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The Dallas Morning News
(KRT)
WASHINGTON - Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is burning up the international airways.
In her first 17 months on the job, she's made seven international trips to nine countries: Afghanistan, India, Jordan, Japan, England, France, Italy, Egypt and Russia. And she's heading to Greece and Spain at the end of the month.
The trips run the gamut of official travel - a visit to Afghanistan with first lady Laura Bush, international meetings with other education ministers in Jordan and Russia, a congressional trip to India to explore competitiveness issues.
"Obviously, the world has changed and is changing," Spelling said, discussing her foreign travel in an interview Thursday.
Education is a "universal, shared value," she said, and is now fully intertwined in the international rush to compete in a global economy and in President Bush's campaign to expand democracy around the world.
Spelling notes, too, that she travels extensively in the United States, including 10 trips to the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast. Bush tapped Spellings as education secretary after his re-election in 2004. She had initially come with him to the White House from Austin as his domestic policy adviser.
She replaced Rod Paige, the former Houston school superintendent, who held the Cabinet post for four years. He traveled abroad, too, but just six trips to six countries.
Spellings, an aide to Bush when he was governor of Texas, took three foreign trips at behest of the White House. She led the U.S. delegations to the 2006 Paralympics in Turin, Italy, and to the World Exposition in Nagoya, Japan. And she accompanied Laura Bush to Kabul, Afghanistan.
The other four trips were Education Department ventures to international conferences, local schools and other venues.
At the Dead Sea in Jordan, Spellings attended the first meeting of educational ministers from the Group of Eight industrialized nations and countries from the Broader Middle East and North Africa - an initiative announced by the president when he hosted the G-8 summit in Sea Island, Ga., two years ago.
The G-8 leaders are meeting next month in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Spellings was in Moscow a few weeks ago for a conference of the G-8 education ministers. On the same trip, she stopped in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheik for the second education meeting of the G-8 and Broader Middle East and North African coalition.
In April, she joined a delegation of U.S. senators on a trip to India to explore global competitiveness, an issue Bush moved high on his agenda last January in his State of the Union address.
And unlike the president, who said last winter his scheduler had not given him enough time on his trip to India, Spellings did visit the Taj Mahal with senators traveling with her.
"I found it to be very interesting," she said.
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(c) 2006, The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
