Skip to footer

Obama vs. Romney 101: 5 differences on education

President Obama says his policy initiatives are helping teachers, schools, and students. Mitt Romney advocates more school choice and private-sector involvement. Here is a look at how the two differ on eduction issues.

3. School choice

  • By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo Staff writer

Romney’s major policy proposal is to enable low-income and disabled students to bring their federal funding with them to the school of their choice.

This would require an overhaul of Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (special education funds). 

Romney would require states receiving these funds to allow eligible students to attend public schools outside their own district, and to ensure that charter school choices can expand to meet demand. Private schools would also be an option for this portable funding, if allowed by state law, which brings the controversial voucher issue onto the table. 

Congress is unlikely to want to change the current formulas by which these grants are distributed to states and schools, education analysts say.

Romney’s plan is in a bit of a tricky position, “because certainly the [Republican] base likes school choice, but they also like a limited federal role in education,” says Michael Petrilli, an education expert and executive vice president at Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington.

Obama has his own awkwardness with the Democratic base on the choice issue. He has been more supportive of charter schools than many other Democrats – most notably by telling states they’d be unlikely to win part of the $4 billion Race to the Top competition if they didn’t have charter laws or if they capped the number of charter schools that could open. Obama has also included support for charter schools in his budget proposals.

Romney says he’ll expand the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, a voucher system in Washington that allows about 1,600 students to attend private schools.

Obama requested no funding for the D.C. program in his 2013 budget proposal.

3 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.