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AMID A THRONG OF CHEERING TEENAGERS IN THE Hamilton High School gymnasium, President Bush declared victory. "Today begins a new era, a new time in public education in our country," he intoned confidently into the microphone. "As of this hour, America's schools will be on a new path of reform, and a new path of results:' With that, he signed into law the bill that reflected much of his education agenda. This Ohio school was the first stop of the two day tour the president and his merry band of liberal and conservative lawmakers took in January to celebrate the president's first true bipartisan triumph.

But the party's a bit premature. To be sure, the president gets credit for forging a consensus after years of ideological and political gridlock. And the law does make some significant changes in federal education policy. Nevertheless, the reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESFA) hardly represents a new era, Instead, it builds on at least a decade's worth of federal reform efforts, Where the Bush administration could make its mark is in its enforcement of the law, an area in which few, if any, previous administrations have found the political will to play rough with the stares.

The law calls for annual tests in reading and math for children in grades 3 through 8, plus a science test in three different grade levels by the 2007-08 school year. (States were already required to test students once in high school.) States must also establish a definition of a failing school that meets federal guidelines. Schools labeled failing for two or more years face increasingly stringent penalties, which states must impose. The law also leaves a host of issues unresolved, giving the states and the federal Department of Education plenty of wiggle room. Thus the quality of implementation may vary widely.

The federal government sports a sobering track record when it comes to enforcing its education reforms. President Clinton's 1994 ESEA reauthorization was hailed by proponents as "the most extensive revision of the legislation since [its enactment in] 1965: It required the states to develop standards and assessments linked to the standards, But lawmakers like Representative George Miller, D-Cal., say the changes envisioned by the 1994 reauthorization didn't live up to their billing because" its implementation was fudged by the administration."

Lawmakers in both parties hope that this time a combination of tough federal sanctions, more public reporting of student performance, and an aggressive White House will be enough to prompt change in the schoolhouse. "This bill delivers the goals and the tools to achieve them," says Miller, one of the four top congressional negotiators on the bill. Still, he says, "The bill is not a silver bullet."

A Long and Winding Road

President Clinton kicked off the ESEA debate in May 1999, when he submitted his proposal to reauthorize the law, which was due to expire that year. But Congress continued arguing about the proposal into 2000, and it was shelved in the din of the presidential election. With the two candidates running even in the polls, neither parry wanted to risk passing a bill when there was a good chance that they could send a bill that was more to their guy's liking the next year. Furthermore, education would be a less potent issue on the campaign trail if Congress passed a major education reform bill.

Once elected, President Bush sent the early message that he wanted an education bill, and he wanted it to be a bipartisan one. Before his inauguration, Bush held a bipartisan education meeting in Austin, and among the hand-picked Democrats attending was Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind. Bayh and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, D-Conn., had put forth an education reform bill in early 2000 called the Three R's, aimed at bridging the partisan divide in education.

Borrowing liberally from Lieberman and Bayh's reform package, Bush said that the 54 federal elementary and secondary education programs should be consolidated into five categories reflecting federal priorities: 1) educating disadvantaged students; 2) teacher quality; 3) English fluency; 4) school choice; and 5) school safety. Bush also proposed that states begin testing children in grades 3 through 8. He wanted to allow children in schools that failed to close the achievement gap for three straight years to use federal money to attend private schools. On his second full day in office, Bush unveiled an education "blueprint" that was essentially the same as his campaign proposal. The White House immediately began negotiating with the 10 centrist Democrats cosponsoring the Lieberman-Bayh bill, which they reintroduced the day Bush unveiled his proposal, in an effort to cut a deal quickly.

However, when it became clear by the spring that Bush's tax cut would pass with the help of a few centrist Democrats, the Lieberman-Bayh group became leery of ditching their party a second time. The White House had also begun negotiating with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and the centrist Democrats feared that the White House would play the centrist and liberal Democrats against one another. For instance, the White House got Kennedy to agree to a limited voucher to pay for tutoring services. It then took that agreement to the New Democrats, who had been holding out on a voucher compromise, to try to get the New Democrats to incorporate the tutoring proposal into the deal they were negotiating separately with the White House. To avoid this, Lieberman decided that future negotiations would have to include Kennedy.

A new negotiating group formed, this time including the White House, Republicans, New Democrats, and Kennedy sympathizers. After a month of negotiations, the group reached agreement on the two most controversial issues: vouchers and block grants. They went with Kennedy's voucher compromise, which allowed students in failing schools to use federal money for private tutoring. They also agreed to a scaled-back block-grant proposal that would have allowed 7 states and 25 school districts to sign a performance contract with the federal government that would free them of most federal education regulations in exchange for a promise to improve student performance. They thought they had a bill ready to send to the Senate floor.

But at a late-night meeting in mid-April, one congressional aide announced that 80 to 90 percent of the schools in states like Texas and North Carolina, both of which had seen rising achievement scores through the 1990s, would be deemed "failing" under the bill's definition. The bill required states to set performance goals for every demographic group of students. The problem was that if a school didn't meet that goal for any one group in any grade level in any one year, it would be labeled failing.

Two weeks later, the senators settled on a complicated formula that required states to calculate an overall performance grade for a school based on several factors, including improving test scores for poor and minority children. But no longer could a school receive a failing grade solely because its poor and minority students didn't see their test scores rise. By the time this definition was devised, it was early May. The Senate began debate, but it dragged on for six weeks as the Senate juggled campaign finance reform and turned over to Democratic control.

On the House side, the bill moved more quickly. A series of bipartisan negotiations between Reps. Miller and John Boehner, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, produced a bill that was similar to the Senate's, but without the block-grant provisions. The Republican leadership and a handful of rank-and-file conservatives protested. But President Bush weighed in on Boehner and Miller's side, and the House passed the bill on May 23. The Senate passed its version a few weeks later.

Still, little was settled on the accountability front. The Senate's rejiggered formula was widely seen as too complicated for parents to understand, and the House's formula would run into the same reality-check problems that the Senate's had before it was revised. The conference committee charged with resolving differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill began meeting in late July, but the bill languished in committee as the members squabbled over details small and large.

In the meantime, fears over the shrinking surplus were beginning to dominate debate on Capitol Hill. Democrats charged that Bush's tax cut made it impossible to fund education adequately. Interest groups concerned with some of the testing and accountability requirements began circling.

"There weren't a lot of bipartisan feelings," remembers Bush education adviser Sandy Kress."[Bush] was concerned. ... The momentum clearly had slowed. He was aware of the mood and the difficulties when we came back from the August recess. We were supposed to be farther along."