Candidates seek to limit federal role in education

Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Mitt Rom­ney, for­mer Gov­er­nor of Mass­a­chu­setts, speaks at the CBS News/National Jour­nal for­eign pol­icy debate. When it comes to edu­ca­tion, the Repub­li­can field of pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates has a uni­fied stance to get the fed­eral gov­ern­ment out of schools, but dis­agrees on meth­ods. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Richard Shiro)

KIMBERLY HEFLING

AP Edu­ca­tion Writer

WASHINGTON — When it comes to edu­ca­tion, the Repub­li­can field of pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates has a uni­fied stance: Get the fed­eral gov­ern­ment out of schools. How they’d do that varies.

Take the Edu­ca­tion Depart­ment. Reps. Michele Bach­mann and Ron Paul along with Texas Gov. Rick Perry want to shut it down alto­gether, while Rick San­to­rum and Newt Gin­grich want to shrink it. Offer­ing stu­dent loans? Her­man Cain says the depart­ment should get out of that business.

And then there’s the Bush-era edu­ca­tion account­abil­ity law, No Child Left Behind. Perry calls it a “direct assault on fed­er­al­ism,” while for­mer Utah Gov. Jon Hunts­man has long expressed ani­mos­ity toward the law.

Although for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts Gov. Mitt Rom­ney has said “we need to get the fed­eral gov­ern­ment out of edu­ca­tion,” he has been more will­ing to praise cer­tain Edu­ca­tion Depart­ment policies.

While polls show that vot­ers clearly care about edu­ca­tion, it hasn’t been a dri­ving issue in the race. Instead, it per­co­lates at times. When it does, the dia­logue — like many other issues in the race — has been pri­mar­ily focused on the gen­eral theme of lim­it­ing the fed­eral role more than on spe­cific edu­ca­tion policies.

Any com­ments of praise of a fed­eral edu­ca­tion pol­icy can lead to accu­sa­tions that a can­di­date sup­ports fed­eral over­reach, said Fred­er­ick Hess, direc­tor of edu­ca­tion pol­icy stud­ies at the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Institute.

For exam­ple, after Rom­ney praised the Edu­ca­tion Department’s “Race to the Top” pro­gram, which has had states com­pet­ing for bil­lions in grant dol­lars, Perry called Rom­ney out on it dur­ing a Sept. 22 debate say­ing, “Being in favor of the Obama ‘Race to the Top,’ that is not conservative.”

Gen­er­ally, the can­di­dates sup­port more school choice options for students.

Lim­it­ing the fed­eral government’s role in edu­ca­tion isn’t a new argu­ment among con­ser­v­a­tives, many of whom dis­agreed with the deci­sion to cre­ate a Cabinet-level depart­ment dur­ing the Carter administration.

Pres­i­dent George W. Bush took a dif­fer­ent view. He cam­paigned heav­ily in 2000 on the pas­sage of No Child Left Behind and the need for tough assess­ment stan­dards, specif­i­cally to help low income and minor­ity chil­dren. Under No Child Left Behind, which was signed in 2002 with wide­spread bipar­ti­san sup­port, stu­dents are tested annu­ally and schools that don’t meet pro­fi­ciency require­ments face sanc­tions. The law, how­ever, has become increas­ingly unpop­u­lar with crit­ics say­ing it’s too rigid, led to schools being unfairly deemed as “fail­ures” and to teach­ers teach­ing to the test.

Many other Repub­li­cans went along — at least early on.

San­to­rum voted for the law.

When Texas’ plan on No Child Left Behind was approved in 2002, Perry proudly said that “Texas was a model” for the national law and that the approval meant Texas would receive almost $400 mil­lion in new fed­eral funding.

And in 2005, Rom­ney tes­ti­fied on Capi­tol Hill in praise of the law. “I do look to the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to help set the bench­mark where we can com­pare to how well we are per­form­ing, and, if we are not per­form­ing, to insist that we do the job or that we suf­fer the con­se­quences at the state or local level,” Rom­ney said.

The can­di­dates’ records on edu­ca­tion are revealing.

Bach­mann has said she was dri­ven to first run for office because of con­cerns over the edu­ca­tion her more than 20 fos­ter chil­dren were receiv­ing. Two years ago, Gin­grich hit the road with the Rev. Al Sharp­ton, a lib­eral civil right advo­cate, on a lis­ten­ing tour on edu­ca­tion that Edu­ca­tion Sec­re­tary Arne Dun­can joined.

Hunts­man, as Utah gov­er­nor, signed a law in 2005 that defied the No Child Left Behind Act by giv­ing the state’s edu­ca­tion stan­dards pri­or­ity over the fed­eral requirements.

Perry has refused to have Texas adopt cur­ricu­lum stan­dards adopted by nearly every state or have his state com­pete in the Race to the Top com­pe­ti­tion, say­ing it “smacks of a fed­eral takeover of pub­lic schools.” Perry’s posi­tions helped earn him a rebuff by Dun­can that he felt “very, very badly for the chil­dren” of Texas.

Rom­ney used to sup­port clos­ing the Edu­ca­tion Depart­ment, but in 2007 he said he’d come to see the value of the fed­eral government’s role.

In recent months, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama has brought edu­ca­tion back into the national polit­i­cal realm. He announced states could apply for waivers around many of the pro­fi­ciency require­ments in No Child Left Behind if they met cer­tain require­ments. He advo­cated for the pas­sage of a jobs cre­ation bill rejected by the Sen­ate that included $30 bil­lion to hire educators.

And, Obama announced he was using exec­u­tive author­ity to allow poten­tially mil­lions of qual­i­fied stu­dents and col­lege grad­u­ates to con­sol­i­date their loans and accel­er­ate a pro­gram that based pay­ment options on income.

The announce­ment on stu­dent loans sparked some dis­cus­sion among the GOP can­di­dates at a forum. Bach­mann said Obama’s effort was an “abuse of power” that will give peo­ple incen­tives to dodge debt. Gin­grich said gov­ern­ment loans should be repri­va­tized before Obama bank­rupts the entire coun­try “by promis­ing to every young per­son you will not have to pay your stu­dent loan as a student.”

And Cain said that, “I do not believe it’s the respon­si­bil­ity of the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to help fund col­lege education.”

Mar­garet Spellings, who served as edu­ca­tion sec­re­tary under Bush, said the anti-federal talk on edu­ca­tion among GOP can­di­dates con­cerns her. She said the can­di­dates should be speak­ing pri­mar­ily about the needs of kids over adults and bet­ter ways to close achieve­ment gaps and edu­cate poor and minor­ity kids — things she said she’s not hear­ing about as much as she’d like. She said she won­ders what would hap­pen to impor­tant pro­grams under a dis­solved Edu­ca­tion Depart­ment, such as edu­cat­ing dis­abled children.

“The fed­eral role in edu­ca­tion has always been around the needs of poor and dis­ad­van­taged kids, so I’d like to see the focus on that, I’d like to see talk of account­abil­ity,” Spellings said.

Posted by AP News on Nov 14 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.