Romney' Six Point Education Plan - Road to the Middle Class

THEY SAY THAT Bill Clinton’s great success in the presidency was that he acted like a governor. After the failure of tax increases and Hillarycare in his first two years he focused on close-to-home issues like midnight basketball and 100,000 cops that are the sort of issue that you expect city mayors and state governors to deal in. Still, it probably helped him win the soccer-mom vote.

George W. Bush did the same thing, campaigning for No Child Left Behind, and passing a pale shadow of his plan once elected.

Now comes presidential hopeful Governor Mitt Romney with more governor stuff, a carefully placed article about education in the Washington Times.

If you are a Democrat, then education is simple. More funding for education—and your number one special interest, teachers.

But a Republican like Mitt Romney has to be more careful. He can’t say that teachers are rent-seeking scoundrels comparable in greed to the worst robber barons of the 19th century. He can’t say that partly because it’s not nice and partly because there are hundreds of thousands of nice teachers who believe what their union has told them, and really believe that they are underpaid and overworked. So a Republican has to weave and dodge. He will want to curb the rent-seeking; he will want to recommend school choice, but he will want to be nice about it. So here’s what Romney comes up with.

1) Make teaching a true profession.

Translation: break the union.

2) Let the leaders lead.

Translation: break the union.

3) Measure up.

Translation: unless we can test we don’t have a clue what they are doing with our money.

4) Let freedom ring.

Translation: Break the union.

5) Pull in the parents... For our lowest-performing schools, I've proposed mandatory parental preparation courses. Over two days, parents learn about America's education culture, homework, school discipline, available after-school programs, what TV is harmful or helpful and so on.
6) Raise the bar. Our kids need to be pushed harder. Less about self-esteem; more about learning.

Good luck with the union, Mitt old chum.

Mitt Romney is coming up with some unexceptional ideas here. But at least they take one small step along a long road back from the dreadful mess we have got ourselves into. It is the mess that Horace Mann got us into 160 years ago with the idea that government-driven education would be better than parent-driven education. What a grand idea it seemed back then. What a dreadful waste of $500 billion a year it has turned out to be.

And what an injustice it is to impose the system upon our nation’s children.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.