The Republican Primary Candidates’ Daylong School-Choice Lovefest
On Wednesday six GOP candidates for president—Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich, Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, and Chris Christie—sat on a stage in a Londonderry, New Hampshire, high school to talk K–12 education policy with former CNN anchor-turned-“education activist” Campbell Brown. The New Hampshire Education Summit, sponsored by the school choice advocacy organization theAmerican Federation for Children and hosted by Brown’s glossy new school-reform website, the Seventy Four (both, it is safe to say, are sympathetic to right-leaning education proposals currently in vogue), gave the six GOP candidates who showed up 45-plus minutes each to expound their views on K–12 education. The result was a daylong school-choice lovefest. Here’s what the candidates covered (hint: race, class, and poverty seldom made the cut).
Jeb Bush
The opening act was former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who was far more comfortable and commanding than at the Republican candidates debate last week. Bush, the (dubiously) self-proclaimed “education governor,” has well-known views on education, and he didn’t deviate from the formula much. He supports vouchers, which he claims didn’t “destroy public education—that’s a myth that was shattered by Florida,” and the general marketplace-driven competition of the charter movement: “The public schools have to get better or they close. This is America.”
When Brown veered to Common Core, Bush joked, “What’s that?” before coming out in veiled support of some form of state-derived standards (which are the same thing as the Common Core standards, since governors derived them). “We can’t keep dumbing down standards,” he said, then reminisced about his Spanish AP teacher at Andover who, in forcing him to read Cervantes and Borges his sophomore year, taught him that “high expectations matter.”
Bush also loves the “nerdy concept” of Title I portability that lets free- and reduced-meals students take their Title I dollars to the school of their choice. When asked about his pick for secretary of education, Bush gestured at his interviewer—a good indication of the tenor of hard-hitting conversation that Brown would be leading throughout the day. Bush also doubled down on his support for keeping the federal testing schedule in place and endorsed more federal money going to pay for privately run pre-K programs.
Carly Fiorina
Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, kicked it off with some niceGOP education summit: Six candidates meet with Campbell Brown in New Hampshire.:
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