Gifford Miller is the only Democratic mayoral candidate who plans to encourage actively the growth of charter schools. Anthony Weiner is the only one who promises to give parents a bigger say over school budgets. Fernando Ferrer is the only one who says the city should pay part – he suggested 25% – of the court-ordered $5.6 billion annual infusion in spending on education.

Although the four candidates vying for the Democratic nomination came down on different sides of some education questions in interviews with The New York Sun, their stances on most issues were strikingly similar.

All four said, for example, that they would seek to start providing special assistance to slow learners in the earliest grades, not in the third and fifth grades – the levels at which Mayor Bloomberg implemented his program to end “social promotion” of struggling students.

“All the data show – and we should be driven by data here – that the earliest possible assessment and intervention, kindergarten and first grade, yield the best results,” Mr. Ferrer, the former Bronx borough president, said. “Get-tough policies on 8-year-olds and 10-year-olds may feel good politically, but they will yield few results.”

The candidates were largely on the same page when it came to the question of whether a principal should be able to fire teachers immediately if they had done something seriously wrong.

“I do not believe that the teacher should remain in that classroom, or in the school, but the due process should be given to everyone until they are proven guilty,” the other candidate, C. Virginia Fields, said. Mr. Ferrer said: “I believe in due process in all cases.”(Mr. Weiner, a congressman from a Brooklyn-Queens district, said he wouldn’t be negotiating changes in the teachers’ contract on the pages of the Sun before the election.)

All four were also critical of the Leadership Academy, the principal training program set up by Mr. Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein.

Mr. Weiner called the millions of private dollars spent on the program “wasted money,” and Mr. Ferrer, in a reference to the academy’s estimated expenditure of perhaps $300,000 a graduate, said: “For the evangelists of doing more with less, that seems to be doing less with more, especially when it’s more than twice what a principal gets paid on an annual basis.” The critique by Manhattan Borough President Fields was more muted, but still substantive: She said it would make more sense to use the academy to give assistant principals extra training, not to put inexperienced educators, or non-educators, on a fast track to becoming a principal.

When asked about the Impact School program established by Mr. Bloomberg to crack down on violence at middle schools and high schools, the Democrats also were of one mind.

“I think it’s a Band-Aid, and not a particularly effective one,” Mr. Miller, the City Council speaker, said. Mr. Ferrer and Mr. Weiner both suggested reverting to old violence-prevention models, while Ms. Fields proposed creating a “more comprehensive discipline and safety program that involves faculty, students, parents, and the larger community.”

A longtime political consultant, Hank Sheinkopf, said that at this point no one in the Democratic pack has differentiated himself on education, and that it’s important for the Democratic candidates, even at this early stage – to tell voters how they would run the public-school system differently from the current mayor.

“They’ve got to position themselves early on, to cast clear distinctions between what the mayor has done and what they’d do differently,” he said. “… The time to make the argument is now, to make yourself the education candidate.”

To date, the campaign has not been focused on education, though the mayor asked voters to hold him accountable for his education record in the 2001 campaign and though all the candidates call education a top issue. The Democrats have talked about their views on education in passing at candidate forums and press conferences, but only one candidate, Mr. Weiner, has given a speech – it was in late January – in which he fleshed out an education vision.

“It’s been surprising to me that my opponents haven’t been more concrete about their education proposals,” he said this week, “because I think it’s a winning issue for the Democrats this year.”

As mayor, Mr. Weiner said, he would end what he called the “experimental curriculum” that Mr. Bloomberg implemented in the fall of 2003; eliminate the Leadership Academy; stop creating new small schools inside of large, overcrowded ones; and make the school system “much more transparent.” He said he would also restore “a sense of discipline” to classrooms, by making it easier for teachers and principals to remove unruly students.

The congressman said his different approach to education would be obvious as soon as he took over the school system.

“I grew up going to public schools my whole life,” he said. “I’ve got a mother who chews my ear off about the situation in the schools. As a councilman for seven years and as a congressman in my seventh year, I spent a lot of time in city schools, and I think I’ve developed a pretty good sense of what makes a successful school tick. And sadly, I’ve also seen how to take successful schools and throw them into disarray.”

That, he charged, is what has happened under the Bloomberg administration.

Although the other candidates have not yet given stump speeches on education, they spoke freely when they were asked about their vision for the schools.

Ms. Fields said she would have five focuses. She would craft a capital plan that would help reduce class sizes to about 20 students. She would expand pre-kindergarten and invest more in early education. She would focus on recruiting, mentoring, and retaining teachers. She would set up academic partnerships with local colleges and universities. And she would build stronger relationships with parents and communities.

She would also change the environment of the public schools by appointing an educator as chancellor, the Manhattan borough president said. She said Mr. Bloomberg “has been very dismissive of leaders in our public school system.”

“I don’t think he’s given support to principals, to teachers,” Ms. Fields said. “I think parents have been excluded, even with parent coordinators.”

Mr. Miller – who released a report Monday by a council commission that recommended spending the bulk of the money awarded in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit on increasing teacher salaries – said that as mayor he would focus on reducing class sizes, attracting and retaining more quality teachers, creating safer schools, and building stronger after-school programs.

As mayor, the council speaker said, he would base his decisions on data, not politics.

“One problem in the mayor’s program is there is very little independent analysis to determine whether they’re actually working or not,” Mr. Miller said. “What we need to do is have a much better and stronger accountability system about what programs are working and what programs aren’t working.”

Mr. Ferrer, too, criticized the Bloomberg administration for inserting politics into education.

He said New Yorkers should “get rid of the term ‘social promotion.’ “

He said the mayor’s program is “ideology run amok … and I don’t think ideology and politics have any role in public schools or in classrooms.”

Mr. Ferrer, whose wife, Aramina, is a principal, said that as mayor his top education priorities would be relieving school overcrowding, strengthening after-school programs, and bolstering programs in music, art, and recreation.