WASHINGTON – Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney opened a new front late Wednesday in his fight against President Barack Obama, accusing him of presiding over a failing US education system that is in the grip of union bosses who refuse to accept reforms.

In a rare diversion from his campaign focus on the weak US economy, Romney laid out an education plan in a speech that represented his most overt appeal to date to Hispanic voters who have largely sided with the Democratic incumbent.

Although he trails Obama by a huge margin among Hispanics, Romney’s address to a Hispanic business group avoided mentioning a top priority for them: how to overhaul the country’s immigration system.

Romney said millions of American children are getting a “third-world education,” and offered proposals that he said would reward teachers for their results instead of their seniority. And he would give parents greater choice of where to send their children to school and take other steps to reduce the influence of powerful teachers’ unions.

“I believe the president must be troubled by the lack of progress since he took office. Most likely, he would have liked to do more. But the teachers unions are one of the Democrats’ biggest donors - and one of the president’s biggest campaign supporters. So, President Obama has been unable to stand up to union bosses - and unwilling to stand up for kids,” Romney said.

Romney’s focus on education comes during a spirited battle in Washington over student loan programs. Obama’s Democrats have been pushing for an extension of low-interest loan rates for federal student loans to avoid a doubling of the rates from 3.4 percent. After an extended partisan fight, a compromise with Republicans is expected by the July 1 deadline.
The former Massachusetts governor is running neck-and-neck with Obama in polls, a prelude to what could be a close election.

His education drive gave respite from fighting with Obama over how best to hasten growth of the US economy, and increasingly heated rhetoric between the two over Romney’s time as the head of a corporate buyout company Bain Capital.

Hispanics will likely be crucial to the election.

A Wall Street Journal/NBC/Telemundo poll out this week showed Obama leading Romney with Hispanic voters 61 percent to 27 percent. Romney is only now starting a push to try to peel some of them away because of their potential influence in swing states like New Mexico, Florida, Colorado, Virginia and North Carolina.

But Romney went almost an hour at his event, including a speech and taking questions from the event moderator, without mentioning the US immigration system and how he would deal with 12 million illegal immigrants in the US. — Reuters