GOP education

Union bashing, Common Core trashing: Takeaways from the GOP education forum

By Caitlin Emma and Kimberly Hefling

Teachers unions were a punching bag and Common Core standards not quite the bogeyman you’d expect as six 2016 Republican presidential contenders subjected themselves to back-to-back questioning on education policy Wednesday at a daylong forum here.

The moderator? Former CNN anchor Campbell Brown, whose “The 74 Million” news advocacy site sponsored the event with the pro-school choice group American Federation for Children.

Outside in the heat, a few dozen members of the local teachers’ union in New Hampshire and from across New England protested the Republican candidates’ education plans. Inside, the rented air conditioning unit for the Londonderry High School gym struggled to cool off the sweating candidates and rapt crowd.

Here are five takeaways from the hours of wonky K-12 discussion.

1) In case you didn’t know, Republicans don’t like teachers unions.

Teachers unions took hit after hit, with AFT President Randi Weingarten getting called out by name by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. “I’d love a day when Randi Weingarten and I can hold hands and sing kumbaya,” Bush said. “But she’s not going to change.”

Christie said if he got to choose the AFT president, he wouldn’t choose Weingarten. “I have no problem saying that teachers unions deserve a political punch in the face, because they do,” he said. (Weingarten tweeted back to Christie in response, saying “Breaking news!!@ChrisChristie wouldn’t pick me for AFT pres. Well, I wouldn’t pick him for POTUS.”)

Former business executive Carly Fiorina said a teachers union is a power structure “designed to preserve the status quo” and pretty universally on the wrong side of these issues.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker bragged that his fight with unions in his state earned him death threats, but he was never intimidated.

“I can tell when a teacher is supportive of what I’ve done because they lean into me, look both ways and whisper ‘thank you,’” he said.

2) To embrace or reject the Common Core remains a political decision.

Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich remain the rare supporters in the GOP field these days of the academic standards.

“If people don’t like Common Core, that’s fine,” Bush said. “Just make sure your standards are higher than they were before.”

Kasich didn’t mention the standards by name and said multiple times that picking standards should be done locally.

“In looking through all the facts and not getting all my information from the Internet … I concluded in my state that we need to raise our standards,” Kasich said.

When asked why his fellow candidates Christie, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Walker, have “flip flopped” on their support for the Common Core — first supporting the standards several years ago and then backing off — Kasich said, “I’m not going to change my position because there’s four people in the front row yelling at me.”

Walker and Christie said they changed their perspective after listening to parents, teachers and others.

Jindal and Fiorina said states were coerced with federal money to adopt the standards.

Fiorina added that Common Core is now a “program” that’s “overly influenced by companies that have something to gain,” like textbook publishing companies.

3) Abolish the Education Department? Not so fast.

Kasich doesn’t buy the popular GOP talking point dating back to President Ronald Reagan that the Education Department should be closed as a means to downsize the federal government and get it out of education policy.

“You know what independent voters heard? ‘Oh, so the Republicans want to kill education?’” Kasich said. “We’ve got to be careful in the way in which we use our rhetoric.”

4) Pre-K is a good thing, and it can be a way to bash Democrats.

Unlike some congressional Republicans, Bush said he sees a federal role in supporting pre-K for states that want it as part of broader education reforms. But he took a big swipe at New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s approach to expand publicly funded preschool and called it a thriving business for “the bureaucracies and for the unions.” Bush said the Florida approach has led to 70 percent of 4-year-olds attending literacy-based programs that are 80 to 85 percent privately run at a cost probably three times less than the New York program.

Bush said there are already scores of federally funded early childhood programs, but little oversight on what works. “I think some of this stuff ought to be bundled up, block grants ought to be given to expand these programs that are totally effective at a lower cost.”

But several early childhood education experts have found Florida’s pre-K quality lacking, though access is plentiful.

5) They love school choice.

Bush and Jindal support allowing federal money to follow low-income students to new schools, such as charter schools.

Bush said it should be a priority issue as Congress rewrites the No Child Left Behind education law. “I’d love to see this notion of portability of federal money,” Bush said.