ABSTRACT
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 embodies a half century of Republican hopes for changing American schools, including support of standards, testing, school choice, character education, and school prayer, and opposition to bilingual education, multicultural education, and gay rights. The ideological underpinnings of No Child Left Behind are compassionate conservatism and neoconservativism. “Compassionate conservatism,” President Bush asserts, “places great hope and confidence in public education. Our economy depends on higher and higher skills, requiring every American to have the basic tools of learning. Every public school should be the path of upward mobility.”2
