It's the new year and, with the holidays behind us, time to start posting again. So here goes.

DR was struck, in looking through the latest Washington Post poll, how poorly Bush is doing on the education issue. In this poll, his approval rating on education is down to 47 percent, 8 points lower than his late October rating and by far the worst of his presidency. And this rating is in mid-bounce, as it were, when most of his other domestic ratings have gone up at least a bit in response to the positive mood generated by Saddam's capture.

Why the poor education rating? Apparently the public is less than enthralled with the results so far of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, where states either tend to have huge numbers of failing schools or standards so loose that proficiency doesn't mean anything (exhibit A: Texas says that 85 percent of its fourth-grade students are proficient, yet the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard for student testing, says only 27 percent are). And, of course, nobody's got any money to improve the schools and fix problems because of almost universal state budget problems.

As DR has argued before, the policy train wreck the NCLB is fast becoming is potentially a huge liability for Bush and a big opportunity for the Democrats. But (and here's the tricky part), that's only going to be true if the issue is handled correctly.

The big problem for the Democrats will be resisting the temptation to simply denounce NCLB as a failure and leave it at that. That would be a big mistake. Polling data could not be clearer that the public supports holding schools accountable for meeting standards and does not wish to depart from such an approach. Therefore, Democrats must strenuously avoid appearing uninterested in holding schools to standards and only interested in more spending on education.

As with affirmative action, this is another clear case of "mend it, don't end it". Voters want to know how you're going to help students meet standards, not how you're going to discard standards and provide more resources to schools.

But, provided they maintain the public's commitment to high standards and stringent accountability, Democrats will find a receptive audience for proposals to give schools the resources they need to modernize to meet the needs of today’s students. That includes universal access to pre-school and after-school, a dramatic commitment to increased teacher quality and ensuring that every student can continue their education beyond high school. This, in turn, will mean changing the ways schools operate, recruit teachers and provide services. A modernization program on this scale will go far toward branding the Democrats as the party of the future, whereas giving up on standards and just calling for more spending will make them sound like the party of the past.