2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney (Photo: Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

Mitt Romney, the GOP presidential candidate who edged out an eight-vote victory over Rick Santorum in the Iowa caucuses, has a long track record on education that includes standardized testing and accountability, charter schools and school vouchers.

Education Week writes:

Romney has a long record and a lot of ideas on education redesign. He’s a fan of standardized testing, and has credited the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 with providing a much-needed boost to accountability. In fact, he was one of the NCLB law’s biggest champions when he ran for president back in 2008. But this year, he has also emphasized the need to step up the state role when it comes to K-12.

The No Child Left Behind Act — signed into law in January 2002 by George W. Bush and supported by the Obama administration — mandated standardized testing that evaluates teachers by score results. In late 2011, the Obama administration offered states “waivers from the most onerous requirements of No Child Left Behind.”

Public school advocates who oppose mandatory standardized testing to determine teacher salaries and state and federal funding for public schools have called for a National Opt Out Day on Jan. 7.

Romney, according to Education Week, “also complimented President Barack Obama’s signature education reform program—Race to the Top—saying the program “had done some good things.”

Race to the Top, “a competitive grant program,” was launched by the Obama administration in 2009 to “encourage and reward States that are creating the conditions for education innovation and reform.”

The program provides funds to states that reform education in four areas: adopting standards and assessments that prepare students for work and college; building data systems that measure student growth and success; recruiting, training, rewarding and retaining effective teachers and principals; and turning around the lowest achieving schools.

Education Week adds that Romney has “called for getting rid of teacher salary schedules, but said he’d like to pay beginning teachers more. He also waded into the culture wars, saying he thinks students should be taught about the advantages of marriage.”

Education News reported last September that Romney also supports charters schools, school vouchers and “currently supports the federal government’s involvement in education and would keep in place the No Child Left Behind act created under President Bush in 2001.”

GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Gage Skidmore)

GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich today announced campaign chairs and co-chairs for all of Florida’s 67 counties.

The Miami Herald reports that GOP state Reps. Michael Bileca and Carlos Trujillo will chair and co-chair (respectively) Gingrich’s campaign committee in Miami-Dade County, and Rep. Debbie Mayfield will chair the Indian River County committee.

Gingrich hired Jose Mallea, former campaign chief for U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, as his Florida campaign director last week.

The Herald cites a Newt 2012 press release issued today that includes other Republicans close to Rubio: Monica Rodriguez, a former aide to Rubio in the Florida House; Karin Hoffman; Sam Rashid, chairman of the Rubio for Senate campaign in Hillsborough County; Dr. Miguel Fana, finance chair for Rubio for Senate; and Tony DiMatteo, the county chair for Rubio in Pinellas County.

The Herald adds that more than 20 “Gingrich backers were on Herman Cain’s team until his campaign fell apart.”

The release adds: “‘Campaigns are won on the ground and through the hard work of grassroots activists such as those who have joined Newt Gingrich’s team in Florida,’ said Deborah Cox Roush, Florida State Director of County Chairs.”

The list of Gingrich supporters in Florida brings together GOP members who in the past have supported among others John McCain and Sarah Palin, former President George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, Charlie Crist, Bill McCollum, Gov. Rick Scott, Rep. Allen West and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Since U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced her decision, reproductive health advocates have expressed disappointment and claim that the decision was based on political calculations, and not on scientific research.

The Center for Reproductive Rights has reopened “its 2005 lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for imposing unnecessary age restrictions on emergency contraceptives, and seek immediate relief to allow broader access to available drugs,” a new press release from the group states.

The group has also sought to add “Sebelius as a defendant in the reopened case for her role in overruling the FDA’s approval of Plan B One-Step last week,” according to the press release.

According to the group:

This fight is far from over. We intend to take every legal step necessary to hold the FDA and this administration accountable for its extraordinary actions to block women from safe, effective emergency contraception,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEP for the Center for Reproductive Rights. “It has been ten years of battling to bring emergency contraception out from behind the pharmacy counter. The FDA cannot simply continue moving the goal posts down the field for women’s reproductive health care.”

While U.S. District Court Judge Edward Korman found the contempt motion moot because late last night, the FDA decided to deny the 2001 Citizen Petition to lift age restrictions on emergency contraceptives— two years after the judge had ordered the agency to fairly reconsider the petition— he proceeded to invite the Center to reopen its 2005 lawsuit and agreed that the Center could add Secretary Sebelius as a defendant.

During the hearing, Judge Korman repeatedly noted the striking similarities between recent events —including last night’s denial of the Citizen Petition and Secretary Sebelius’ unprecedented decision to intervene and block the unrestricted sale of the drug—and the findings in 2009 that the FDA under the Bush Administration had “acted in bad faith and in response to political pressure.”

“The FDA has essentially been holding women’s reproductive health hostage to political calculations,” said Suzanne Novak, the senior staff attorney who argued for the Center for Reproductive Rights.

The Washington Post reports today that “Korman said he was willing to hear arguments over whether the agency should have allowed the sale of the morning-after pill to girls younger than 17 without a prescription, and he instructed advocacy groups to file the appropriate legal motions.”

Obama said during “The Beginning of the End of AIDS,” an online conference organized by ONE International, “a grassroots advocacy and campaigning organization that fights extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa”:

Today, I’m announcing some new commitments. We’re committing an additional $15 million for the Ryan White program that supports care provided by HIV medical clinics across the country. Let’s keep their doors open so they can keep saving lives. And we’re committing an additional $35 million for state AIDS Drug Assistance Programs. Now, the federal government can’t do this alone. So I’m also calling on state governments, pharmaceutical companies, and private foundations, to do their part to help Americans get access to all the life-saving treatments.

Florida has the longest AIDS Drug Assistance Program waiting list in the United States. According to National Alliance of State and territorial AIDS Directors, “as of November 17, 2011, there were 6,595 individuals” (.pdf) on ADAP “waiting lists in 12 states.” More than 3,200 of those people live in Florida.

ADAP provides life saving medications for the treatment of HIV and AIDS for people who cannot afford to pay because they are unemployed, uninsured or underinsured. States have implemented a variety of cost containment measures that include waiting lists since 2010, when ADAPs began facing an ongoing funding crisis.

“With bipartisan support, we reauthorized the Ryan White CARE Act,” Obama said today. “And, as I signed that bill, I was so proud to also announce that my Administration was ending the ban that prohibited people with HIV from entering America. Because of that step, next year, for the first time in two decades, we will host the International AIDS conference. So we’ve done a lot over the past three years.”

The president added: “We know that treatment is also prevention. And today we’re setting a new target of helping six million people get on treatment by the end of 2013. That’s two million more people than our original goal.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vital Signs November report issued this week indicates that in the U.S. alone “about 1.2 million people are living with HIV” and “about 240,000 don’t know they are infected.”

Vital Signs adds that “each year, about 50,000 people get infected with HIV in the US. Getting an HIV test is the first step to finding out if you have HIV and getting medical care.”

The National HIV/AIDS Strategy, approved in 2010, highlights among other measures the need for increasing access to treatment and focusing on HIV prevention programs.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., spoke at the ONE conference panel, saying HIV/AIDS “is a good example of how government can work with other institutions in society and around the world to be a positive difference maker.”

Rubio added Democrats and Republicans agree that “the U.S. was a great country in the 2oth century” and “some of the debate that’s happening now is whether the United States will remain a great country in the 21st century.”

The senator acknowledged that “we need to recognize that there are still thousands of people in the United States on waiting lists to receive medication, certainly in my home state of Florida that is the case.”

Rubio concluded that the “economy will be even tougher if people around the world are dying, can’t enter the workforce and can’t be our business partners in economic trade and development.”

Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., founding co-chair of the first ever congressional HIV/AIDS caucus, highlighted today the need to increase HIV testing at the domestic level, adding, “We need a domestic PEPFAR; that’s what we are working on.”

PEPFAR, the United States President Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, was created to “help save the lives of those suffering from HIV/AIDS around the world.”

Photo: President Barack Obama (Flickr/The White House)

Scott acknowledges in his statement that Florida has the third highest rate of HIV infection in the U.S., “with 135,000 Floridians living with the disease.”

The Florida GLBT Democratic Caucus points out in a written statement that Florida:

• [has] the greatest number of people living with HIV/AIDS incarcerated in a state prison;
• [has] the greatest number of people on a wait list to access HIV-medications through the state’s AIDS Drug  Assistance Program (ADAP)
• [has] a greater number of people living with HIV/AIDS who are victim to HIV-criminalization and being arrested because Florida has laws that are outdated and not based on modern day science;
• falls short in its in HIV/AIDS care, treatment and prevention programs;
• bans evidence-based programs like syringe-exchange programs, despite the fact they are proven to decrease the  number of new HIV and Hepatitis C-infections;
• ignores the realities of LGBT-youth who are most at risk of infection by failing to establish a minimum state standard for sex education, inclusive of LGBT-people;
• fails to have a strategy to effectively reduce the number of HIV-infections, reduce health disparities or improve access to care and health outcomes for People Living with HIV.

Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said this week “we have the tools to stop HIV from spreading in the individual patient and we have the tools to greatly reduce its spread in communities.”

Frieden added that a recent study shows “that treatment for HIV can prevent spread of HIV to others. For too many years there has been sometimes friction between HIV treatment and HIV prevention, and this study brings home that treatment is prevention, that treatment is essential to prevention.”

A public service announcement launched today by the National Minority AIDS Council and Gilead Science Inc. states: “HIV is not the same epidemic it was 30 years ago, but it is far from over,” telling viewers to “take the 20 minutes to get tested”:

The ADAP Crisis Task Force (PDF) and Gilead Sciences announced today that they reached new terms “that extend additional voluntary discounts and rebates for most Gilead products purchased by state AIDS Drug Assistance Programs (ADAPs).” This at a time when Florida is home to almost 50 percent (more than 3,200 people (PDF)) of all the individuals on AIDS Drug Assistance Program waiting lists in the U.S.

ADAP provides medications for the treatment of HIV and AIDS for people who cannot afford to pay because they are unemployed, uninsured or underinsured. States have implemented a variety of cost containment measures that include waiting lists since 2010, when an ADAPs began facing an ongoing funding crisis.

According to politicalpartytime.org, the fundraiser was hosted by the Van Scoyoc Associates Political Action Commitee and Marlin “Buzz” Hefti, vice president of Van Scoyoc since 2002 and former principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs in the George W. Bush administration.

Van Scoyoc Associates is a D.C. lobbying firm that “provides companies, nonprofits, universities, research centers, towns, cities, and other organizations with a full menu of services to achieve their goals,” with an extensive list of clients in the United States, including Florida.

According to Open Secrets, West has raised, as of Sept. 30, more than $4 million for his 2012 reelection bid.

A letter (.pdf) signed by 20 organizations states:

As representatives of the millions of students with disabilities, low-income students, students of color, English-language learners and migrant students who are studying in our nation’s schools, both boys and girls, we cannot support the Elementary and Secondary Education Reauthorization Act of 2011 at this time. The bill’s weak accountability system excludes the vast majority of children we represent, and is a major barrier to our organizations’ support.

The letter adds that under the proposed Elementary and Secondary Education Reauthorization Act of 2011:

States would not have to set any measurable achievement and progress targets or even graduation rate goals. They would be required to take action to improve only a small number of low-performing schools. In schools which aren’t among the states’ very worst performing, huge numbers of low-achieving students will slip through the cracks.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that the Senate committee proposed “dismantling a controversial accountability system set up” by No Child Left Behind.

The Monitor adds: “The proposed new law retains a historic federal requirement that schools test students annually in math and reading – and publish the results of those tests, disaggregated by race, ethnicity, and poverty.”

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was first passed in 1965 and amended by the No Child Left Behind Act proposed by President George W. Bush in 2001 and signed into law in 2002. Education Week describes No Child Left Behind as “a comprehensive education plan that would hold states accountable for student performance based on annual assessments, but would give schools more flexibility in meeting federal regulations.”

No Child Left Behind content includes annual tests, vouchers, education technology, charter schools, school choice and teacher quality — all central to the education agenda already in place in Florida because of former Gov. Jeb Bush and that has the support of current Gov. Rick Scott.

The Florida Department of Education writes that No Child Left Behind

recognizes what truly makes a difference in providing a quality education. It calls for a highly qualified teacher in the core subjects in every classroom; the use of proven, research-based instructional methods; and timely information and options for parents. Schools that underperform are held accountable, providing their students with free tutoring or transfer to a better performing public school.

According to RH Reality Check, the House GOP’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education spending bill cuts funding for the “Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative from $110 million to just $20 million”:

The new initiative, according to the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), funds a total of 102 grantees in 36 states and is set to reach over 800,000 young people annually. It began in FY 2010 and was designed to support “medically accurate and age-appropriate programs to reduce teen pregnancy and underlying behavioral risk factors.” Many saw this as the Obama Administration’s answer to the Bush-era investment in abstinence-only-until-marriage programs which did not work. Not only would the cuts force the government to drastically reduce the number of grantees receiving money, the proposed bill also removes the important requirement that all programs be evidence-based, which disregards the intent of the initiative and makes room for abstinence-only programs to apply.

… The bill also resurrects the Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) grant program. CBAE was always considered the strictest of the funding streams for abstinence-only programs in part because the money went straight from the Department of Health and Human Services to community-based organizations bypassing the states which were often more relaxed about the definition of what constitutes an abstinence-only program. Funding for CBAE was finally eliminated in Fiscal Year 2010. In this proposed bill, it once again would receive $20 million.

The Florida Legislature has been prioritizing sex education in the state in a similar manner, which has led to disappointing results.

Legislators turned away federal grants awarded to the state for comprehensive sex education, while accepting funds mostly for abstinence-only sex education. Some of the abstinence education funds have gone to local programs that have been shown to place a very limited emphasis on health specifics.

Florida has made progress reducing teen pregnancy in the past few years. However, a number of counties are facing a persistent problem with high teen pregnancy rates. Over 60 percent of the counties in Florida with the highest birth rate among teens who are between the ages of 15 and 19 did not manage to decrease their rates in 2009. In 2009, Florida was sixth in the nation for teen birth rates.

Many comprehensive sex education advocates in the state have pointed to the state’s focus on abstinence education for the high rates of teen pregnancy.

The same proposed GOP House spending bill also makes big cuts to reproductive health services and defunds Planned Parenthood, a chain of women’s health clinics that provides care to women who are uninsured or under-insured.

The GOP presidential candidates and Florida Republicans disagree on many issues, but they mostly agree that K-12 education policies should be designed at the local level and that the federal government should play a limited role.

According to Education Week:

The Republicans running for president may be working to stand out from the pack on some issues, but it already appears that most of the nine current candidates are largely united when it comes to K-12 policy: They want to dramatically shrink the federal role.

Some candidates, including Reps. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Ron Paul of Texas, are outspoken in saying they want to see the U.S. Department of Education scrapped.

Mitt Romney talks about jobs, health care, fiscal responsibility — issues that Rick Perry lists, adding national security. Michele Bachmann also addresses affordable energy and not increasing the debt ceiling. Newt Gingrich adds protecting life and religious liberty to the list of issues. But all of their campaign websites say nothing on education.

Herman Cain, the recent winner of the Florida straw poll, touts leadership of local municipalities, school choice and expanding school voucers and charter schools, while limiting the “federal government’s control over” education.

Ron Paul limits his campaign website education comments to the importance of home-schooling.

Education Week adds that Perry and Romney “are more nuanced on some education issues but have pumped up their rhetoric around getting the federal government out of schools.” The publication highlights the fact that ”nearly every candidate is largely disparaging” of the No Child Left Behind Act, which “became the centerpiece of GOP President George W. Bush’s domestic legacy.”

According to the Florida Department of Education, No Child Left Behind ”recognizes what truly makes a difference in providing a quality education. It calls for a highly qualified teacher in the core subjects in every classroom; the use of proven, research-based instructional methods; and timely information and options for parents. Schools that underperform are held accountable, providing their students with free tutoring or transfer to a better performing public school.”

Former Gov. Jeb Bush has led education reform based on standardized testing, accountability, teacher merit pay, school choice and charter schools through his Foundation for Excellence in Education and the Foundation for Florida’s Future. Rick Scott, the current Florida governor, has followed in Bush’s footsteps and supported the same type of education reform.

Bush has said, “I think you’re getting more dynamic results by having the states play the policy role and holding local school districts accountable for actual learning,” but he recently appeared along with President Obama to show they have common ground on education reform.

In the state House, state Rep. Larry Ahern, R-St. Petersburg, and state Rep. Carlos Trujillo, R-Miami, introduced the “Florida Unborn Victims of Violence Act.” State Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey introduced the bill in the Senate.

House Bill 137 amends state statutes to say that “vehicular homicide … is the killing of a human being, or the killing of an unborn child, by any injury to the mother, caused by the operation of a motor vehicle by another in a reckless manner likely to cause the death of, or great bodily harm to, another.” The offense would be considered a second-degree felony, and would not require that the person know the woman involved was pregnant.

Such “Unborn Victims of Violence” bills, or fetal homicide bills, are championed by many anti-abortion groups, including National Right to Life. Ahern tells The Florida Independent that the bill he introduced was handed to him by the Florida Catholic Conference.

The Florida Catholic Conference has been successful at lobbying for stricter abortion restrictions in the state. This year, the group gave policy-makers an amendment to the state’s Medicaid overhaul that allows providers to opt out of providing “family planning services” for “moral or religious” reasons. Advocates for women’s health care have said the policy could create more barriers to health care access for low-income women.

In 2004, anti-abortion groups successfully lobbied federal lawmakers to pass the Federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which President George W. Bush signed. The bill was originally drafted in part by National Right to Life. The law, however, only applies to federal and military crimes. As of May 2011, 27 states have approved laws that are similar to the federal law, recognizing fetuses at all stages of development as victims.

Sheila Hopkins, associate director of social issues for Florida Catholic Conference, says the new bill revises Florida statutes’ “outdated definition” of life. She says the bill would make the state’s definitions consistent with “military statutes and current science.”

According to Ahern, the Catholic Conference has been asking legislators to pass such a law for a few years. Ahern says the bill would “more accurately define life” and would make sure that the life “of an unborn child is more protected.”

The attempt to “define” life is what typically draws opposition from reproductive rights and civil liberties advocates.

In 2003, during discussions over the proposed federal law, the American Civil Liberties Union said in a press release that the law “would be the first federal law to recognize a fetus at any stage of development, from conception forward, as an independent ‘victim’ of a crime with legal rights distinct from the woman who has been harmed by a violent criminal act.”

According to the group’s 2003 press release:

“Anti-choice forces claim this is simply a greater deterrent to violent offenders, but there can be no doubt that it’s a cunning attempt to separate the fetus from the woman in the eyes of the law and public opinion,” said Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington National Office. “Were this legislation to become law, it could become part of the larger effort to undermine a woman’s right to direct the course of her own reproductive life.”

Last year, North Carolina passed a similar bill, which the ACLU of North Carolina pointed out was “described on the House floor as recognizing the fetus as a person.”

Ahern, however, says that the debate has more to do with updating the terms used in a courtroom with “current science,” and not challenging state or federal abortion laws. “I hope that we will be a little bit smarter with our science,” he says.