Jeb Bush: States Don’t Need to Use Common Core if They Pass Similar Standards
BUSH: “You know them. You know if every state has high standards because you have experts who know it, and if you assess to those standards faithfully, you know… It’s not like pornography where you know it if you see it. That's what most states have had. Higher standards along with real accountability and school choice and ending social promotion and teacher effectiveness plans, and rewarding teachers for continuous improvement in student learning, all of that together yield rising student achievement, and the whole objective together needs to be about rising student achievement… If people don’t like Common Core, fine -- just make sure your standards are much higher than the ones you had before. We can’t keep dumbing down standards.”
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FIORINA: "I believe the first role of a president of the United States, honestly as it revolves around education, is to devolve as much money, as much responsibility and as much accountability into the states and into communities and parents' hands as possible. (Applause) … We know, factually speaking, that when Washington spends more money, the quality of education in this nation does not improve. (applause) We also know -- it helps to have facts."
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KASICH: "I'm going to tell you something that was a mistake. When we use the rhetoric that we're going to kill the Department of Education, you know what independent voters heard? ‘Oh, so the Republicans want to kill education.’ We've got to be careful with the way we use our rhetoric. What would I do? There are about a hundred plus, maybe 110 federal programs. I think we need to bundle them up, and we need to send them back to the states, so that the states can develop their own ideas about how best to educate their kids, thus back to we see what you do, we look at Ohio, we look at Illinois, we look at Texas. And I want to move those programs, I want to empower people in the states. … I'll tell you what the unions do, unfortunately too much of the time. There's a constant negative comment to, 'they're going to take your benefits, they're going to take your pay...' And so if I were not president, if I were king in America, I would abolish all teacher's lounges where they sit together and worry about how 'woe is us'."
