The mayor of Philadelphia isn't feeling much brotherly love for Mitt Romney. In fact, Michael Nutter told msnbc's Martin Bashir on Thursday that when it comes to education, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee doesn't know squat.
“If you want to come to Philadelphia to talk about education, or if you want to talk about issues in a presidential campaign, then your record is going to be examined,” Nutter said on The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, which Bashir was guest-hosting.
“President Obama actually has a record," Nutter said. "Mitt Romney doesn’t. I’m not going to let him or his folks come into our town and dupe people into thinking that he actually knows something about education."
Nutter’s remarks come as Romney made a trip to Universal Bluford, a charter school in Pennsylvania's largest city. During a roundtable discussion with school administrators and teachers, Romney declared that class sizes don't really matter all that much, saying his team had analyzed hundreds of communities in Massachusetts, where he was governor several years ago, and found no apparent link between class size and academic performance.
“The district with the smallest classrooms, Cambridge, had students performing in the bottom 10 percent,” Romney said. “So just getting smaller classrooms didn’t seem to be the key.”
Nutter decried that stance as bogus, since nearly all educators rank small class sizes as critical to the success of young students.
"Clearly [Romney] has gotten an 'F' on his first day out on the issue of education," said Nutter.