Though education has played second fiddle so far to other domestic issues in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, the narrowing field includes GOP candidates with compatible views on scaling back the federal role in K-12, but big contrasts in policy specifics and experience. President Barack Obama, meanwhile, is expected to put a…

Ask Antonio White what he thinks of Race to the Top--President Barack Obama's signature K-12 initiative--and the Florida teacher will tell you the competitive-grant program is a "difficult pill to swallow." Merit pay for teachers based partly on student test scores is "a joke," he says. He's also not a fan of expanding charter…

As the governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007, Mitt Romney championed aggressive education policies later embraced by the Obama administration and by other states. But for most of his second run at the Republican presidential nomination, voters have heard little about his education record in Massachusetts or initiatives that Mr. Romney was…

It has become a familiar sight for education policy mavens this election season: panel discussions, in Washington and elsewhere, hashing out the presumptive presidential nominees' differences on performance pay for teachers, private school vouchers, and other reliable topics of debate. But the candidates themselves have not appeared at these…

The presumed November match-up produced by the long presidential-primary season offers contrasting approaches to K-12 policy, along with some common ground on the basics of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee, and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, his Democratic counterpart, both…

Throughout the presidential campaign, the leading Democrats have been speaking from a similar script on education--until this month, when U.S. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois suggested that he could be persuaded to support private school vouchers. "If there was any argument for vouchers, it was "Let's see if the experiment…