It almost stole the show.

The eye-popping level of Democratic support behind Pres. George Bush's $26.5 billion, No Child Left Behind bill-signed into law in January-threatened to draw more media attention than the 1,200-page, legal leviathan itself, which, as the dust settled, revealed itself to be the most far-reaching educational reform act the country's seen in 35 years.

Here was an unlikely duo-George W. Bush and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.)-all grins and hugging like old Army buds amid a traveling media frenzy that characterized signing day January 8. The image captured the essence of a rare, genuine bipartisan compromise on a politically profound social issue.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) said the agreement marked “a truly important coming together of parties and ideologies” on a matter of deep national significance. “We're simply not going to accept failure here for any of our kids. We're going to insist that they be educated,” he said.

But few who followed Congress' eager stamp of approval of the Bush Administration's reading plan picked up on just how apolitical the effort really was. What went unnoticed was the political stripe of those chiefly responsible for at least one of the new law's more provocative provisions. To wit, if school districts fail to adopt “scientifically based reading research” programs (code for those that provide direct and systematic instruction in phonics) to teach kids how to read, they won't get a nickel of the nearly $1 billion the law provides annually for reading improvement.

In April, a leading Republican candidate for governor in Alabama bragged to a radio audience that the long overdue measure is a triumph of “right-thinking conservatives” now in power in Washington. He went on to imply that the central, “back-to-the-basics” message now being sent to school houses coast to coast essentially is a product of conservative think-tanks, practically a page out of the Republican playbook.

Conservatives can believe that all they like, but the facts are otherwise. If the voices and hard work of a few long-suffering, liberal-minded, predominantly Democrat-leaning university researchers scattered across the nation had gone ignored, much of the “phonics first” teeth in the Bush bill wouldn't exist.

FSU psychologist Joe Torgesen, head of the new Florida Center for Reading Research created in February by Gov. Jeb Bush, sees the new get-tough federal reading initiative as an uncommon example of how serious-minded people can put their political biases in check to focus on solving enormous social problems in the best way possible.

At the request of Research in Review, he identified 10 of what he called “the top foundational, academic contributors” to the nation's current reading reform movement, which he says has grown almost entirely out of federally funded research primarily in his own field of psychology. Not terribly surprising (as conservatives love to point out, academics tend to be “liberals”) a study of the political affiliations of these researchers revealed a strong preference for the Democratic Party's agenda.

Nonetheless, the point is lost on many that a gaudy banner now flapping beneath the Republican Party's portico is hardly borne of right-wing zealots as the uninitiated might fairly guess. To the contrary, a fresh generation of American schoolkids may soon be the beneficiaries of those who finally put science above politics on both campus and Capitol Hill.