Education Quote by Margaret Spellings

“Again” is doing quiet damage control here: it signals a recurring critique and a speaker who’s tired of being told the same uncomfortable thing. Margaret Spellings, a Bush-era education secretary closely associated with No Child Left Behind, uses the line to concede a gap without confessing failure. The phrasing is carefully managerial. “The truth of the matter is” sounds like candor, but it also pre-packages the conclusion as inevitable, the kind of sentence that dares you to argue without seeming irrational. Then comes the real pivot: “we haven’t paid that much attention.” Not “we got it wrong,” not “we harmed kids,” not even “we underfunded schools” - just insufficient attention, as if the problem is a camera angle rather than policy design.

The subtext is a recalibration of the accountability project. NCLB trained its harshest spotlight on elementary and middle school reading and math scores, where test-based gains were easiest to measure and politically easiest to sell. High school is messier: graduation rates, course rigor, dropout recovery, career pathways, and inequities that can’t be neatly reduced to a single annual test. Admitting neglect of high school accountability is also a way to justify the next wave of reforms - new metrics, new testing regimes, new federal leverage - while keeping faith with the original brand: measurement as moral seriousness.

Spellings’s intent is less confession than continuity. She’s saying: the logic of accountability still stands; we just haven’t applied it hard enough in the place where failure becomes adult life. That’s a powerful frame because it turns a policy blind spot into a mandate for expansion.