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Anybody who thinks President Obama’s education policies have been unfriendly to public education should pay close attention to Mitt Romney’s newly announced school reform vision. Because what you don’t like about Obama’s, you may like even less about Romney’s.

“A Chance For Every Child” is the name of the education program that the presumptive Republican presidential candidate spelled out in a speech and then a white paper released on Wednesday.

(LARRY DOWNING/REUTERS)

Romney is advancing a pro-choice, pro-voucher, pro-states-rights education program that seems certain to hasten the privatization of the public education system.

In a Romney-run education world, the parents of poor and special education students would choose a school — public or private, based on standardized test scores and other data — and then a specific amount of public money would follow the child to the school.

It’s a voucher system that would, among other things, require families of the neediest children to constantly shop around for schools in an unstable market and would likely exacerbate the very thing — a chronic achievement gap — all of this is supposedly intended to fix. Obama opposes vouchers.

Romney’s education vision is based on an ideology that demonizes unions and views the market as the driver of education reform. His program is not based on quality research or best practices; indeed, it doesn't mention the one reform that has been shown over years to be effective, early childhood education.

It also inores the role that outside-school factors play in how well a student does in the classroom. School reformers and politicians can talk all they want about how a great teacher can overcome the effects of living in poverty and turmoil, but, systemically, they can’t. A hungry or tired or sick student just won’t do as well as one who isn’t. You only have to look at the most successful schools — traditional public and public charter and private — to know this to be true.

This was written by education historian Diane Ravitch . She is a research professor at New York University and author of numerous books, including the best-selling “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” a critique of the flaws in the modern school reform movement. This piece appeared on her blog.

By Diane Ravitch
Several months ago, U.S. News & World Report announced that it planned to rank the nation’s schools of education and that it would do so with the assistance of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ).

Since then, many institutions announced that they would not collaborate. Some felt that they had already been evaluated by other accrediting institutions like NCATE or TEAC; others objected to NCTQ’s methodology. As the debate rated, NCTQ told the dissenters that they would be rated whether they agreed or not, and if they didn’t cooperate, they would get a zero. The latest information that I have seen is that the ratings will appear this fall.

To its credit, NCTQ posted on its website the letters of the college presidents and deans who refused to be rated by NCTQ. They make for interesting reading, as it is always surprising (at least to me) to see the leaders of big institutions take a stand on issues. Two of the conservative Chiefs for Change are on NCTQ’s technical advisory panel.

Here is the full text of Mitt Romney’s remarks on education reform as prepared for delivery on Wednesday at The Latino Coalition’s Annual Economic Summit in Washington, D.C.:

Mitt Romney Speech

As Prepared for Delivery to Latino Coalition

Thanks to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for hosting us. This year the Chamber marks 100 years of Standing Up for American Enterprise.  Few organizations have fought longer or harder for the principles of economic freedom. And these days, your voice is more important than ever.    

I am grateful to the Latino Coalition for the invitation to be part of your Annual Economic Summit. In recent days we’ve heard a lot about business from the President and if you’re feeling like you deserve protection under the Endangered Species Act, I can’t blame you.

  This is a time when everybody in this administration should be doing everything in their power to support you. If every one of our small businesses added just two employees, Americans could pay more mortgages and buy more groceries and fill their gas tanks.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a Democrat, has been in the news for blasting President Obama’s campaign ads attacking Mitt Romney’s career with a private-equity firm and calling the tone of the presidential campaign “nauseating to me on both sides.”

This isn’t the first time that Booker has sided with Republicans over the leader of his own party.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker, left, jokes with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie during in 2011. (Julio Cortez/AP) Booker has made school reform a key initiative of his administration in New Jersey’s biggest city. And he has been an outspoken supporter of the school reform policies of the Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, which include an expansion of charter schools, the end of teacher tenures, and the use of student standardized test scores to evaluate teachers. He has called the state’s largest teachers union a group of “bullies and thugs.”

While there are a number of issues on which Obama and Christie agree when it comes to school reform — including charter school growth and the use of test scores to evaluate teachers — there is at least one key area where they depart company.

Obama opposes vouchers, which provide public money for students to use for private school tuition. But Christie does support them, and so does Booker.

How’s this for some unfortunate prom planning? A high school prom was just held in the same Miami arena as a porn convention. And it wasn’t a surprise to organizers.

Miami Beach High School students attended their prom Saturday night at the Miami Beach Convention Center at the same time that the “Exxxotica Expo” was being held in a different part of the complex, according to the Miami Herald.

Parents were not amused.

“That is terrible. I don’t like it,” Loise Carter was quoted as saying on CBS 4 in Miami after dropping off her daughter at the convention center.

The station said that security personnel and some parents were at the event to make sure that students did not mingle with the participants at the convention. But one video on MSNBC’s Morning Joe showed a clip of a student standing next to a scantily clad woman at the convention.