Dana Goldstein, a left-of-center education reporter, writes a fair-minded assessment of the where the major Republican presidential candidates stand on K-12 education. Her basic point is that the rise of the Tea Party has led many Republicans to distance themselves from past involvement in federal efforts to promote a national standards and accountability agenda. This strikes me as a reasonable assessment.

Recently, Rick Hess of AEI, a champion of structural, supply-side reform of K-12, and Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford, known (fairly or otherwise) as a critic of union-skeptical choice-based reform movement, joined forces to offer a modest, minimalist approach for federal K-12 policy that might serve as a useful framework for Republicans disinclined to wade too deeply into what has traditionally been a state and local concern. No revolutions from above, as “the federal government is simply not well situated to make schools and teachers improve,” but support for transparency, basic research, and some limited use of voluntary, competitive grants to encourage innovative policy-making and to (help) break political bottlenecks.