s especially true of pandemic relief funds — the largest infusion of one-time federal aid states have ever seen. 

Former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who led the Education Department during this period, was especially blunt about recent developments. 

“It is pretty much the frickin’ wild west out here now,” said Spellings, who leads Texas 2036, a nonprofit focused on the state’s future. “Anyone can do anything. It’s the era of local control.” 

‘Federal intrusion’

School districts receive less than 10% of their funding from the federal government, but in large, urban districts with a lot of poor students, the amount of Title I money is significant. Davidson County in Tennessee, which includes the Metro Nashville Public Schools, receives over $50 million in Title I funds for its low-income students. Tulsa Public Schools in Oklahoma receives $22.5 million.

In a strongly worded statement, the U.S. Department of Education suggested states contemplating such legislation should consider its effect on students.

“Any elected leader in any state threatening to reject federal public education funds should have to answer to their local educators and parents in their community about the detrimental impact it would have on their community’s education system,” the statement said. “Our students need more — not less — to support their academic recovery and address the youth mental health crisis.”

For some, the current debate stirs a sense of deja vu. Almost 20 years ago, NCLB’s passage — which set up strict new testing and accountability requirements — led to a standoff between the , and offered a vivid example of the difficulty in cutting federal ties. 

State lawmakers objected to NCLB’s requirement to use end-of-year test scores to determine which schools didn’t make sufficient academic progress, subjecting them to consequences ranging from school choice options for families to state intervention. 

Utah leaders instead wanted to test students twice — in the fall and spring — and base accountability measures on growth over time in reading and math. Former Rep. Steve Mascaro the department could “take the stinking money and go back to Washington.”

“NCLB was, in my mind, and in the minds of many Utah legislators, the biggest federal intrusion in public education ever,” former Superintendent Patti Harrington told ����Ӱ��. “Educators were in a well-deserved uproar about the law.”

Ultimately, the department allowed Utah’s proposal, and the state never stopped receiving federal funds.

“We got to a place where the plan was negotiated to the satisfaction on both sides,” Spellings said.

She suggested that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona reach out to lawmakers in Tennessee and Oklahoma to ask what they’re “aggrieved about.”

In Tennessee, Cepicky said the prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation is part of it. The U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a saying the order extends to school meal programs.

But the state considered the interpretation an example of government overreach and sued the administration last summer in federal court, along with 20 other states. 

Tennessee risks losing federal funds anyway if it that would restrict defining sex in state law to one’s gender assigned at birth. The Senate has already approved the bill, which would bar transgender students from changing their . According to the legislature’s , the proposed definition would affect roughly $1.3 billion in federal education funding because it would conflict with President Joe Biden’s prohibiting discrimination based on gender equity and sexual orientation in federal programs. 

Two other states, Montana and Oklahoma, passed . The Education Department did not comment on the Tennessee proposal. 

While Tennessee currently has enough money to cover a potential loss in federal funds, some education advocates said that will change when the state’s surplus dries up. 

“My concern is to make sure that everything is fully funded and we don’t get put on the chopping block,” said J.C. Bowman, executive director and CEO of the non-union Professional Educators of Tennessee.

Cepicky said the state plans to first ask the department to offer the funds in the form of a block grant, with the promise that any savings realized by delivering education “the Tennessee way” would be returned to the federal government. That’s already the way the state handles its Medicaid program, . 

In the likely event the department refuses, the next step would be a letter outlining the state’s plan to transition off federal funds in three years — an action that he said would create a “domino effect.” 

“If Tennessee gets out, what kind of pressure does that put on Florida and DeSantis? What kind of pressure on Abbott in Texas?” he said. “They are scared to death in Washington.”

Bullard in Oklahoma didn’t return calls seeking comment. While his bill hasn’t moved, the idea has support from at least one member of the state’s Congressional delegation.

Quoting Thomas Jefferson, Oklahoma Rep. Josh Brecheen addressed the issue last week during the House debate on the Republican Parents Bill of Rights. 

“We need to follow the advice of our founding fathers,” he said “Put this back in the hands of our state, and they can determine what is happening in the classroom.” 

The bill, perhaps the centerpiece of Bush’s “compassionate conservative” agenda, had sprinted through the U.S. House and Senate before hitting the summer quagmire that so often ensnares federal legislation. Administration officials hoped that a presidential swing through Florida might reawaken Washington and speed its way to passage.

It was only minutes before the activities began when Bush learned that a plane had collided with one of the World Trade Center towers. Like many, Brogan initially assumed the reports referred to a light aircraft that had wandered off-course.

But as the room filled with the singsong cadence of kids reading aloud — the activity, centered on a called The Pet Goat, had been selected to draw attention to NCLB’s literacy provisions — the atmosphere changed noticeably. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card approached Bush to whisper the news of the second crash. And over a seven-minute interval that would be picked apart for years, the president’s focus seemed to drift between the children in front of him and the horrors unfolding in Manhattan. Brogan called the moment “extraordinary.”

“He didn’t change his expression, but the color in his face visibly changed, especially for people who were only a few feet from him. It was crystal-clear that whatever he just heard was very disturbing.”

As the activity wound down, the president excused himself to join a call with national security leaders. After stopping to deliver brief remarks from the school’s media center, including a moment of silence for the still-uncounted victims, Bush’s entourage headed immediately to Air Force One. The advocacy tour was over. A wartime presidency had begun.

The ties linking 9/11 with NCLB were the result of a historical accident. During the 20 years that passed since that day, the U.S. government undertook generational commitments to both rid the world of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism and provide an excellent education to every American child. Begun amid a swell of bipartisan approval, both missions fell far short of their goals as the afterglow of national unity first ebbed, then extinguished altogether. And while much of the vision of NCLB is preserved in federal law, controversial requirements around school accountability have been significantly loosened; some of the law’s original architects even attribute its demise, in substantial part, to a combination of hyperpartisanship and neglect that arose as the Bush administration turned its focus to the ever-expanding War on Terror.

“This is really what 9/11 meant: People moved on to other things,” said Sandy Kress, an education advisor to President Bush who helped lead the White House’s efforts to lobby for NCLB. “Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, plus the return of normal politics, that was huge. The president certainly moved on, and so did the rest of the world.”

Moving at ‘breakneck speed — for Washington’

Kress came to Washington after the 2000 election to transform the sweeping education proposals of then-Gov. Bush’s campaign into legislation. He spent years before that as a power player in Texas politics, serving as president of the Dallas school board before receiving appointments to a series of commissions empaneled throughout the 1990s to improve the state’s schools.

At that time, Washington’s role in K-12 schools offered barely a hint of what it would later become. The principal statute governing federal interventions in education, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, had been reauthorized in 1994 as the Improving America’s Schools Act, a fairly radical revision that required states to make “adequate yearly progress” toward proficiency for all their students. But reforms were still driven overwhelmingly by a set of ambitious governors: like Roy Roemer of Colorado, Jim Hunt of North Carolina and Bush of Texas.

By the time ESEA was due for another reauthorization, leaders in both parties were settling on a single model of reform. States would set high standards, deliver the instruction necessary to help students meet them, and institute regular assessments to keep an eye on their progress.

“I think people at the federal level realized they couldn’t get away any longer with simply saying, ‘America’s children aren’t learning enough, but just keep doing what you’re doing,’” said Brogan, who was elected as Florida’s commissioner of schools in 1994 and would go on to lead the state university systems of both Florida and Pennsylvania before serving as assistant secretary of education under president Donald Trump. “We had to come up with some new ideas…and at least spell out with clarity what kinds of things children were expected to master with each of the passing grade levels.”

That bipartisan convergence was reflected in placed on education reform by the campaigns of both Bush and Democrat Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election, argued Tom Loveless, former director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy. Bush, whose own package of reforms in Texas had won the admiration of even some Democrats in Congress — including California Rep. George Miller, an avowed liberal serving on the House Education and Workforce Committee — was only too happy to break with prevailing orthodoxy in order to build his brand as a different kind of Republican. That included moving away from the party’s oft-stated commitment to abolish the federal Department of Education.

“Bush simply jettisoned that,” Loveless said. “He dropped it completely — it was in the ’96 platform, but it was not in the 2000 platform because the Bush people wouldn’t allow it in.”

“That whole sweet thing that was put together in the ‘80s and came together in various states and then saw this incredible peak in Washington in 2001 — all of that largely fell apart because of 9/11, and the failure of everyone on all sides to hold it together in the wake of 9/11.”
—Sandy Kress, education advisor to former President George W. Bush.

Bush began setting a course for a major new education law almost as soon as the Supreme Court handed him the presidency, meeting at the White House in January with Miller, Sen. Ted Kennedy, and future Republican House Speaker John Boehner. , as the proposal soon became known, passed through both chambers even though it was loaded with tough language on equity and accountability. Under the new law, states would be required to test all students between grades 3-8, separate the data by class and ethnicity, and publish detailed school report cards based on the results. Billions of dollars in new federal funding would be allocated to support improvement efforts.

Margaret Spellings — a senior Bush advisor whom he would later appoint as U.S. secretary of education — said she didn’t fully appreciate at the time how quickly the initiative came together.

“I was a relative newcomer [to national politics], and little did I know that this was all happening at breakneck speed for Washington,” she said. “Particularly when we fast-forward 20 years, it really is amazing that this mammoth piece of policy, the major elements of which stand to this day, got done that fast.”

But the process stalled in conference, a lengthy process intended to iron out the differences between House and Senate versions. As the summer dragged on, dozens of conferees worked through a torturous debate over how to define adequate yearly progress, then left Washington for August recess. The economy was in recession, and the president’s approval ratings were ticking downward. Eager to return permanently to Texas, Kress began to worry how long his sojourn in the capital would last.

“By the end of the summer, things were not so rosy,” he recalled. “We were thinking about trying to rev it up and get going again, and that’s how that Florida trip was planned.”

Reinvigorating bipartisanship

At around 8:15 a.m. on September 11, Kress was in the president’s suite at Sarasota’s Colony Beach and Tennis resort, presenting him with talking points and a visual aid — a chart showing America’s education expenditures growing over time, plotted against stagnant national test scores — for what he hoped would be a news-making speech at Booker Elementary.

On campus, Kress skipped the classroom visit to brief reporters before the president took the stage. Instead, he watched with them as a television at the school’s media center broadcast live footage of United Airlines Flight 175 slamming into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. As the Secret Service moved hurriedly to coordinate the group’s departure, the stagecraft morphed from political salesmanship to an emergency speech.

“Now we’re getting instructions: ‘You are to come with me and stand right here, and the president’s going to give some remarks. First thing, take down the chart’ — I did that — ‘and then stand right here. And when the president says his last words, he will go, and you’ll be right on him, and you’re to get in the car.’ It was all solemn and lockstep.”

From the Sarasota airport, Air Force One sped to Louisiana’s Barksdale Air Force Base (“The plane took off faster than I’d ever lifted off on a plane, and got higher than I’d ever been on a plane,” Kress noted.) There it shed most of its passengers while Bush, still considered a potential target, delivered before departing to another location with his key political and security staffers. With virtually every airplane in the country grounded, Kress and his companions only arrived back in Washington that evening, in time to see the smoking wreckage of the Pentagon attack.

Along with his fears for the country, and intermittently his own safety, he couldn’t help worrying about the fate of the historic law he’d spent most of the year negotiating. Would the massive loss of life, to say nothing of the inevitable military action that would follow, leave room for a huge, expensive law overhauling K-12 schools?

As it turned out, he would later reflect, the collective outrage provoked by the attacks proved vastly more effective at pushing NCLB to the finish line than any messaging event could have. Congress would soon be occupied with authorizing the use of force in Afghanistan and drafting the USA Patriot Act, but both Democrats and Republicans also sought the chance to pass a major piece of domestic legislation and show that the nation’s business was still underway.

“9/11 probably reinvigorates bipartisanship for a bit,” said Andrew Rudalevige, a political scientist at Bowdoin College on the politics of NCLB. “And there was an idea that we have to show, as a country, that we can make progress on things other than terrorism and war: ‘This is something we’ve already gotten most of the way through, and we should do it.’”

Before the year was out, overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate voted to accept the version of the bill that emerged from the conference committee. On January 8, 2002, Bush signed it, flanked by its congressional stewards, at an Ohio school located in Boehner’s district. The group then proceeded to Kennedy’s home state of Massachusetts for a celebration at the famed exam school Boston Latin. Only time constraints prevented them from flying to Miller’s California stomping grounds, Kress said.

In retrospect, No Child Left Behind was likely too far down the tracks to be derailed by events. But, as Spellings argued, the rush of purpose and unity following 9/11 put “a rocket booster” under it; moreover, national attention was significantly diverted from the last months of negotiations, which may have made final concessions go down smoother.

“They were trying to hold that coalition together without offending the far left or far right,” Loveless said — a towering task, given that teachers disliked the new testing requirements and conservatives resented losing out on a longed-for federal voucher program. “Bush really wanted a bipartisan bill, and I think the focus on foreign policy allowed them to do whatever they needed to do in conference and get the bill out.”

A short honeymoon

American flags were still flying from windows, and the renewed sense of national assurance only beginning to waver, when skepticism of NCLB began festering in school districts and state capitals.

Conflict arose almost immediately over new money. Under the law, total federal funding for K-12 schools between 2000 and 2003. But for schools now awakening to the threat of sanctions (including governance changes like the mass replacement of staff or restructuring as a charter school) if their students didn’t make consistent, measurable strides toward college readiness, it seemed unfair that escalating expectations on their staffs weren’t accompanied by continuing commitments of resources.

Their doubts spread soon enough to the public at large. In Brookings, Loveless noted that surveys from the law’s early years demonstrated little widespread understanding of its impact, including penalties for consistently underperforming schools. But as participants learned more of NCLB’s key provisions, they consistently came to like it less, he found.

“I think one thing NCLB was able to paper over was the fact that it did have punitive measures involved,” Loveless argued. “When people were polled on the question, in 2001 or 2002, ‘What do you do with a failing school?,’ respondents overwhelmingly supported giving more resources to that school — not closing it or transferring teachers or anything like that.”

Combined with its “utopianism” — the law put forward the aspiration that every student in the country would reach proficiency in math and reading by 2014, a starry-eyed notion that later became a punchline — NCLB’s main weakness lay in its fundamental challenge to Americans’ sunny perceptions of schools, Loveless said.

“It’s been a mainstay in polling: People are just happy with their local schools. And parents are even happier with the schools they send their own children to. So once it became evident that those schools were also endangered by sanctions and maybe weren’t quite what they were cracked up to be, [the law] lost some popularity.”

Eventually the dissatisfaction spread to Washington, where even NCLB’s supporters were increasingly bogged down in the fervid debate over whether Bush’s “Global War on Terror” should extend to Iraq. Along with industry groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, a diverse alliance of civil rights organizations including EdTrust, La Raza, and the Urban League had pushed hard to make testing and accountability a reality in every American school; but by 2004, NAACP chairman its mandates of fostering a “drill-and-kill curriculum.”

Consistent blows were landed by none other than Kennedy, a figure as vital to NCLB’s passage as any except the president. On the second anniversary of the happy ceremony held at Boston Latin, Kennedy’s office issued giving Bush a “D-minus” for rolling out his signature education reform. In an unmistakable dig at Bush’s famous photo op of the previous year, the release called it “way too soon for the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner on No Child Left Behind.”

For the temporary boost it delivered to American pride and purpose, Kress said, September 11 ultimately sabotaged the “nice, short-term story” of NCLB’s enactment.

“Passing a bill should be a very positive event in a movement, but if you think passing a bill is the culmination of a movement, then you don’t understand politics,” he said. “That whole sweet thing that was put together in the ‘80s and came together in various states and then saw this incredible peak in Washington in 2001 — all of that largely fell apart because of 9/11, and the failure of everyone on all sides to hold it together in the wake of 9/11.”

Though NCLB’s authors intended for the law to be reauthorized by 2007, it remained in effect for another eight years as controversy built up over its demands on states and school districts. have credited the landmark legislation with lifting student achievement and closing achievement gaps , but it has also been blamed for through an over-reliance on testing.

Those concerns contributed to the push to replace NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which offered states more latitude to design their own systems for measuring school performance. In the years since its 2015 passage, committed reformers have complained that the new law is far too slack, allowing states to potentially ignore failing schools and that reveal which students are falling behind.

Spellings credited NCLB’s supporters in Congress, industry, and the civil rights world with ensuring that many of its key principles remained in place. But she also warned that a political retreat from testing and accountability was underway, “flying under the banner of COVID and mental health and all other manner of bullshit.”

“The secret sauce — and this is what’s under threat in the states — is annual assessments, disaggregated data, and transparency,” she said. “It’s at risk.”

Rudalevige’s research as a political scientist ultimately led him to study the growing powers of the “imperial presidency.” He agreed that it became increasingly challenging for politicians to mend or improve NCLB — still less reauthorize it — once debates over the War on Terror came to “distract attention and dissolve whatever bipartisanship was still left.“.

“Could you do it if you had full presidential attention? Maybe, but Bush didn’t have that, and he didn’t have the institutional resources to make it work without that. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could put on auto-pilot.”

Lead Image: President George W. Bush was reading with a group of Florida second-graders when his chief of staff, Andrew Card, delivered the news that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. (Paul Richards and George W. Bush Presidential Library/Getty Images) Photo illustration by Meghan Gallagher/����Ӱ��