President Bush has one ace in his hand when it comes to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB): Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. Spellings, who has been working on education issues for Bush since the 1990s and his days as a Texas governor, is the person who from the very beginning has had to make NCLB work. She was a key architect of the law, arguably Bush's most significant domestic accomplishment and a grand experiment for Republicans, who traditionally thought education should be left to the states. Spellings oversaw the law's implementation during Bush's first term as his domestic policy adviser, then became secretary of education in early 2005. Her tenure has been marked by a pragmatism that is both political and based on the real-world state of affairs in education: a jumble of noisy education advocacy groups, unhappy state education chiefs, and members of her own party who don't support the law's federal reach into local schools. That pragmatism has allowed her to navigate choppy education waters while continuing to build support for the law's ultimate goal of getting all students to grade level by 2013-14.