Jeb Bush sought to put space between himself and his support for controversial Common Core education standards – but said all states need to set high bars for students.
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All six candidates echoed each other on a wide range of K-12 reform issues, especially the importance of state and local control.
None of the candidates had many good things to say about teachers unions. They’ve all backed school choice through charter schools and vouchers.
Though Christie pledged to work with the union if elected president, despite their differences, he also defended his remark to CNN’s Jake Tapper recently that the American Federation of Teachers deserved a punch in the face.
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush said teachers support education reforms – such as allowing students to progress through subjects at their own pace and possibly graduate early – but teachers’ unions don’t.
Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Chris Christie of New Jersey and Bobby Jindal of New Orleans are three governors who implemented Common Core in their states but later moved to dismantle the standards.
“They’re punching us all the time“, he said.
Christie is also strongly defending his reversal on the Common Core standards, which he had once supported. I think you see them shifting their talking points a little bit to be less about the Common Core and more about high standards.
In an interview, the AFC emphasized that they did invite all Republican candidates and tried to accommodate everyone, but acknowledged that having all Republican candidates would logistically have been hard.
The Obama administration gave states big financial and policy incentives to adopt rigorous academic standards, but didn’t create or require the Common Core. Critics say Christie is trying to have it both ways, reaping the political windfall of coming out in opposition to Common Core, while continuing to receive federal funds associated with the PARCC test. And given that they all believe that the role of the federal government should be diminished, they said they would encourage – but not mandate – their favored changes.
As a cast of GOP presidential hopefuls slam teachers unions during a forum in New Hampshire, local teachers are pushing back.
She said “human potential” was the only resource America needed to solve its problems, and that “innovation” has functioned as the United States’ “secret sauce” in its recipe for success. But when it comes to charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently run, the candidates’ stances are less clear cut. “People are fed up with the Common Core and the terribly expensive and overbearing Common Core tests”. “One of the first initiatives that we did was between the police and the board of education, for safe school passage zones”, Christie said. Each candidate will get about 45 minutes to answer questions and defend their records.
Unions reward seniority, not excellence, said Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who has surged after her early-August debate performance.
The summits are the first of their kind and are the result of a joint partnership between the non-profit, non-partisan, education news website The 74 Million and the American Federation for Children (AFC), a school-choice advocacy organization.
Pressed on how states could determine whether they have high standards if there is not an overall standard, Bush acknowledged: “It’s not like pornography where you know it when you see it, but clearly low standards, you know it. That’s what most states have had”.
But the APIA ripped Bush, saying he has “propagated the false narrative that the Common Core standards are merely learning goals and are of high quality”.
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Fiorina criticized federal programs such as Race to the Top that dictate standards on the state level through funding. “I’ve got a lot of scars”, he said. Asked about the standards last week in Iowa, Bush said the term had become “so darned poisonous, I don’t even know what it means”.
