UNDER THE DOME

Education secretary hopes to return to Lone Star state

Perry not repeating as chairman of GOP governors group.

For Spellings, it's a wrap

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings dropped by the American-Statesman on Friday and was her usual high-energy, we've-got-to-do-better self.

Her take on the No Child Left Behind Act, the administration's signature effort to improve accountability and performance in primary and secondary schools: It's helping. "We've got to pick up the pace. We're not there yet."

Spellings, who has worked for George W. Bush throughout his presidency and when he was Texas governor, said she hopes to return to the Lone Star State after her daughter graduates from high school in 2010.

Is a book in her future? "I don't know. I'm planning to go to the spa." That would be Lake Austin Spa Resort, where Spellings recommends the pumpkin wrap.

Her travels have convinced her that Asia, for instance, "is on fire with improving education." By contrast, she sees complacency in parents of students in affluent school districts in the United States. And she says parents of minority students, whose high school and college graduation rates lag sharply behind those of their white counterparts, need to get mad.

Maybe that's the stuff of a book.

— Ralph K.M. Haurwitz and Molly Bloom

Perry yields chairman job

Texas Gov. Rick Perry could have served two years as chairman of the Republican Governors Association, but he bowed out at the group's national meeting in Miami this week.

He yielded the kind-of-high-profile job to South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford , though he will remain on the association's executive committee as its finance chairman, the group announced Friday.

Aides said Perry, permitted under 2007 changes in the association's rules to serve two one-year rounds as chairman, wanted to focus his energy on the regular session of the Texas Legislature, which begins in January.

"He never said he would serve more than one term" as RGA chairman, spokeswoman Allison Castle said.

Under the Dome thinks it just seemed that way at the time.

— W. Gardner Selby

Dunnam a Civil War junkie

Rep. Jim Dunnam of Waco, who leads the House Democratic Caucus, is war-gaming in Round Rock this weekend.

No, he's not talking speaker strategy with Rep. Dan Gattis, R-Georgetown .

Dunnam is participating in the Lone Star Historical Miniatures .

That's right, he's spending the weekend recreating battles in miniature. His specialty is Gettysburg.

Maybe that's why so many of those Democratic floor fights during the 2003 legislative session, when Democrats were so outnumbered, resembled Pickett's Charge.

— Laylan Copelin

Time for a change?

Rep. Delwin Jones, R-Lubbock , one of the nine official candidates for speaker, joked that he's the candidate for change.

Who better to champion change than an 84-year-old member who first came to the House in 1964 as a Democrat, was defeated in 1972, then returned in 1989 as a Republican?

Jones said: "Letting the members run the House would indeed be a change."

— Laylan Copelin