Sunday Political Talk Show interviews during 2015: on Education

Donald Trump: Cut Department of Education and Common Core

TRUMP: We're going to be cutting tremendous amounts of money and waste and fraud and abuse. But, no, I'm not cutting services, but I am cutting spending. But I may cut Department of Education-- Common Core is a very bad thing. I think that it should be local education. If you look at a Jeb Bush and some of these others, they want children to be educated by Washington, D.C. bureaucrats.

Chris Christie: Teachers unions are not for education of our children

A: The national teachers union--because they're not for education of our children. They're for greater membership, greater benefits, and greater pay for their members. And they are the single most destructive force in public education in America. I have been saying that since 2009. I have got the scars to show it. But I'm never going to stop saying it, because they never change their stripes.

Carly Fiorina: School choice is the only way to fix education

Donald Trump: Common Core is a disaster

Chris Christie: Free college is ludicrous, but we can reduce the cost

CHRISTIE: My alternative is we have to start to put market forces on these college costs. I pay for two college tuitions right now, and I can tell you that they're the most opaque bills you'll ever see in your life. If you got that bill for dinner with that little of that detail, you wouldn't pay it. You'd send it back. Yet for college, we pay it.

Q: What would you do as president?

CHRISTIE: Universities need to start telling us exactly what they're spending the money we give them on. And secondly, we need to unbundle those costs. So if a child doesn't want to pay for all of these different things in college, they should be able to select it. That will tell colleges what they don't need to provide and we shouldn't have to pay for. These ideas will help to contain costs, but the concept of free college for everybody -- there's nothing free in this world. We need to earn what we get.

Carly Fiorina: Common Core limits choices; vouchers allow choices

A: Our education system is in trouble, but demonstrably, giving more money to the Department of Education, as we have been doing for almost 40 years, doesn't improve the state of education. Common Core has become a nationally driven set of bureaucratic standards that teach teachers how to teach, that teach children how to learn, and what we need is to provide more parental choice so that our kids anywhere they live have a real chance, and Common Core doesn't help us do that.

Q: So what should be done?

A: We know that the most important thing about a child's education is to have a great teacher in front of the classroom and a lot of choice and accountability with parents, whether that's at home or with vouchers or charters or parochial schools. And Common Core, unfortunately, limits parents' choices. It limits the creativity a teacher can apply in the classroom. So, it will over time limit our children's chances.

Scott Walker: Tuition cap on University of Wisconsin; then reform tenure

WALKER: What I'm doing with the University of Wisconsin system, is I'm giving them the same sorts of tools I gave to public education four years ago: the same critics said that was going to devastate public education. I took away seniority in tenure and now, we can hire and fire based on merit. We can pay based on performance. We can put the best and the brightest in our classrooms

Q: But U.W. says they're going to have to raise tuition on students.

WALKER: But they're not. We have a two-year tuition freeze.

Q: But after that?

WALKER: Going forward, we have a cap on it tied to inflation. And so, we will be much more affordable than just about any other campus in America. We believe it's not about austerity, it's about reform. The reforms that worked before will work here.

Marco Rubio: Professor of political science at Florida International U.

Rubio's lectures reveal a tactical mind that explores "targets of opportunity" for both parties. He discusses demographic slices of the electorate as if they are pieces on the Electoral College chessboard.

Rubio explains the GOP's dilemma like this: "Basically, Barack Obama got eight out of 10 votes from the fastest-growing groups in America. And Mitt Romney got 90 percent of his votes from the group that is diminishing in terms of its overall percentage of the population.

Imagine, he tells his students at one point, that "despite your message, you can't get through [to minority voters] because they're convinced you hate them. That's going to be a problem."

Mike Bloomberg: Push Voc-Ed: plumbers earn more than Harvard grads

Bloomberg said the poor in the U.S. need better education. By the end of his life, he said he's going to write a book about why the poor remain poor. "It's always the poor that get screwed," said the founder of Bloomberg L.P.

Scott Walker: High school football is ok if practiced responsibly

WALKER: They did. Yes, wide receivers.

Q: You love football. But when you look at the concussions, when you look at what's happened, can you imagine saying to your grandchildren, 'yes, go do that'?

WALKER: I think in a state like Wisconsin, we actually have pretty good standards. My kids, even a few years ago, one of them had an early concussion, and was out for 10 days. They wouldn't let him back in until he had a full checkup. That actually should have happened a long time ago, and I'm hopeful other states around the country will do that. Because I think a lot of us enjoy football.

Q: If you were out there in Arizona?

WALKER: I'd be in Phoenix watching the Packers take on the Patriots, but I still think, like anything in life, there's ways of doing it that are responsible, and I still think football can be responsible in America.

Mike Huckabee: I'm against Common Core; it differs from its original intent

HUCKABEE: No, I'm absolutely against what Common Core has come to stand for. But it's totally different than what it was intended to be. The original intent, which was conceived out of the Achieve Movement from the mid-'90s that a number of governors, most of them Republicans, put forth to keep state standards, not letting the federal government get in control. And the whole idea was let the states decide the standards, but have high standards. So that was the genesis of it. Common Core originally only dealt with two things: language arts and math. That was it. And nothing, nothing in curriculum.

Jeb Bush: 1994: cut Department of Education from 2,000 to 50 staff