A week after President Obama reinserted education into the 2012 presidential campaign by attacking Mitt Romney on spending and class size, Republicans kept schools squarely in the spotlight at their Tampa convention. In his keynote address, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie gleefully recounted his record of taking on the Garden State’s powerful teacher unions, detailing his success at securing meaningful reforms to teacher-retirement benefits and tenure. Jeb Bush speaks this evening, and those in the know say it will mostly be about education reform. And then there’s a refreshingly reasonable GOP education platform, featuring support for expanded school choice, merit pay, and high academic standards (and no mention of hare-brained schemes, like scrapping the Department of Education, which dogged the Republican primary). After a decade spent avoiding education (and the mixed legacy of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind act) in national politics, Republicans appear poised to position themselves as the education-reform party once again. It remains to be seen whether this will prove an effective political strategy—Obama’s record on education, if not his campaign’s recent statements on the subject, is fairly strong—all Americans stand to win if both parties engage in a spirited, substantive debate on the issue.
RELATED ARTICLE: “Republican Education Platform 2012 Emphasizes School Choice, Teacher Accountability,” Huffington Post, August 29, 2012
