Plenty of Common Ground in Obama and Romney’s Ed Reform Pitches

Surprise, surprise. When it comes to school reform, Republicans and Democrats agree on quite a bit.

By Julianne Hing Oct 04, 2012

For all the back and forth sparring during the presidential debate on Wednesday, one might think President Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney don’t see eye to eye on anything. But look at Mitt Romney and President Obama’s respective [education](http://www.mittromney.com/blogs/mitts-view/2012/05/chance-every-child-0) [agendas](http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education) and you’ll see something rather striking: plenty of ideological overlap about how to fix public schools. Romney’s education platform, which calls on the federal government to tie federal education funding to state commitments to school reform, puts a focus on improving the U.S. teacher force by evaluating teachers based on their students’ test scores and expanding choice options for parents. Romney supports far more aggressive school choice models, including vouchers which encourage families to leave poor performing neighborhood schools for other private and charter schools. But he, like Obama, encourage the expansion of charter schools in the U.S. public education system. In fact, Romney’s ideas look remarkably like President Obama’s marquee education initiative Race to the Top, a competitive grant program which exchanged money for promises from states to enact harsher accountability measures for teachers, a more open school marketplace, and better data tracking. During the debate last night, Romney even managed to say he agrees with "some" of the ideas in Race to the Top.