“This president receives the lion’s share of funding from organized labor, and the teachers’ unions represent a massive source of funding for the Democratic Party,” Romney said. “The challenge with that is when it comes to actual reform to make schools better for our kids, they talk a good game, but they don’t do it.”

He continued, “If I’m president of the United States, instead of just giving lip service to improving our schools, I will actually put the kids first and the union behind in giving our kids better teachers, better options and better choices for a better future.”

The message is consistent for the Romney campaign, which regularly heaps criticism on the Democratic president’s policies but offers only a vague road map for what Romney would do.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday that Romney’s shift to education was welcome after a long campaign season in which he said the GOP rarely mentioned the issue.

“Education never came up in the Republican primary in any of the debates, or if it did, it came up almost never,” Carney said.

Carney said Obama’s education initiatives have received broad bipartisan support and that the president “looks forward to defending that record.”

Romney’s shift carries some risk. His regular criticism of labor unions, in particular, threatens to alienate voters in Rust Belt states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where a close election may be decided.

Before the speech, Romney announced Tuesday a team of education policy advisers that includes former Education Secretary Rod Paige and other officials from President George W. Bush’s administration. Paige is among several prominent opponents of teachers’ unions on the panel. As education secretary in 2004, he labeled the National Education Association a “terrorist organization.”

Romney’s positions on education have evolved over time. He once supported abolishing the Education Department but reversed that position as a presidential candidate in 2007. At the time, he said he came to see the value of the federal government in “holding down the interests of the teachers’ unions” and putting kids and parents first.

Romney also changed his position on the Bush-era education overhaul known as “No Child Left Behind.” He said he supported the law as a candidate in 2007, but he has since generally come out against the policy many conservatives see as an expansion of the federal government.

Romney continues to support the federal accountability standards in the law, however. He also has said the student testing, charter-school incentives and teacher evaluation standards in Obama’s “Race to the Top” competition “make sense,” although the federal government should have less control over education. The campaign in recent days has emphasized his support for charter schools while governor of Massachusetts, a theme likely to play out in Wednesday’s address.

The speech represents Romney’s first public event in four days. Working to close Obama’s cash advantage, he’s coming off a three-day fundraising swing in the New York area that his chief finance aide said had netted $15 million. A single finance event in Manhattan on Tuesday evening generated $5 million.

Still, the campaign is eager to drive a positive message for voters now tuning in to the contest.

The education speech follows a relatively quiet phase for Romney, who has been focused on fundraising but usually delivers one major address a week. Most of his recent speeches, however, have been about the economic themes that so far have defined his campaign.

Earlier polls generally showed the former Massachusetts governor holding a slight lead over Obama on economic issues and Obama slightly ahead overall.

But the tightening follows an aggressive attack on Romney’s business credentials by the Obama campaign, including ads painting him as a job-destroying corporate raider at Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he co-founded.

Romney called the attacks “character assassination.” But Obama defended the tactic on Monday as legitimate and suggested Romney’s background was a poor qualification for the White House since being president involves more than “maximizing profits.”

Still, some prominent Democratic supporters have expressed discomfort with the attacks, including former Tennessee Rep. Harold Ford Jr., former Obama economic adviser Steve Rattner and Newark Mayor Cory Booker. Booker said he found attack ads from both sides “nauseating.” However, he later said Romney’s business record was fair game.

With U.S. unemployment still hovering above 8 percent and economic uncertainty widespread, both candidates have stepped up their emphasis on jobs and the economy.

Romney was fund raising in New York with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and had no public appearances. Obama was at the White House also with no public appearances scheduled.

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Associated Press News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.

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The election, Romney aides say, will be a referendum on Obama’s economic leadership far more than a question of Romney’s business career, regardless of how much Democrats highlight that issue.

So far, Romney aides have let Democrats — led by President Barack Obama — do most of the talking.

Obama sharply attacked Romney’s background as a venture capitalist on Monday, offering his most expansive comments to date about how Romney’s role as founder of the Boston-based private equity firm doesn’t necessarily translate to the White House.

“If your main argument for how to grow the economy is ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,’ then you’re missing what this job is about,” Obama said during a news conference at an international summit in Chicago. “It doesn’t mean you weren’t good at private equity, but that’s not what my job is as president. My job is to take into account everybody, not just some. My job is to make sure that the country is growing not just now, but 10 years from now and 20 years from now.”

He added: “This is not a distraction. This is what this campaign is going to be about — is what is a strategy for us to move this country forward in a way where everybody can succeed?”

Romney did not respond personally to the broadside. Instead, his campaign issued a written statement as he courted donors on Wall Street in the midst of a three-day fundraising tour. In the statement, Romney said Obama was once again attacking the free enterprise system.

“What this election is about is the 23 million Americans who are still struggling to find work and the millions who have lost their homes and have fallen into poverty,” he said. “President Obama refuses to accept moral responsibility for his failed policies. My campaign is offering a positive agenda to help America get back to work.”

The Romney campaign has offered several defenses since Obama’s re-election team launched an all-out assault against Bain: It’s a simple distraction, an affront to free markets, an attempt to divide the nation, a misreading of the firm’s success. The Romney campaign released a Web video last week featuring workers from an Indiana company that benefited from Bain’s involvement.

However, Romney himself has generally avoided the issue as he spends most of his time privately raising money. He ignored Obama’s criticism during a $2,500-a-plate reception at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel.

“I understand the economy because I’ve lived in it,” he said. “And by the way, I’ve been successful, but I’ve also lost. There’s sometimes I failed. I probably learned more from failures than from the successes. But I know how this economy works.”

Romney’s relative silence was made possible, in part, by a gaffe by Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker, an Obama supporter who on Sunday called exchanges by the campaigns over Bain “nauseating” and a distraction from issues that interest voters. He walked back his comments after they dominated the campaign news for a day.

Obama is running television ads across five swing states featuring a former worker who likens the firm Romney founded to a vampire. The president’s re-election campaign has also released Web videos and hosted multiple conference calls with employees from companies that suffered under Bain’s leadership.

Romney senior aide Stuart Stevens described the television ad as “performance art gibberish.”

“Shouting louder and getting more angry is not very persuasive,” Stevens said in response to the line of attack. “The idea that people are walking around with less of a paycheck or higher gas prices because of something Bain Capital did 20 years ago is absurd.”

Romney faced similar criticism from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich during the Republican primary. Gingrich accused Romney of “looting a company” and suggested that he return money earned “from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain.”

The argument helped fuel Gingrich’s surprise victory in South Carolina. Democrats are betting big that it will help Obama win over working-class voters in November, citing polling that suggests Romney would struggle with lower-income voters. But exit polling from the GOP primary shows Romney won such voters about half of the time.

In a rare recent interview on Bain, Romney told a conservative radio host last week that the closure of a Florida factory under Bain’s control was not his problem. “The steel factory closed down two years after I left Bain Capital. I was no longer there. So that’s hardly something which is on my watch,” he said.

The Obama campaign has pointed out, however, that Romney continued to profit from Bain’s investments years after he left.

Romney also opened himself to new criticism by resurrecting a controversy over the number of jobs he created at Bain. In the radio interview, he jabbed the Obama campaign for failing to mention that Bain created “over 100,000 jobs.” He has struggled for months to back up the jobs claim.

Bain offered this statement Monday responding to Democratic criticism: “Despite political attacks that emphasize the few companies that have struggled, the facts are that during Bain Capital’s ownership, revenues grew in 80 percent of the more than 350 companies in which we have invested.”

The former Massachusetts governor co-founded Bain in the early 1980s, but he left in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and pursue a political career. He has lived off his investments and retirement package ever since.

His net worth is now as much as $250 million, which would make him among the wealthiest presidents ever elected.

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AP Deputy Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.

The Romney campaign’s response has been that immigration is irrelevant to winning over Latino voters — jobs and the economy are the only things that matter. But his speech this week underscores just how difficult an argument that will be for him to make: In the past, the Latino Coalition has argued that immigration reform is part of a pro-business platform, not separate from it.

These days, the only immigration issue the Coalition mentions on its website is the “Mexican Trucking issue.” But the group aggressively advocated for comprehensive immigration reform under President Bush. In 2007, the Coalition’s president slammed “far right extremists” who opposed “common-sense [immigration reform] legislation that is so important for the security and economic vitality of our country.” The group “urge[d] Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the Democratic leadership in the House to demonstrate courage and leadership on this issue and take on immigration reform,” saying Pelosi could pass a bill “without the level of Republican support she is demanding.”

In the 2008 GOP primary, the Latino Coalition favored Rudy Giuliani — a veritable leftist on immigration reform compared to most Republicans — with the former New York mayor capturing 64 percent of the vote in a straw poll of the group’s members. Romney apparently finished behind Sen. John McCain and former Sen. Fred Thompson, as his name was not mentioned in the statement.

Meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce, whose grand D.C. offices will host the event Wednesday, also supported comprehensive reform under Bush, similarly seeing it as a boon for free market capitalism. The powerful business lobby still calls for “an effective and streamlined temporary worker program so that employers can hire immigrant workers” and “a pathway to legal status for undocumented workers currently in the United States.”

This was essentially Bush’s policy too. But Romney’s infamous immigration advisor, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who authored the draconian anti-immigration laws in Arizona and Alabama, said his candidate would not support any kind of pathway to legalization for undocumented immigrants.

The Romney campaign briefly attempted to disown Kobach after Romney won the primary and the advisor’s utility was spent, but he may have to throw his entire immigration policy under the bus with Kobach if he hopes to win over the Latino business owners on Wednesday, let alone Hispanic voters more generally.

Democrats are wringing their hands over the latest circular firing squad, but I think all the self-promotion and betrayal is a good thing. It should remind Democrats why many working- and middle-class people either sit out elections or don’t think there’s a big difference between the parties. For the last 20 years, folks like Rattner, Booker and Ford have tried to make sure their party courted Wall Street more slavishly than the GOP – and they often succeeded. We ought to remember that history before we get carried away with our populist high-fiving in the 2012 campaign, convinced that Obama deserves to win the fealty of the unemployed, underemployed and Occupy Wall Street, too.

I’ve always kind of liked Cory Booker, even while knowing he was a privileged Ivy Leaguer in love with his own capacity to reconcile conflict and also to convince rich people and Republicans that Democrats don’t hate them – kind of like Barack Obama, before he got sandbagged by the modern GOP. I still don’t think Booker has gotten nearly enough grief for his multilayered betrayal of Obama on “Meet the Press.” For one thing, he stepped on the president’s message, which is a terrible move for a trusted surrogate. He also played the despicable false-equivalence game – and he did it again in the video he made to try to walk back some of the damage he’d done. Booker keeps claiming what he really finds “nauseating” are the negative super PAC ads “from both sides” – but the Bain attack is coming directly from the Obama campaign (although the pro-Obama Priorities USA contributed one ad to the mix). Besides, it’s outrageous to equate the Bain attacks with the Fred Davis-Joe Ricketts plan to morph the president into Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I expect Republicans to try to make that lame argument, not Democrats.

Maybe most unfair, Booker and Ford endorsed the GOP lie that Obama has it in for private equity generally, not merely the excesses of firms like Bain. They’re only egging on the Wall Street wusses who act like the president has nationalized the banks just because he signed on to the flawed Dodd-Frank bill and once called a few of them “fat cats.” Booker and Ford are clearly only out for themselves, anxious to prove there are some Democrats who still love Wall Street. Of course, this shouldn’t surprise us: Booker has teamed up with hedge fund moguls and other super-rich private equity folks (as well as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates) in the course of reforming Newark’s schools as well as generally advancing his career. (He’s also ignored public records laws to keep those big donors from scrutiny.)

I wrote about Rattner’s comments earlier. By all accounts he did a decent job as auto czar, helping the president restructure the big three automakers and save the industry. But the big Democratic Party donor is clearly trying to pull the party back from those who are coming to understand that its fealty to Wall Street has hurt it with working- and middle-class voters – and much more important, has hurt the country. It’s Democrats who have for years protected the carried interest rule, keeping tax rates low for investors and private equity principals like Mitt Romney. Booker, Ford and Rattner are firing a warning shot at Democrats who are wandering away from their Wall Street. To its credit, the Obama team is doubling down on its Bain campaign, and let’s hope that continues.

Here’s the Romney ad: