Rick Santorum announced his second presidential bid on Wednesday. He joined six other candidates in the crowded GOP field—which sits in stark contrast to the Hillary Clinton-dominated Democratic race. He’s also the subject of the tenth installment of the Eduwatch 2016 series chronicling presidential candidates’ stances on education issues.
Santorum is a seasoned politician. He began his career in 1991 as a two-term congressman and went on to serve two terms in the Senate. In 2012, he ran for president for the first time and finished as the runner-up in the Republican primaries. He has homeschooled six of his children and voiced strong opinions about education. Here are some of them:
1. Common Core: “We need Common Sense not Common Core....From its beginning, the Common Core State Standards initiative has flown under the radar. Its funding, its implementation, and the substance of the standards it proposes have received little public attention, but all of them are wrong for families, wrong for students, and wrong for our teachers.” May 2015.
2. The federal government’s role in education: “We should repeal all of the federal government's role in primary and secondary education.” January 2012.
3. Local control of education: “Parents, teachers, school districts, and local communities should be making the important decisions about education.” May 2015.
4. College for all: “President Obama wants everyone in America to go to college. What a snob!” February 2012.
5. No Child Left Behind: “President Bush's signature initiative of No Child Left Behind, I voted for it. I shouldn't have. It was something that I said, and I will say publicly, that we should repeal.” January 2012.
6. Religion in schools: “Why are Bibles no longer in public schools? Don’t give me the Supreme Court. The reason Bibles are no longer in the public schools is because we let them take them out of the public schools. You say, ‘Well we can't get them back in.’ Yes we can! Yes we can!” March 2015.
8. Homeschooling: “In a home school…children interact in a rich and complex way with adults and children of other ages all the time. In general, they are better-adjusted, more at ease with adults, more capable of conversation, more able to notice when a younger child needs help or comfort, and in general a lot better socialized than their mass-schooled peers.” April 2006.
7. Early childhood education: “How about early parent intervention with their children? Instead of focusing on the child and getting them out of the home and into an educational setting, how about focusing on the parents and trying to get the parents more interested and involved? Parents are the first teacher.” December 2011.
9. Education and poverty: “If you look at a study that was done by the Brookings Institute back in 2009, they determined that if Americans do three things, they can avoid poverty. Three things: work, graduate from high school, and get married before you have children. Those three things.” January 2012.
10. School choice: “We should have an educational system that serves the customer of the education system. And of course the customer of the education system is the parent. Why? Well, first, because they're responsible for educating their children. They do so from the moment they're born, and in some cases even before, as they sing to them in the womb. But they educate their children. That's their job. Number two, they pay for it. So of course they're directly the customer.” December 2011.
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That’s it for Rick Santorum. George Pataki, the former governor of New York, is expected to announce tomorrow, so he’s up next. Then I’ll cover Lindsey Graham (who is set to declare on June 1), Scott Walker, and anyone else who decides to join the fray. Until then.
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Read what Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, and George Pataki have said about education.
