The Bushes have what you could call a family tradition: Finding a position on education that is out of sync with the conservative movement.
As a matter of politics, this worked well for George H.W. Bush, as well as his son George W. Bush. It allowed them to appear non-ideological, bipartisan. They could claim to be common-sense moderates on an issue that is important to a certain kind of independent voter.
But it may not work for Jeb.
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The conservative movement has traditionally wanted to decrease or eliminate the federal government's role in education. The libertarian side wants to get rid of the Department of Education not only because it sees it as a meddling and clumsy bureaucracy, but also because it dislikes public education generally. The "moral majority" wants it gone because it sees the department as a vehicle for destroying local control of education and imposing liberal values through the schools.
The Bushes had other ideas. They wanted to use the federal government to create standards and accountability in American education. This appeals to both the liberal and conservative mind. Liberals go along because they view education as the motor of social and economic progress. Raising the standards will hopefully create better results. On the other side, conservatives are sympathetic to regulation when it cracks the whip on teacher's unions and public schools.
When the moral majority was baying for the abolition of the Department of Education, George H. W. Bush was promoting Washington D.C.'s role in supporting the states. He convened 49 state governors for an education summit in 1989, and in his 1990 State of the Union address he said, "Real improvement in our schools is not simply a matter of spending more: It's a matter of asking more — expecting more — of our schools, our teachers, of our kids, of our parents, and ourselves." He also outlined ambitious goals for American kids, including beating the Japanese in math by the year 2000.
The first Bush administration didn't do much in terms of legislation. It was high-minded rhetoric without the blowback of implementation.
When George W. Bush came into office, however, he hammered out a deal with Ted Kennedy for No Child Left Behind, which presumed that data and financial pressure could force schools to improve their performance. This was when Bush was talking up the "soft bigotry of low expectations," a popular and effective line.
But NCLB had problems. It had no way of allocating more financial resources to schools that were failing. It did nothing to close the achievement gaps between races. And 15 years later the results indicate that NCLB has only proven what educators knew already, that standardized test scores correlate with family income. Congress is already looking at ways to reform NCLB.
Enter Jeb Bush, who is the most prominent Republican champion of Common Core education reforms. Like NCLB, Common Core presents itself as a standards-based reform. And its initial conception had a lot to recommend it. Common Core aimed at making sure America's secondary schools graduated kids who were ready for careers or college. It actually looked like a move away from rote-testing and toward traditional notions of literacy and numeracy. These were loose standards, allowing for local flexibility.
However, as with any standards-based reform, curriculum entrepreneurs have attached themselves to it. As a result, almost anything novel that comes home in a kid's backpack and confuses mom and dad has been promptly posted online and mocked alongside the name Common Core. In a sense, precisely because Common Core disavows being a curriculum, any idiotic thing said to be in "compliance" with it can be blamed on Common Core — and that's a problem for Jeb Bush.
It's also a problem in that the parents who seem to take education most seriously as a voting issue are drifting further into general cultural distrust of central authority. We see this trend in medicine. At the extreme end are anti-Vaxxers. But right there in the middle are a generation of parents who scan WebMD and question their doctor's orders.
The information age is one of auto-didacts, and many parents from the left and right are more interested in designing an education for their kids without interference from Washington. And so we see a proliferation of independent schools, classical education experiments, home-schools, unschoolers, Montessori methods, and even religious schools that want little to do with their local religious authorities. Voters who take education policy seriously overwhelmingly oppose Common Core.
Common Core and standards-based reform is irrelevant to these people, or seen as a source of mischief and a threat, one funded by distant billionaires like Bill Gates.
Whereas the two previous Bush presidents could run on a message of uplift and high standards, promising future benefits for our nation's children, Jeb will be in town hall meetings where citizens will confront him with the most nonsensical questions posed to third graders — and ask him to answer for them. It will be a test that he is destined to fail.
