Margaret Spellings

The commission was charged with recommending a national strategy for reforming post-secondary education, with a particular focus on how well colleges and universities were preparing students for the 21st-century workplace.

Controversial recommendations included a call for colleges and universities to focus on training students for the workforce and supporting research with commercial applications.

It had a secondary focus on how well high schools were preparing students for post-secondary education.

Spellings described the work of the commission as a natural extension into higher education of the reforms carried out under No Child Left Behind, and is quoted as saying: "It's time we turn this elephant around and upside down and take a look at it."

After leaving her role as Secretary of Education, she founded Margaret Spellings & Company, an education consulting firm in Washington, D.C. She was a senior advisor to the Boston Consulting Group and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Spellings is currently co-chair of the Future of Tech Commission alongside Jim Steyer of Common Sense Media, an organization that focuses on technology and privacy policy.

Margaret M. LaMontagne Spellings (née Dudar; born November 30, 1957) is an American government and non-profit executive who serves as president and

CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Margaret M. Dudar was born on November 30, 1957, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and moved with her family to Houston, Texas when she was in the third grade.

She graduated from Sharpstown High School in 1975.

She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of Houston in 1979 and worked in an education reform commission under Texas Governor William P. Clements and as associate executive director for the Texas Association of School Boards.

Before her appointment to George W. Bush's presidential administration, Spellings was the political director for Bush's first gubernatorial campaign in 1994, and later became a senior advisor to Bush during his Texas governorship from 1995 to 2000.

She was one of the principal proponents of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act that aimed at reforming primary and secondary education.

She served as education secretary for the entire second term of Bush's administration, during which time she convened the Commission on the Future of Higher Education to recommend reform at the post-secondary level.

Following Rod Paige's departure as Secretary of Education, Spellings was nominated to that position by President George W. Bush on November 17, 2004, confirmed by the U.S. Senate on January 20, 2005, which also marked the beginning of Bush's second presidential term, and ceremonially sworn in on January 31 the same year.

She was the second female Secretary of Education.

She previously served as the eighth United States secretary of education from 2005 to 2009.

On January 21, 2005, one day after being confirmed as Secretary of Education, Spellings wrote a letter to the Public Broadcasting Service warning the network not to air an episode of the children's program Postcards from Buster.

In that episode, the animated bunny Buster visits Vermont to learn about maple sugar production and meets real-life children who have lesbian parents.

The children tell Buster they have a "mom and stepmom."

A child explains that one of the women is her stepmother whom she loves.

No other comment is made about the family.

Spellings' letter reminded Pat Mitchell, CEO of PBS that Postcards from Buster was funded in part by the Department of Education and "that many parents would not want their young children exposed to the life-styles portrayed in the episode."

PBS decided not to distribute the episode, but WGBH, the public television station in Boston, said it would air it and offered it to any station "willing to defy the Education Department."

Cusi Cram, a writer for Arthur (from which that program was spun-off), later wrote a play titled Dusty and the Big Bad World, based on the controversy.

In a 2022 statement about the show's 25th and final season, Spellings told NPR that "the world is very different today" and that the government "now reflects a greater openness to the multi-faceted, diverse stories that Americans can tell about themselves, their lives, and the country we share."

In April 2005, on PBS's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, she called Connecticut's resistance to the No Child Left Behind Act the "soft bigotry of low expectations."

According to the program's transcript, she said:

"I think it's regrettable, frankly, when the achievement gap between African-American and Anglo kids in Connecticut is quite large. And I think it's unfortunate for those families and those students that they are trying to find a loophole to get out of the law as opposed to attending to the needs of those kids. That's the notion, the soft bigotry of low expectations, as the president calls it, that No Child Left Behind rejects."

In September 2005, Spellings announced the formation of the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which has also been referred to as the Spellings Commission.

On May 10, 2007, Spellings testified before the House Education and Labor Committee responding to criticism from New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo that the Education Department had been "asleep at the switch" in overseeing student loan programs, allowing corruption and conflicts of interest to spread.

Spellings has further gone on record to say that she is disregarding the suggestion by the Inspector General to hold the loan companies accountable for their graft.

Altha Cravey and Robert Siegel wrote in the News & Observer that Spellings had been "supporting for-profit colleges who prey on students – and then profiting off those same students when they default on their loans."

Spellings served on the board of directors for the Apollo Group, the parent company of the for-profit University of Phoenix, which paid her more than $300,000.

On October 23, 2015, Spellings was elected as the president of the University of North Carolina system by the board of governors, effective March 1, 2016.

She succeeded Thomas W. Ross, who was fired by the Board of Governors in a controversial move that some believed was motivated by politics.

She is the second woman to serve as president of the University of North Carolina.

After leaving the government, Spellings served as president of the University of North Carolina System, overseeing the seventeen campus system from 2016 to 2019.

She then served as president and CEO of Texas 2036 from 2019 to 2023.

Spellings worked in several positions under George W. Bush during his tenure as Governor of Texas and President of the United States.