Romney to end social mobility

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Romney, Dipping Into Education, Pushes School Choice

By TRIP GABRIEL


Luke Sharrett for The New York TimesMitt Romney delivered a speech on education at the Latino Coalition’s 2012 Small Business Summit Luncheon on Wednesday in Washington.

The education issue figured in the Republican nominating contest only when candidates competed over how zealously they could call for abolishing the federal Education Department.

Now, Mitt Romney has injected actual education issues prominently into the campaign for the first time. On Wednesday, he called for sweeping change in the federal government’s role in promoting school choice, an end to federal intervention at failing schools in high-poverty districts, and for bringing back private lenders to the subsidized college loan market.

For his first big education speech, Mr. Romney chose a Washington meeting of a Hispanic business group. This was a savvy choice since education often shows up in polls as a top issue for Hispanic voters, a constituency that Mr. Romney badly needs to engage and inspire, especially in swing states like Nevada, Florida and Colorado.

The failure of many American schools with minority students “is the civil rights issue of our era,’’ Mr. Romney said, echoing a mantra of the charter school movement. “It’s the great challenge of our time.’’

But the challenge for Mr. Romney is that many school-reform ideas he touched on – increasing charter schools, holding teachers accountable for student success – are already central to the Obama administration, whose education policy has all but co-opted traditional Republican positions.

Indeed, in response to Mr. Romney’s proposals, the Obama campaign released a compilation of Republican governors’ past praise for the president’s education policies, including from Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, who once said she and Mr. Obama spoke “the same language” on schools.

Mr. Romney promised to break logjams that still hold up reforms by taking on teachers’ unions, which he called “the clearest example of a group that has lost its way.” He accused Mr. Obama of quavering before the unions because of their power in the Democratic Party. “President Obama has been unable to stand up to union bosses – and unwilling to stand up for our kids,’’ Mr. Romney said.

In fact, Mr. Obama has crossed teachers’ unions, notably in 2010 when he praised a mass firing of teachers in Rhode Island in a showdown over his administration’s policy to radically overhaul a failing school in a high-poverty district.

In a policy paper released after Mr. Romney’s speech, his campaign called for the elimination of such federally mandated interventions. They have been controversial, but many die-hard school reformers might see their removal as a retreat.

Mr. Romney proposed to replace drastic turnaround efforts with a “public report card,” presumably exposing a school’s failures so parents could steer clear. But it is uncertain how that proposal differs from existing detailed report cards now required under the No Child Left Behind law.

Mr. Romney’s biggest departure from existing policy was a call for poor students and those with disabilities to be able to choose any public school in their state and to have federal funds follow them, rather than the current system in which the money stays with their local school.

This would significantly shift how the two largest Education Department programs in K-12 schools – those for poor students and with disabilities – currently run. Vowing to “expand parental choice in an unprecedented way,” Mr. Romney said, “for too long, we’ve merely talked about the virtues of school choice without really doing something about it.’’

Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, an education policy group, said the proposal was ambitious.

“It’s a fundamental structural change of focus away from districts and schools to focus on kids and families,’’ Mr. Finn, an education official under Ronald Reagan, said. “It changes the allocation of power as well as money, from people running school systems to parents choosing schools.’’

Nationally, the federal government pays about 10 percent of education costs for students. States and school districts, which provide the balance, have in many cases already embraced the portability of financing when students choose a school beyond their neighborhood. “Frankly, it catches up the federal policy to what is already state policy” in many places, Mr. Finn said.

Mr. Romney’s speech was almost entirely focused on K-12 education. But in his policy paper, he called for restoring private lenders to the subsidized college loan market. Congress passed a law in 2010 at Mr. Obama’s urging that eliminated government fees paid to private banks, an estimated savings of $68 billion over 10 years, which was channeled into Pell grants for the poorest students. Republicans have argued the law caused job losses in banking and introduced inefficiencies to the student loan market.

[teflep]

Where is this from? No source.

[Deleted]

May 23, 2012 19:18:25 GMT -5 teflep said:

Where is this from? No source.

NYTs

thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/romney-dipping-into-education-pushes-school-choice/?src=rechp

[teflep]

Thanks.