Soon after leaving office in 2007, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush launched the Foundation for Excellence in Education to “ignite a movement of reform, state by state,” Reuters reports. A close examination of the foundation’s work, including a review of thousands of pages of email, shows the staff of two dozen has worked aggressively – if not always with immediate success – to shape public policy. Last fall the foundation flew Education Commissioner Stephen Bowen and other state schools chiefs to San Francisco for a three-day policy summit on topics ranging from online learning to teacher tenure. When he returned, Bowen sought help from the foundation, emailing the executive director, Patricia Levesque, to explain that he had “no ‘political’ staff who I can work with to move this stuff through the process.”