As the Bush Administration limps toward its final year, the failure of its so-called compassionate conservatism is painfully evident. Issues vital to a compassionate society—education, health care, and poverty—have been addressed only through ideologically driven half-measures that prioritize conservatism more than they do compassion.

Take for example the No Child Left Behind act (NCLB), which imposes periodic, standardized student performance assessments onto schools. Student performance on these assessments determines whether schools get funding, lose teachers, or are closed—so the stakes are high. In addition to overall performance, schools are evaluated on the basis of subgroup performance. Testing subgroups include five ethnic groups (American Indian, Asian, Hispanic, black, and white), children who qualify for free or reduced priced lunch (that is, are from low-income families), and children in unique situations (such as those with limited English proficiency, special needs, or migrant status). Schools only report the results of an independent subgroup if the number of children in that subgroup is greater than a minimum threshold.

This is problematic, because this minimum threshold is set at the state level. Let’s say that the vast majority of public schools in Oklahoma have between fifteen and twenty Hispanic students, and that Hispanic children on the whole tend to underperform on standardized tests. If Oklahoma sets its reporting minimum for the Hispanic subgroup at twenty-five, most schools will never have to report the poor Hispanic performance as a separate data point, thus inflating their NCLB results. Evidence suggests that this is exactly what is happening around the nation. According to the National Center for Learning Disabilities, subgroup minimums vary from fifteen to two hundred across the country. Last year, media outlets reported that over 2 million children—the vast majority hailing from traditionally underperforming subgroups—are unaccounted for by NCLB because of this loophole. NCLB’s obsession with exploitable metrics encourages institutional neglect of those children who need the most help.

The Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) program is another right-wing mix and match approach that neglects the needy. Traditional health coverage pools healthy and sick patients together, diluting the risks of coverage through a redistribution of cost. HSAs—personal savings accounts for health care costs—encourage the healthy to opt-out of collective plans because those at less risk are willing to take their chances and avoid the cost of ongoing premiums. Without low-risk folks to offset the costs, coverage is more expensive for the remaining at-risk population. And since HSAs partner with high-deductible plans, these same people will also have to pay more out-of-pocket expenses for care.

As these two examples show, performance indicators and savings accounts may look good on paper, but in practice they have been expressions of a partisan tunnel-vision that has belied the Bush administration’s pretensions to compassion. Indeed, when it comes to the nation’s intractable poverty problem, the Bush Administration has held steadfast in its conservative insistence that poverty is a question of individual achievement, rather than a social question in need of policy solutions. According to Census data, the number of Americans in poverty grew from 11.3 percent in 2000 to 12.6 percent in 2005—a jump of 5.4 million people. And the number of people living in extreme poverty (that is, with an individual income of under $5,000 or a family income of less than $10,000) has grown by 26 percent over this period.

Ignoring poverty has serious repercussions beyond the economic peril of the poor. According to the Economic Policy Institute, middle-class schools (where a majority of students come from middle-class families) are twenty-four times more likely to be consistently high-performing than low-income schools (where at least half of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch). So when the number of children living in poverty increases by 11 percent from 2000 to 2005, after a drop of nearly 30 percent from 1994 to 2000, education experts should be alarmed. But the Bush Administration has been conspicuously silent on the issue. Similarly, according to Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, between 52 percent and 59 percent of those who lack health insurance are in low-income families. But HSAs discriminate by income: since they’re tax exempt accounts, rich people benefit more from investing in them because they have a higher tax liability. Indeed, in 2004 the Government Accountability Office found that the average income of HSA users was $133,000, as opposed to a $51,000 average income for all tax filers. Market-based health care thus does little for the uninsured.

The paint-by-numbers policies that compassionate conservatism has given us these past seven years are a testament to the fact that political orthodoxies tend to distort messy realities. An education system that encourages neglect and a health care system built for the healthy are anything but compassionate, and without addressing poverty, the efficacy of any serious social reform is inhibited. The lesson for the future is clear. Stubborn politicos who insist on following prefabricated ideological play-books undermine the most compassionate policies of them all: those that actually work.

Niko Karvounis is a Senior Fellow with The Roosevelt Institution and a Research Assistant at The Century Foundation.