Now that Mitt Romney
has taken a stand for local and parental control of education and
against federalized Common Core standards and tests, the issue of
education has come into sharp focus in the presidential race.
The distinctions could become even clearer and education might even become a key issue, depending on how the Obama/Romney debates play out beginning Wednesday.
At the September 25 Education Nation Summit in New York, Romney said that as president he would propose incentives for states to offer parents plenty of information to help them choose the best schools for their children.
To do what Washington can to generate more choices, Romney said he would link money from IDEA and Title I — the two huge programs for special-needs and low-income children — to students rather than to bureaucracies, so that affected families could choose the schools, public or private, best for them. In effect, that would be a nationwide extension of the successful experiment with school choice vouchers in Washington, D.C., that Congress first authorized in 2002 and which the Obama administration has repeatedly tried to kill.
When NBC’s Brian Williams asked his take on the Common Core standards, Romney did not waffle as some supporters of local control had feared he might:
“I don’t subscribe to the idea of the federal government trying to push a Common Core on various states,” said the former Massachusetts governor. “It’s one thing to put it out as a model and let people adopt it as they will, but to financially reward states based upon accepting the federal government’s idea of a curriculum, I think, is a mistake. And the reason I say that is that there may be a time when the government has an agenda that it wants to promote.”
Prior to that response, there had been uncertainty about Romney’s position, given that local-control advocates were unable to get a statement of opposition to the Common Core into the GOP platform at the party’s convention in Tampa. In addition, several past and present Republican governors, including Romney education adviser Jeb Bush, have backed the national standards.
has taken a stand for local and parental control of education and
against federalized Common Core standards and tests, the issue of
education has come into sharp focus in the presidential race.The distinctions could become even clearer and education might even become a key issue, depending on how the Obama/Romney debates play out beginning Wednesday.
At the September 25 Education Nation Summit in New York, Romney said that as president he would propose incentives for states to offer parents plenty of information to help them choose the best schools for their children.
To do what Washington can to generate more choices, Romney said he would link money from IDEA and Title I — the two huge programs for special-needs and low-income children — to students rather than to bureaucracies, so that affected families could choose the schools, public or private, best for them. In effect, that would be a nationwide extension of the successful experiment with school choice vouchers in Washington, D.C., that Congress first authorized in 2002 and which the Obama administration
has repeatedly tried to kill.When NBC’s Brian Williams asked his take on the Common Core standards, Romney did not waffle as some supporters of local control had feared he might:
“I don’t subscribe to the idea of the federal government trying to push a Common Core on various states,” said the former Massachusetts governor. “It’s one thing to put it out as a model and let people adopt it as they will, but to financially reward states based upon accepting the federal government’s idea of a curriculum, I think, is a mistake. And the reason I say that is that there may be a time when the government has an agenda that it wants to promote.”
Prior to that response, there had been uncertainty about Romney’s position, given that local-control advocates were unable to get a statement of opposition to the Common Core into the GOP platform at the party’s convention in Tampa. In addition, several past and present Republican governors, including Romney education adviser Jeb Bush
, have backed the national standards.
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