For the past few months, Republican presidential nominees have sparred over everything picayune and otherwise. The percentage of income paid in taxes by front-runner Mitt Romney. The sexual peccadilloes of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (and those of now-ousted candidate Herman Cain). Even whether former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum is enough of a movement conservative — even with him walking the talk against abortion. And even with Romney’s win last night in Florida’s GOP primary, the sparring (and the rising and declining fortunes of each) will continue until the nominee finally gives his acceptance speech six months from now.

Yet the candidates have largely been silent on education, probably the biggest long-term issue facing our nation’s economy and social fabric. While President Obama, for better or worse, has built up his credentials as School Reformer-in-Chief, the GOP candidates have done little more that proclaim that students should take over the clean-up work of school custodians and make vague declarations that the No Child Left Behind Act is some sort of federal overreach (even as Romney backed the law and even said kind words about U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan before he stood against it). Certainly the rebellion among movement conservatives against the excesses of former President George W. Bush’s tenure (and his legacy, on education, as the Democrats’ favorite Republican) is one reason for this reticence. But in the process, Republicans are essentially conceding to Obama on this front and hurting their own odds of a general election victory. And considering that high-quality education is a key long-term solution to keeping future generations off welfare rolls (and, in the process, keeping government small), the Republicans are also failing to address a critical policy issue.

Here are three education policy declarations Romney, Gingrich or Santorum should make once one of them wins the nomination:

Admit the Need for a Federal Role in Holding States Accountable: The Republican nominee can immediately use Obama’s No Child waiver gambit as an opportunity to hammer the president on education. He can play on arguments advanced by conservative reformers that allowing states to evade enforcing the law’s Adequate Yearly Progress provisions violate the U.S. Constitution by stepping on Congressional law-making authority. He may want to trod Obama’s path if he succeeds in ousting him — and actually attempt a similar waiver gambit once in office. But this is politics, and that’s usually how it rolls.

But the Republican nominee will have to do more. He must make clear that school reform is a national economic and social priority. This means confronting the mistaken notion among movement conservatives (and conservative reformers who once supported No Child before standing against it) that No Child has been some form of federal overreach. (Whether or not the feds should be funding education at all is a different discussion.) It also means articulating that No Child simply recognized the reality that states, not school districts, are in charge of providing education, and that they should be held accountable for making sure that districts do their jobs in providing high-quality teaching and curricula to the kids in their care.

What the Republican nominee would be saying is this: If the federal government is going to subsidize education, then it shouldn’t just give it away, something that the feds allowed for 37 years before No Child’s passage a decade ago. States taking federal taxpayer dollars should accept the strings that are attached to them — or don’t take the cash at all. It’s a simple fact of life, no different than what the rest of us have do in the real world when we accept money from other, whether we borrow money from a bank, receive a grant from a foundation, or take a loan from our parents.

The nominee should then declare as president, he will make this declaration: that if states don’t want to be subject to accountability for how their spending of those subsidies improve student achievement, then they shouldn’t take the money. Such a move would force governors and legislators to have some long, hard, and honest conversations about the abysmally inefficient ways school dollars are spent throughout American public education — including the $7 billion spent annually on helping teachers get master’s degree when there is no evidence that such credentials improve student achievement. Given the $1.1 trillion in pension deficits and retired teacher healthcare costs that will burden taxpayers for the next few decades, it’s a conversation worth having.

Meanwhile the Republican can also strike a blow for the GOP legacy in education by declaring that No Child has largely worked in spurring reforms that have helped lead to at least 217,432 fewer fourth-graders being functionally illiterate (and thus being on the path to poverty and prison) in 2011 than in 2002 — and spurring the first wave of systemic reforms upon which we are building now. Such a move could undermine Obama’s own claim to the mantle of being the nation’s leading school reform advocate at the federal level — and also slightly rehabilitate predecessor Bush in the process.

No matter what happens, defending AYP and accountability is still a winner. The Republican nominee actually argue a conservative principle — that federal money shouldn’t be just doled out without condition — that resonates with independents. And if the position forces states to stop taking federal dollars, it can mean reductions in federal spending. All in all, taxpayers and families win.

Parent Power and School Choice Must Be Key Elements of Federal Education Policy: One of the Obama administration’s failings on the school reform front has been its rather mixed embrace of school choice and Parent Power. Certainly the administration has pushed hard for the expansion of charter schools and has made it part of its agenda. But as with other centrist and liberal Democrats, it opposes school vouchers and voucher-like tax credit programs largely because think that allowing families to use those dollars to attend parochial schools violates the U.S. Constitution’s separation between church and state, think lowly of vouchers as a school reform strategy, and argue that their party has never historically supported them. Meanwhile it has been unwilling to embrace Parent Trigger laws such as those passed in California, Connecticut, Texas, and Mississippi that would allow families to actually shape the quality of education their kids receive in the schools that serve them. The fact that the otherwise voluble Duncan has been reticent in using his bully pulpit on behalf of Parent Trigger laws being proposed in Arizona, Indiana, and Florida says plenty — and it is not flattering.

For a Republican presidential aspirant, Obama’s lack of presence on Parent Power is an opportunity to score points in several ways. Supporting current efforts to pass Parent Trigger laws would essentially be advocacy for expanding school choice. At the same time, it would also serve as an opportunity to please the Heritage Foundation crowd that argues for local control of schools; parent trigger laws can be seen as the best form of local control because the decisions are moved away from school bureaucracies to the very families who send their kids to the schools. And it encourages systemic reform from the ground up, playing upon the language that congressional Republicans such as House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline have used in justifying their efforts to kibosh No Child (even as Kline himself has pushed to increase federal special ed subsidies).

Meanwhile the Republican nominee can voice his support for expanding choice by backing state efforts happening in key states such as Florida. He can also declare that future federal funding will only go to states that allow for the creation and expansion of voucher programs, bring down barriers to charter school expansion (while also improving quality), pass Parent Trigger measures, and allow for the growth of online learning efforts that can allow families and the rest of civil society to start schools on their own. This move, by the way, would also be seen as being fiscally conservative.

All Federal Education Dollars Should Be Doled Out As Competitive Grants: The most-essential aspect of Obama’s Race to the Top effort has been its underlying principle that the federal government should move away from the traditional program-centered approach to funding schools. All that has resulted from it is the exacerbation of the nation’s education crisis — including the double digit increases in number of capable young men condemned to special ed ghettos, to the compliance approach that has hindered providing easily-understandable school data to families and teachers so they can make smart decisions and improve teaching.

This reality should be enough to convince the Republican nominee to go further than Obama and call for nearly all dollars — including Title I (and excepting those fund tied to education for American Indian students) — to be doled out in through a competitive grant model. Doing so allows Republicans to strike a blow for smaller, efficient, and more accountable government. States, after all, would only get money if they actually propose and follow-through on efforts.

In the process, Republicans can also dust off a concept that the party has long embraced — that of enterprise zones — by allowing for districts implementing innovative reforms to be exempted from state laws that render them servile to NEA and AFT affiliates.

Certainly movement conservatives would rather see the nominee push to end all federal education subsidies. One can reasonably see why it makes sense. But few Republicans in Congress would stand for it; after all, the districts in their own backyards, especially those in suburbia, are as unwilling to let go of Title I dollars as big city counterparts. And given that school reform is critical to the nation’s long-term fiscal, economic, and social health, maintaining the federal role just makes sense.

It’s high time that Republican presidential candidates do more than just hem and haw on education reform. They owe more that vague statements to the families, taxpayers, and children they want to serve in while in the White House.