Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker put the dollar back in his pocket but the shutters on the cameras at the front of the stage kept clicking, fast and loud like a gaggle of crickets. Walker was deftly doubling down on an idea that had dominated the 2015 New Hampshire Education Summit — a day-long education gathering hosted by The Seventy Four and sponsored by the American Federation for Children that was held Wednesday outside Manchester, New Hampshire — where six Republican policymakers came to give in-depth summaries of their K-12 education positions.

You’d have to be under a rock not to know, but to sum up the day’s declaration in six words: Local control is the best control. (Watch the full NH Education Summit: Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich and Scott Walker talk K-12 with Campbell Brown)

Each political party has their own whipping boy proxy that best embodies this notion (and you can see it among the Democrats in what Randi Weingarten calls the “test and punish” dogma of standards and assessments) but at Wednesday’s GOP summit it was about Common Core — which has become shorthand for national standards, the U.S. Department of Education as an agent of oppressive regulation and coercion, and a bunch of other things. Common Core is a rare instance of seeming agreement among the hard left and the hard right … they both hate it (even if for different reasons).

Governors Bush and Kasich remain supportive of the concept if not the name while the other attendees — with varying levels of efficacy — are walking away from them like the hero in a Michael Bay movie just after the big explosion.

Personally, I’m on the role of the federal government (or government broadly) where regulation and implementation are concerned, but I am highly skeptical of centralized bureaucracies. Carly Fiorina — who spent more time talking about the nature of regulation and innovation than education — might have summed up my feelings best when she noted that innovation is about “risk taking and mistake making” and that when you “give a bureaucracy an inch it takes a mile.”

But I am absolutely NOT sold on this reasoning that “local control” is a panacea for the ills of Washington’s overregulation. And it shocks me, given some of the examples we’ve seen, that the candidates would sell it that way.

Consider what you might describe as the radical localism of a place like Newark, New Jersey, where local control (the state has run Newark for over 20 years and pays the lion’s share of the school budgets) is “the” community issue. Things are tense enough there that it was common to see drawings of former superintendent Cami Anderson scrawled across her face hanging in the window of the CWA office downtown. Governor Christie’s picture, more recently, was seen hanging in the window next to Anderson’s receiving the same treatment. Is giving this sort of local establishment more power really the way to go?

And then there’s Missouri, where the triggering of a state-law transfer provision catalyzed by the Normandy school district’s (which is almost entirely black) loss of its accreditation unleashed what I will kindly describe as “the worse angels” of the folks in nearby Francis Howell (which is mostly white). Local control, taxation, property wealth concerns, community cohesion, and safety were offered as the primary reasons to oppose the transfer of students from Normandy. But when people start talking about “knives, guns, metal detectors, and test score drops” you don’t need to be a Navajo code talker to understand what they really mean: those poor black kids will ruin “our” public schools. It’s all very David Simon-esque.

And let’s not forget that “local control,” which is to say traditional school board governance where the teachers unions have an outsized ability to put their own folks in charge, is precisely what we’ve been trying to get away from as “reformers.” To add some more nuance, I think lots of folks on Team Change like local control when it’s “parent control” in the form of more school choice (which all the candidates support). But school board elections in particular—which the former head of The Fordham Institute Checker Finn once described as “deeply corrupting of the democratic process”—created the highly uneven system of public education we’re all trying to improve. Given the history here, and the tense relationships with teachers unions that many of the candidates (Walker, Christie, and Bush in particular) have experienced, the cry of “onward” for local control seems like running backwards, or to borrow from Governor Christie, like “arming the palace guard” instead of empowering the revolutionaries.

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Common Core has its issues (as a proxy and as a policy on its own) but I’m not sold on the wholesale notion of forcing the federal government out of education and exclusively empowering the locals. And that’s not even because I don’t think competition among states, or states as “laboratories for innovation” are bad things … and it’s absolutely not because I think the federal government is a perfect implementer.

It’s because, given the history of No Child Left Behind and its important legacy of shining the spotlight on student failure which states routinely covered up in the absence of any federal push, I think local “accountability” in an era of no federal intervention is flatly “no accountability.” The , because the states, in the absence of Washington calling for some rational transparency and, if not describing, at least mandating that there should be sanctions for failure (though even this seems to be a bridge too far) aren’t going to do these things wholesale. Sure, Governor Bush had a breakthrough education policy agenda that has shown great gains for the kids who needed them the most, but for every strong-willed, tough, committed wonk like Bush there’s someone who thinks letting parents know their schools aren’t up to snuff is morally and civically untenable. Without the federal role and, indeed, some level of federal command, we’ve got nothing on this.

Running for office is more about what you say than what you’ll do. And, yes, primary voters of all stripes are a prickly bunch (I happen to be one waiting to chime in on the other side of the aisle). But this chatter — brilliantly cloaked in the language of local sovereignty — is … unsettling, and it troubles me deeply to hear the positive aspects of the federal role dismissed so cavalierly. Maybe the candidates know better and are just posturing. I certainly hope so.

Fans of Game of Thrones will recognize the themes behind this debate. In one exceptional scene of the HBO series, scheming Petyr Baelish summarizes his worldview, claiming .” But Cersei Lannister, a royal who is woefully detached from her citizens, but who controls the money and the soldiers, sees it a whole lot differently: “POWER is power.”

But in the case of education, aren’t both of these sentiments true? Don’t we need to both empower families and leaders at the local level AND have a federal government that acts as an honest broker, ensuring there’s some semblance of consistency across districts and states?

And more urgently: Can a candidate who actually gets this nuance survive the Republican primary melee?

K-12 education in America is in a crisis, Bush said.

“If you focus on outcomes, we’re in a heap of trouble,” he said at the event at Londonderry High School in Manchester, New Hampshire.  (See Bush's full conversation below, starting at 11:30)

Only a third of students graduate from high school prepared to enter the workforce or begin college without remedial courses. “Who in their right mind would consider that a successful outcome?” he asked.

The federal government, he said, can be a “catalyst for meaningful reform” and should put a greater focus on outcomes, but should otherwise generally stay out of education, Bush said.

Bush, one of only two of the 17 GOP candidates to back the Common Core State Standards, emphasized that he’s for high standards, but they don’t necessarily have to be common. “Kids are smarter than we give them credit for,” he said.

Again, he said, states should be in charge. “States ought to drive this. There should be no federal involvement in curriculum, content or standards for sure, directly or indirectly,” he said to applause from the audience.

New Hampshire state lawmakers passed a bill — quickly vetoed by Gov. Maggie Hassan — that would have prohibited the state from requiring any district to adopt the Common Core.

Improving education “has got to be the highest priority of the next president of the United States,” said Bush, the former governor of Florida who is perhaps the candidate most steeped in the issue. He was in the forefront as governor bringing public school choice to Florida and was founder of the Foundation for Excellence in Education. (Check out The Seventy Four’s presidential candidate baseball cards and a preview on Bush’s education record.)

As the economy becomes more automated and competitive, entry-level workers need more and more skills, he said, standing up from his chair to emphasize the increasingly high knowledge barriers to entering the job market.

“I’m on fire on this stuff, because I believe this is the way you create a right to rise society more than any other thing, and for our country to succeed we cannot just cast away huge numbers of kids without them having the chance to achieve earned success,” Bush said.

Tests – which Bush said should be required at the federal level but left to states to figure out specifics – are essential to measure those gains.  

“There should be a test to measure how a child is doing and it should be based on learning gains. The whole focus here is a year’s worth of knowledge in a year’s time,” he said. “We should be all in on that subject. When we neglect that, the kids that are left behind are the kids in poverty, African-American kids, Hispanic kids, and then we blame it on the social circumstances of their life. And that is what a former president [Bush’s brother, George W. Bush] called the soft bigotry of low expectations, and we should reject that out of hand.”

Title I funds, which help low-income students, and grants given under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which requires schools to provide appropriate educations to students with disabilities, should be more flexible for states, he said.

Bush said he backs a provision in the House’s No Child Left Behind rewrite that would allow Title I funds to follow children as they move among schools. Now the money flows to the schools based on the total number of poor children. President Obama and congressional Democrats have said the provision, which only allows funds to travel to other public or charter schools, is a non-starter. Republicans in Congress have said the funds should go to private and religious schools, too.

Efforts to expand preschool programs, too, should happen at the state not federal level, Bush said. Federal early learning funds, including Head Start, should be given to states in block grants to do with as they please, he said.

When asked about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s endorsement by the American Federation of Teachers, Bush said it was because she told the union, “Don’t worry about me.” He contrasted that with his own dealings with the teachers union in Florida, saying he had "tire marks on my forehead.”  

He asked  “Can we give a little space to kids to be able to learn?” as opposed to being crowded out by the economic interests involved in education. He championed merit pay and fostering teacher effectiveness.

“To make sure the teachers are rewarded for a job well done but this shouldn’t be lifetime employment, we ought to be paying teachers more when they get successful learning gains consistently and incompetent teachers shouldn’t be in the classrooms,” Bush said.

Photo by Brian Jodice

See our complete coverage of the 2015 New Hampshire Education Summit

Manchester, New Hampshire (See full coverage of our 2015 NH Education Summit)

“What doesn’t work are big bureaucratic programs from Washington, D.C. What doesn’t work are people spending money on mandated programs, either at the state or federal level,” she said, saying instead that the focus should be on innovation at the local level.

As president, Fiorina said she would take power away from herself and devolve it to local communities and schools. In addition to the federal government, she sharply criticized teachers unions — saying they “personify the status quo” — but at the same time she raised questions about over-testing, echoing criticisms voiced by many teachers and their unions.

Throughout the discussion Fiorina criticized the Department of Education, saying it gets in the way and spends too much money. (About 10 percent of education spending the federal government, with the remainder coming from states and districts.) She said that among the first things she would do is audit the department, saying, “We don’t know what the Department of Education does any more.”

The department does issue detailed annual .

Fiorina chastised the Obama administration’s Raise to the Top initiative, and its support for the Common Core standards. The rhetoric was a sharp departure from Fiorina’s when she ran for Senate in California in 2010. At the time, she praised Race to the Top as putting in “place some critically important accountability measures” which include “internationally benchmarked standards and assessments.” When asked about these statements, Fiorina said she continued to support high academic standards, but opposes “a federally mandated program” that she said restricts how teachers teach.

(See also: The Seventy Four’s presidential candidate baseball cards and our campaign preview of Fiorina and education policy.)

Fiorina also argued that the standards have turned into “a program that honestly is being overly influenced by companies that have something to gain, testing companies and textbook companies.”

Also, she said, the influence of the federal bureaucracy had led to over-testing: “Teachers feel they have to teach to the test and kids feel they have to learn to the test.” Through the Race to the Top program and No Child Left Behind waivers, the Obama administration has incentivized the creation of new teacher evaluation systems, which in many cases require a battery of new assessments.

She praised a broad-based education: “Children have to be exposed to art, to music, to philosophy, to history.” Education should prepare students to become citizens, she said — adding that in fact, maybe all students should take the U.S. citizenship test.   

Fiorina backs the version of the re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed by the U.S. House, specifically because it would give more autonomy to states in using federal money and allow parents to opt out of standardized tests. Separate reauthorization bills were recently passed by both the House and Senate; a conference committee will attempt to hash out the differences.

Fiorina said that education reform should be bi-partisan, but argued, “The Democrat party is on the wrong side of this issue.” She claimed that too often teachers unions have blocked meaningful reform, and stopped the expansion of school choice. Fiorina also said that spending more money will not improve outcomes.

(Some research finds that additional resources can benefit students.)

She praised a variety of education initiatives — New Orleans’ school choice system, performance pay for teachers, school vouchers, the — but did not say what, if anything, she would do to expand these programs as president. Her emphasis on local control and reducing the federal bureaucracy suggested that a Fiorina administration would do less at the federal level, not more, to improve education.

“We can have the most creative and smartest people in the world,” Fiorina said, “but not if we keep deciding that the federal government knows how to innovate, because it does not."

Photo by Brian Jodice

See our complete coverage of the 2015 New Hampshire Education Summit

You can also see a breakdown of the presenters’ education platforms, and read through the online reactions to the Summit. Here are complete videos of the conversations that defined the 2015 New Hampshire Education Summit (in chronological order):

Gov. Jeb Bush:

CEO Carly Fiorina:

Gov. John Kasich:

Gov. Scott Walker:

Gov. Bobby Jindal:

Gov. Chris Christie: