NJ Education Report

Everyone’s tweeting Gov. Mitt Romney’s comments to NBC’s Brian Williams about early education. Politics K-12 has the write-up. In an interview at NBC’s Education Nation Summit, Romney said that it was “extraordinarily important” for one parent to remain home with young schoolchildren (although he didn’t address the economic impossibility of this scenario in lower-income families), emphasized his opposition to  federal support for national common core standards, and said that unions shouldn’t be able to contribute to political campaigns. 

Here’s one comment Romney made regarding  the importance of parental support that isn’t getting much notice:

“That’s one of the reasons why I proposed in my state that before you could send your child to go to kindergarten, that the parents had to go to a training program to learn about the impact of education. And again, I wasn’t able to get it done. It’s something I wanted to do and something, I think that has some merit.”

Really? The Governor wants to require that kindergarten registration be contingent on parental participation in “training programs?” Talk about government interference, not to mention erecting more barriers to education.