The Presidential Sweepstakes 2008: Education with a Whimper, Not with a Bang

Abstract

FOR PERSONAL reasons, Louis Armstrong's sung refrain of more in his famous rendition of Mack the Knife comes to mind this election cycle. Just as Armstrong called for another rendition, this is the seventh time Kappan has asked me to solicit education essays from the two presidential candidates. That's 28 years! Tempus fugit! How time flies and how issues repeat themselves. But there are also differences, and in this election cycle education is treated not with a bang, but a whimper. While education as a national issue continues to command the public's interest, it is just barely on the candidates' radar. I speak from experience. In March, on behalf of Kappan, I invited the three leading presidential contenders--Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama--to submit essays about their educational platforms. The promise of reaching 50,000 readers--the nation's education elite--is no small matter, one that elicited a strong response the first six times around. This time, nothing from the two candidates still left standing by convention time. Much personal badgering ensued and finally one of the campaigns--Obama's--submitted the speech that appears in this issue. Unhappily, McCain's campaign did not submit an essay, and what runs here is a pastiche taken from the candidate's web site. The necessity to revert to Plan B raises questions I perforce must ask: Is this emblematic of the low regard in which the campaigns hold the issue? Is it attributable to campaign fatigue? Is education once again off the national table? Is the web and its progeny (whatever they may be) simply going to shoulder aside print journalism? Is it all of the above? NOBODY HAS ANSWERS Because the candidates and their advisors cannot possibly think education is unimportant in the 21st century, there must be another possibility. I suggest this explanation: No one is sure what to do at the national level, least of all John McCain. In part, the reason is not hard to fathom. The tools available to Uncle Sam are either too blunt or too controversial to effect the changes that education needs, and interest groups are more easily mollified with silence than detailed position statements. Silence is golden (or ignorance is bliss, if you prefer). Not surprisingly, candidates are reluctant to touch what looks more and more like a third rail. Federal programs are viewed as too crude to reach the classroom when nuance is essential or too controversial (e.g., national standards, national tests) to raise in a campaign. There were reasons George Bush was able to turn 100 years of Republican antipathy to a strong federal role in education on its head--and leaving teacher unions, which had resolutely supported a vigorous national role, to lament the form this federal role eventually assumed. In this connection, remember that Bush took on education because of his experience in Texas--where the issue played well--and because his polling showed that education was an issue that would actually move voters, especially soccer moms, in campaign 2000. …