While much of what Bush did as President was not at all compassionate, he actually did believe in and try to practice compassionate conservatism. He made major concessions to liberal ways of thinking, some good and some not so good. A major good one was fighting AIDS in Africa. His education policies were on the not so good side.

> He made major concessions to liberal ways of thinking, some good and some not so good. A major good one was fighting AIDS in Africa.

This is not making concessions to "liberal ways of thinking".

I think it is. Part of liberalism is seeing all people as worthy of compassion and help, even if they're not closely related to you. While the contrasting tendency in conservatism is to help people closer to / more similar to us and protect ourselves from outsiders who we do not understand, may not benefit from our help, or may even exploit us. Both of these tendencies are valid and adaptive in different situations, they're just different and at least somewhat in opposition. Do you disagree?

I would think a truly liberal policy would be to provide funding for the “compassionate” policies.

On the other hand, federally legislating that local school taxing districts provide services costing $x and if they do not, open up local taxpayers to litigation of $y where x and y are quite large is…something else.

How is a poor school district serving poorer taxpayers supposed to provide expensive IEP for every problem child and/or collect all the evidence to expel them, and at the same time provide quality education to well behaved kids?

Well, I'd be the last person to expect that any particular policy enacted by the US Congress does either liberalism or conservatism effectively.

> A Republican Congress with a Republican President in 2004 enacted the federal law that makes it difficult for public schools to expel disruptive children.

The Republicans only had a slight majority. And after a change, the bill passed in both chambers almost unanimously.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/108/hr1350

The purpose of pointing out that it was a Republican majority is to counter the claim that (only) “liberals” support not expelling kids.

Anytime something becomes political there becomes two sides. If conservatives want to expel students, liberals want to keep them. If conservatives say no, liberals say yes, this is America at its core. We cannot agree on anything so when it comes to public education, it's better to ignore the politics and focus on results.

The reason for this is that the overwhelming majority of bullies and disruptive kids go on to become republicans. Unironically.