Education not for G.O.P.

G.O.P. Hopefuls Display Differences on Education

By MOTOKO RICH

In saying on Wednesday that he supported annual standardized tests for public school students, Jeb Bush invoked his brother.

“When we neglect that, the kids who are left behind are kids in poverty, African-American kids, Hispanic kids, and then we blame it on the social circumstances of their life,” Mr. Bush, a former governor of Florida, said at an unusual panel discussion on education in Londonderry, N.H., which featured six Republican candidates.

He also quoted one of George W. Bush’s signature phrases. “And that is what a former president called the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations,’ and we should reject that out of hand,” he said.

Staking out a more conservative stance, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin said he did not want the federal government overseeing public schools.

“The federal government doesn’t have a very good track record of holding anybody accountable,” he said. “My solution is, I would like to take the money and the power from Washington in education and send it back to the states.”

He added, “I’m going to be challenging some in my own party.”

Education has been a divisive issue for Republicans, and the differences were on full display as the presidential contenders vied to prove how small a role they would permit the federal government to play in public schools.

The candidates performed a balancing act as they tried to embrace high standards for schoolchildren while shying away from the Common Core, education guidelines that have become intensely controversial among conservatives, parents and teachers.

Some, including Mr. Walker and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, spent a lot of their time criticizing teachers’ unions.

For several decades, Republicans have lurched on where they stand on education. For years, particularly when Newt Gingrich led Republicans to power in the House, they called for the abolishment of the federal Education Department. But President Bush’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind, significantly expanded the role of the federal government in requiring annual standardized tests and prescribing interventions in schools judged failing.

These days the biggest battles are over the Common Core, supported by businesses pushing for a better-educated population but rejected by conservatives who say the benchmarks for what students should know and be able to do in reading and math have been pushed by the Obama administration through incentives that created a de facto federal mandate.

During the forum — sponsored by the American Federation for Children, a group that advocates school vouchers, and the Seventy Four, an education news website — Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Mr. Christie and Carly Fiorina, a former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, reiterated their opposition to the Common Core.

But Gov. John R, Kasich of Ohio, a supporter of the standards, said, “I’m not going to change my position because there’s four people in the front row yelling at me.”

Mr. Walker once supported the Common Core standards, which were originally developed and adopted by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, a nonprofit group that represents state education commissioners.

At the forum, he defended his change of stance; after his initial support, Mr. Walker passed a budget measure in Wisconsin that stripped funding for tests aligned to the standards and said local districts were no longer required to follow the Common Core, which has been opposed by some teachers and a growing tide of parents.

Still, on Wednesday, he said that although he favored tough academic standards for schoolchildren, “I just want them set by people at the local level.”

Mr. Bush, a strong supporter of the Common Core, said the standards should not be “federally driven.”

“If people don’t like Common Core, fine,” he said. “Just make sure the standards that you have are higher than the ones you had before. We can’t keep dumbing down standards.”

When Campbell Brown, the former CNN journalist turned education advocate who moderated the discussion, asked him how people should recognize high standards, he said: “It’s not like pornography where you know it when you see it. Clearly low standards, you know it.”

The effort to distance themselves from the Common Core standards poses a challenge for Republicans to assure voters that the party has a vision for how to improve the education of their children.

“Republican candidates are absolutely right to be appalled by the Common Core as it stands because of the way it was rolled out and how it’s been pursued and what it has actually meant,” said Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. “But then they need to have an answer to ‘O.K., so then what?’ It doesn’t need to be standards, but it needs to be something that shows Americans that they have a clear and coherent vision of how you expand educational opportunity.”

Mr. Kasich, in many ways the most moderate of the Republican contenders, warned Republicans that they needed to make sure they courted independent voters.

“When we use the rhetoric that we’re going to kill the Department of Education, you know what independent voters heard? ‘Oh, so Republicans want to kill education,’ ” Mr. Kasich said. “You have to be careful about the ways we use our rhetoric.”

Voters often want to hear about public education because it speaks to their families and their belief in education as an engine of economic advancement.

“Republicans need to find a way to talk about education and how important it is, especially for poor kids to climb out of poverty, and talk about education as the great equalizer to upward mobility,” said Michael J. Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning education policy group in Washington.

“Voters want to hear about that and middle-class voters want to hear about candidates talking about how to improve all schools, not just for poorer kids.”