As the Bush administration draws to a close, the good-thinking consensus is that President Bush's record with black America can be summed up largely by the name of a certain hurricane. Indeed, by the end of his first term, it was considered a mark of sagacity to dismiss George W. Bush as numb to race issues.

This point of view could have made sense only to people who hadn't bothered to check. The Bush administration's policies relating to black America have demonstrated the very compassion that was promised years ago.

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), for example, took on, without flinching, the lagging performance of black students in schools nationwide, including in middle-class districts. In holding schools responsible for bringing black students' test scores up to par with other students', NCLB even addressed the problem as one with "the system" rather than with black parents or black students' attitudes toward schoolwork.

Surely there was at least a droplet of compassion in a policy that arranged for students stuck in public schools where no learning goes on to be able to transfer to private or charter schools. Of course, on the ground, there are typically not enough such schools to accommodate all seekers. But then, this is hardly traceable to Mr. Bush's presumed compassion deficit.

In one locale after another, it is teachers' unions, preserving the status quo for public school teachers and administrators, who lobby against the opening of more charter schools. Nor does absence of compassion have anything to do with the fact that although NCLB has also funded tutors at failing schools, quite often administrators and parents have not taken advantage of them.

So far, NCLB's results have been minor. But in evaluating whether the Bush administration's compassionate conservatism has been a joke, when it comes to NCLB, the point is that it was instituted at all. Twenty-five years ago, the notion of the Reagan administration developing a program to close the performance gap between white and black students would have sounded like science fiction. Nothing of the sort happened under President Bill Clinton, nor would it have, by all indications, under a President Gore.

Then there have been the faith-based and community initiatives, which the Bush administration proposed with great fanfare. Although nominally race-neutral, these initiatives were promoted via high-profile summits with black ministers, and their primum mobile was helping poor minority communities get on their feet through the intervention of churches, rooted geographically and culturally in neighborhoods in a way that impersonal social service agencies can rarely be.

The faith-based and community initiatives did not get off the ground in the dimensions that Mr. Bush originally intended. Ironically, this was predominantly because of opposition from liberals.

However, faith-based initiatives did not die; they went underground. One current manifestation is a program called Ready4Work, funded principally by the Department of Labor. Ready4Work began as a pilot program in 17 sites across the country, designed to provide ex-cons with a network of services, with an emphasis on mentoring and on channeling religious faith as a source of purpose and direction.

The results of Ready4Work speak for themselves: After a year, only half as many of its clients were back in prison as the national average, and testimonials are glowing. There is currently a full-bore effort in Congress, called the Second Chance Act, to take prisoner re-entry efforts to a national scale.

Something happened under Mr. Bush's watch. Yet the No Child Left Behind Act is processed as an abstraction, and the Second Chance Act is unknown. In my experience, when Bush detractors are informed of prisoner re-entry efforts, their attention is of a dutiful, genuflective kind, contrasting with their bright-eyed commitment to getting in yet more tart jabs about the administration's response to Katrina.They do not notice the real good the president's programs have done for black America because they are distracted by a revolutionary vision, beside which incremental changes such as ex-cons getting real jobs or teenagers reading a little better each year seem uninteresting distractions.

I, who have yet to vote for a Republican, dearly hope that the next president will continue such policies and even expand on them, as they indeed comprise compassionate engagement with black people left behind. They are part of what makes America a great country.

However, keeping these policies alive will also require compassion of an additional sort, of a kind that continues to deliver help to a people so many of whose best and brightest refuse to even notice it.

John McWhorter is author of "Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America." A longer version of this essay appears in the magazine In Character (www.incharacter.org). You may e-mail him at editor@incharacter.org