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The Dallas Morning News
(KRT)
WASHINGTON - Mom is on the phone and wants to know how her daughter's first month at college is going.
Mom just happens to be Margaret Spellings, the highest-ranking education official in the country.
"She was asking me about boys," said Mary, 18, a freshman at Davidson College, a small liberal arts school in North Carolina.
"Why are you asking that? I am not going to tell you about my kissing habits," Mary replies.
Mary later confessed to the kiss and now uses the story to illustrate their relationship - one that is close despite the pressures and notoriety of being the child of the U.S. secretary of education.
"It is very cool. We have gotten to that point where we have an adult-to-adult relationship," Mary said.
Spellings is not the first education secretary to have children in school but she is the first mom. She draws on her experience as a parent to understand how education policy affects students, parents and teachers.
For instance, she had to find a math tutor to help daughter Grace, 13, who attends public middle school in suburban Virginia. A year ago, she searched for books on how to choose a college. And she's now talking with Mary about possible career paths. "I am the dean of the college of undecided," Mary said.
Juggling the roles of mom and policymaker hasn't been easy, especially when she was a divorced single parent.
The move from Texas to Washington was especially tough.
Spellings wanted her daughters to finish the 2000-2001 school year in Austin before leaving their friends. So she worked killer hours Mondays through Thursdays at the White House. On Fridays, she bolted from the West Wing by mid-morning to fly home and spend the weekend with her girls.
"It was one of the hardest work periods and personal periods I have ever gone through," she said.
Things got better when her children moved to Washington. And then she married lawyer Robert Spellings, 64, who she had started dating while still in Austin.
Spellings learned early about the direct style of his future bride, who was then known as Margaret La Montagne. When aides suggested they date, she summoned Spellings to a "policy" meeting.
With staff assembled, she fired her first question at him, asking for a political appraisal of a school choice proposal. He said it did not have a prayer.
"She said, `I agree with Mr. Spellings,' slapped her hand on the table and ended the meeting," he said. "The sole purpose of that meeting was to see what I looked like and check me out."
Spellings also was not shy about showing up at school to make sure her girls were getting a good education.
She once called on an Austin school principal to prove his school was meeting state standards in her daughter's classroom. She was handed a copy of the standards - which was not a satisfactory answer.
"I said, Yes, I know that. I wrote it,'" Spellings recalled. "What I wanted to know isWhat are you doing here in this classroom?'"
The White House tempo was tough even though President-elect Bush promised it would be mom-friendly. Karen Hughes, who was to become counselor to the president, brought up the issue with Bush after getting a frantic call from Spellings. The chief of staff had told some new hires they would be working day and night.
"Margaret called, and she was very distressed. She was very worried," said Hughes.
That led Bush to tell his chief of staff: "Do not run off my working moms," said Hughes, who later returned to Texas to spend more time with her high school-age son.
To deal with the stress, Spellings would join Hughes and Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, for mid-day workouts with a trainer at the White House. The women wore gloves for weight lifting, which prompted the president to nickname them "chicks with mittens."
Spellings still travels a lot but keeps up with her daughters by phone. During a recent trip to New Orleans, she worked in a call to Grace before an interview with a radio station and a session with a congressman in Washington.
"Do you have homework? Do you have a test?" asked Spellings, hardly pausing for an answer. "How do you feel about it?" And then the secretary of education offered some motherly advice: "Well, just keep up with it."
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(c) 2006, The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
