Mitt Romney has never been known for taking strong stances on
the issues. But he has proven to be even more artfully dodgy than
usual on the matter of federal education policy — and the debate
over whether or not to reform America’s woeful public schools. As
part of his effort
to woo movement conservatives displeased with George W. Bush’s
legacy as centrist Democrats’ favorite Republican on education (and
longing for halcyon days of federal nonintervention that never
were), Romney has avoided mentioning education in his 87-page
economic plan; backed away from his support of Bush’s signature
legislation, the No Child Left Behind Act; and even backpedalled
from his praise of President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top school
reform competition after being criticized by equally double-talking
Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
As left-footed in his dodging as the former Massachusetts
governor has been, he has still managed to confuse otherwise-astute
reformers and commentators. Time columnist Andy Rotherham,
whose Eduwonk site is one of the
go-to sites on school reform,
declared the other week that Romney is now to “the political
right of President George W. Bush” on education policy; while Fox
News commentator Juan Williams
suggested last week that Romney should pick Condoleezza Rice as
his running mate because of her work with former New York City
schools chancellor Joel Klein on a Council on Foreign Relations
report advocating for school choice and Common Core national
reading and math standards.
But like so much with Romney, what you think you see isn’t
always what it real. This is especially true when it comes to
education. A closer look at his advisers, along with his actual
record in Massachusetts, reveals that his tenure as president would
more-likely resemble that of still-reviled Dubya (and even the
current school reformer-in-chief) than either movement
conservatives or teachers’ unions will like. And for children stuck
attending failing schools — and the taxpayers picking up the tab
to the tune of $591 billion a year — this is not a bad thing.
One hint of Romney’s embrace of Bush-style school reform came
last Wednesday when he took aim at Obama for his latest and
“inexcusable” effort to shut down the D.C. Opportunity school
voucher program. The school choice program, which serves
1,615 students looking to avoid the nation’s capital’s worst
schools, was favored by Dubya, who championed
vouchers and charter schools as ways for parents to get their kids
out of schools “that won’t teach and won’t change.”
The more-obvious hint came later that day when one of Romney’s
advisers, former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings,
appeared with Colorado’s Democratic U.S. Senator Michael Bennet at
a confab held in San Francisco by the Aspen Institute and school
reform philanthropy New School Venture Fund, where she defended No
Child and its success in exposing the extent of the nation’s
problems with teaching and curriculum. Although Spellings was
technically appearing in her capacity as head of her eponymous
education policy consultancy, her prominent status as one of the
players in crafting No Child and other Bush education policies
(along with her influential role shaping the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce’s defense of No Child and other reforms) led reporters and
commentators to wonder if she was also speaking on Romney’s
behalf.
Spellings isn’t the only prominent former Bush education player
on Romney’s team. One of Spellings’ charges during her days on
Maryland Avenue, Grover Whitehurst (now the education czar for the
Brookings’ Institution), is also advising Romney. There’s also Nina
Shokraii Rees, a former Heritage Foundation analyst — and now a
senior vice president at junk bond mastermind-turned-school
reformer Michael Milken’s Knowledge Universe — who led Bush’s
education innovation efforts.
But it’s not just Dubya’s influence that will weigh heavily on
Romney’s education policies. This was clear last month when former
Florida governor Jeb Bush, the ex-president’s brother, blessed the
Republican presidential nominee presumptive with his endorsement.
Jeb bolstered his school reform credentials during his eight years
as Sunshine State governor by expanding school choice, and enacting
a series of other reforms that contributed to an 11 percent decline
in the percentage of functionally-illiterate fourth-graders,
according to an analysis of National Assessment of Educational
Progress data by education magazine Dropout Nation. And
now out of public office, the former governor is playing an even
stronger role in school reform through his masterminding of groups
such as
Chiefs for Change, whose members include such change-minded
state superintendents as Chris Cerf, the tough-talking education
czar for New Jersey’s equally abrasive governor Chris Christie.
More than likely, a Romney presidency would include his use the
bully pulpit (and the regulatory force of the Department of
Education) to push states to allow for the opening of more charter
schools — the nation’s most-successful form of school choice —
and launch voucher programs. He will also likely bless efforts by
reformers and budget-conscious governors struggling with the $1.1
trillion in teachers’ pension deficits and unfunded retired teacher
healthcare costs to end near-lifetime employment, ditch degree- and
seniority-based pay scales, and embrace performance pay plans. He
will probably support the efforts of education groups to develop
national reading, math, and science standards. And Romney will
likely hold states accountable for improving graduation rates, test
scores, and percentages of high school grads going to college and
technical school, while allowing them to meet those goals their own
way.
In short, it will resemble the federal education policy approach
of Bush and Obama. And this shouldn’t be a surprise. Even as Romney
obfuscated his positions on education during the Republican primary
campaigns, his record as Bay State governor had been one of a
moderate reformer. Certainly he was nowhere near as passionate on
the issue as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal — who just led the
passage of a reform package that included effectively ending tenure
and expanding the state’s school choice program to serve as many as
300,000 kids stuck in failing schools — and he wasn’t even a Mitch
Daniels. But during his tenure, Romney vetoed a proposed bill to
stop the growth of charter schools, supported the creation of a
high school graduation exam, and backed efforts to improve academic
standards. As a result, Massachusetts is only one of two states
whose eighth-grade math standards match up to those of
top-performing nations such as Singapore.
Romney made clear his sympathies in a 2003 speech before a group
of reformers convened by school reform outfit Rennie Center for
Education Policy and Research.
Declared Romney: “No Child Left Behind is following principles
being championed here. That speaks volumes.”
All that said, Romney’s tendency to flip-flop, along with his
background as a centrist corporate executive, makes it difficult to
assume he stands for anything. Even if he sticks to the reform
approach of Dubya and Obama, Romney lacks the
strong intellectual and ideological backbone, firm
statesmanship, and rhetorical skill that is required of the
Commander-in-Chief, much less be the nation’s leading school
reformer.
But Romney will have to embrace the very school reform formula
— including holding states accountable for student progress,
expanding school choice, and subjecting
teachers to private sector-style performance management and
compensation
— that have been the hallmarks of Bush’s and Obama’s tenure. Which
means even more angst for NEA and AFT union bosses who cling
tenuously to their still-considerable influence — and more
ammunition for the motley crew of conservative, libertarian,
and centrist Democrat school reformers, along with the families and
taxpayers tired of paying for lackluster schools.
