As he presses for the conservative votes he needs to overtake GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum is hammering away at the role state and federal governments play in running schools.
Santorum plays up how he and his wife have home-schooled their seven children and says parents should be the ones responsible for educating their kids.
Yet back when Santorum was a senator from Pennsylvania, he got a Pittsburgh-area school district to help pay tens of thousands of dollars in tuition for his children to receive online schooling.
It's a bit of history that's unknown to many voters outside Pennsylvania as the Republican nomination race closes in on the 10 Super Tuesday contests next week.
Santorum says he wants to curtail dramatically the power of states and the federal government in public education.
"Not only do I believe the federal government should get out of the education business, I think the state government should start to get out of the education business and put it back with the local and into the community," Santorum said in a recent debate in Arizona with his GOP rivals.
He mocks America's schools as "factories" that stand as "anachronistic" relics of the Industrial Revolution and says he would home-school his kids in the White House if he becomes president.
In the fall of 2004, Santorum's use of tax dollars to pay for his kids' home schooling became controversial because his family was primarily living in Leesburg, Va., west of Washington. Following a local newspaper report, the Penn Hills School District near Pittsburgh tried to recover about $73,000 that it contended the state wrongly sent to an Internet-based charter school. Although the Santorums owned a house in the school district, officials argued, they were living out of state. The Pennsylvania Education Department in 2006 agreed to pay the district $55,000 to settle the dispute.
The cyberschool controversy dogged Santorum through his 2006 Senate re-election bid and contributed to his 18-point loss to Democrat Bob Casey.
Santorum's campaign did not respond this week to questions about his family's online instruction, and it's not known whether his children received teaching at home in addition to what they got online.
The Santorums withdrew their children from the cyberschool and resumed home schooling after Penn Hills officials complained about the tuition payments. Students in cyberschools log onto computers to access their assignments and teachers.
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