President Taps New Education Leader

By Eric Oatman -- School Library Journal, 7/1/2005

President Bush has nominated Mississippi’s state superintendent of education, Henry L. Johnson, to be the main advisor to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings on all things relating to elementary and secondary education.

A firm believer in the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, Johnson, 59, is eager to support attempts to make the law more palatable to the states. As assistant secretary, he says, “I’ll try to bring a perspective from the state level on how to implement it effectively.”

While President Bush’s proposed $56 billion budget for education in 2006 includes $19.7 million for school libraries, Johnson promises to seek more. “Libraries are extremely important because reading is the cornerstone of further learning,” he says. “We ought to do everything we can to help youngsters acquire the enabling skills of reading.”