Ann Romney told Good Housekeeping magazine that the campaign issue closest to her heart is taking on teachers unions and dismantling public education as we know it. In an interview, she told the publication:

I’ve been a First Lady of the State. I have seen what happens to people’s lives if they don’t get a proper education. And we know the answers to that. The charter schools have provided the answers. The teachers’ unions are preventing those things from happening, from bringing real change to our educational system. We need to throw out the system.

This attack on public school teachers echoes one that has been frequently heard in her husband’s stump speeches and debates. In his Friday economic speech, he said “It matters for the child in a failing school, unable to go to the school of his parent’s choosing, because the teacher’s union that funds the President’s campaign opposes school choice.”

Both Romneys have it wrong. President Obama has also consistently supported charter schools as a supplement to traditional schools. In May, he declared in his “Charter School Week” proclamation, “charter schools serve as incubators of innovation in neighborhoods across our country.” Obama has opposed, however, proposals to take taxpayer money out of public schools and to fund private and parochial schools that do not have to achieve the same standards. Romney has embraced a risky school voucher scheme. Studies have also shown that charter schools may not necessarily improve children’s education.

Unlike Mitt Romney, President Obama’s campaign has not taken a single contribution from political action committees — teachers’ unions or otherwise. The National Education Association’s super PAC, NEA Advocacy Fund, has not made a single expenditure on the presidential race. While some individuals employed by the union have donated to the Obama campaign out of their personal funds, those contributions amount to less than one 1/100th of a percent of his total contributions.

Mitt Romney has made the questionable boast that as governor of Massachusetts, he made the state’s public schools number one in the nation. Those schools — with great union teachers — show that standards and certification are part of the solution, not the problem.

One of the major initiatives of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) has been pushing for is the expansion of for-profit and privately managed schools in K-12 education. As part of this push, Christie has been championing a school voucher expansion that would cost the state $825 million to funnel tax dollars to private schools, while at the same time slashing spending for public education, cutting $820 million last year alone.

Last week, Christie announced a new “public-private school pilot program” which would allow “local school boards [to] hand control of some so-called ‘transformation schools’ to education management organizations, possibly including for-profit firms.” Christie designed the new program with Acting Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf, the “former president of the world’s largest for-profit operator of public schools, Edison Schools Inc.”

The New Jersey Star-Ledger notes that Christie actually has a very strong financial tie to Cerf’s for-profit company. The private law firm at which Christie worked as a lobbyist between 1999 and 2001 actually lobbied New Jersey’s government on behalf of Edison Schools:

From 1999 to 2001, Christie was a registered lobbyist at a law firm that lobbied New Jersey government on behalf of Edison Schools, according to filings with the state Election Law Enforcement Commission. While the firm was representing the multinational education company, Chris Cerf was its general counsel.

The firm, Dughi, Hewit and Palatucci, also represented Mosaica Education, a for-profit charter school operator, and the University of Phoenix, a for-profit online university. At the time, the firm listed two lobbyists, Christie and William Palatucci, a longtime political ally of the governor who is a named partner in the firm.

“Many people support their public schools and they are reacting with anger to the idea they should be privatized,” said state Sen. Dick Codey (D), in response to Christie’s proposed education policies. (HT: BlueJersey)

Last week, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) — buoyed by legislators who received hundreds of thousands of dollars of special interest cash — signed into law legislation that would dramatically expand access to school vouchers, which funnel taxpayer dollars into private schools. Scott is doing this despite proposing nearly $3 billion in cuts to public education, meaning that he is essentially transfering money from public education to private education.

On the same day that Scott signed into law his latest attack on public education, Gus Garcia-Roberts of the Miami New Times published a story looking at the case of InterAmerican Christian Academy, a private school located in Doral, Florida. Garcia-Roberts amazingly enrolled at the school and earned a diploma after only eight days of schoolwork and $399:

It began with a poster on a streetlight in downtown Miami: “High School Diploma. (305) 716-0909.” I dialed, and a chipper female voice answered, “Hello. High school.” Eight days and $399 in cash later, at the school’s Doral “campus” — a cramped third-floor office next door to US Lubricant LLC and across the hall from a hair extensions company — I was grinning widely, accepting a framed diploma and an official transcript sporting a 3.41 GPA.

The diplomas that the school is offering are actually getting students admitted to local colleges. The paper found that at “least 88 graduates have used its diplomas and bogus transcripts to gain admittance to Miami Dade College, according to that institution’s registrar.” Remarkably, the state’s Departmenf of Education (DOE), when asked about the school, said that it is powerless to stop it from rewarding diplomas. “If a school like that exists,” said Cherry Etters of the Florida Doe, “we might know about it, but we can’t really do anything.”

As Garcia-Roberts concludes, “There’s no telling how many of Florida’s 1,713 private schools — which educate a third of a million students — are run like InterAmerican. Even as Gov. Rick Scott leads a charge to privatize education on a historic scale, our state’s private schools are among the least regulated in the nation.” Indeed, Florida currently leads the country in “school choice” programs that include tax credits for private schools, voucher programs, and privately managed charter schools. The case of InterAmerican Christian Academy provides a cautionary tale about some of the pitfalls of the proliferation of lightly-regulated or unregulated private schools.