FOR MONTHS it has been agonizing - and often amusing - to watch the national media, generalists all, trying to grab hold of the education issue and create a substantive debate between the two major party candidates. Most of them have missed the real story. That is, when it comes to education policy, it doesn't matter very much who is elected President this month. There are differences between Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush, but they are for the most part a matter of degree. The bald truth is that, no matter who heads the next Administration, he will guide a greater national - nee federal - involvement in education because this is what the public wants. Or, in my opinion, this is what the public has ceded to the federal government by default. Throughout the campaign, the candidates made many speeches pledging to do more for education, pledges that would have been anathema just a few years ago. They both realized that the education policy game in Washington, D.C., is far different today from that instituted 20 years ago when the Revolution came to town. At that time, a myriad of categorical programs - often the particular pets of members of Congress - were folded into a single block grant. It was difficult to rally support to prevent discrete programs from disappearing into a block grant, and not many who played the policy game would waste their energies on such matters as metric education or desegregation aid (though in order to mollify urban districts, the latter did become a separate magnet school program). Gradually, starting under President Bush, categories began creeping back into federal policy. But this time around, they concerned issues that were central to education and essential to improving education across the board - in all schools, for all students. Standards, teacher quality, smaller classes, greater college opportunities, and, above all, accountability directly affect the nation's classrooms. Along the way, Republicans played around with the issue of cutting back on federal involvement and strongly objected to the idea of voluntary national tests. In the long run, however, these were doomed skirmishes. They were continued in the arguments over the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, with threats to go the block- grant route (even Sen. Joseph Lieberman had his version). But the die was cast: the public wants results from its public schools, and it wants national leaders to deliver on the promises they have made. Nominally, our leaders at the federal level defer to the states to carry out national policy. This is necessary in order to maintain a semblance of the old governance structure: education as a national interest and a state responsibility, but under local control. These distinct roles no longer hold, though, and that is primarily because the financing of education has changed. In reality, accountability has become as much a federal concern today as a state one, and the Clinton Administration was at least as willing to pump money into failing schools - with time lines and consequences attached - as were state policy makers. Arnold Fegy, formerly the National PTA's long-time federal liaison, goes so far as to suggest that these interventions look like a federal takeover in the making of the 10,000 schools identified by the U.S. Department of Education as being in the most academic trouble. The reason state leadership falters is primarily money. A small state capacity-building program disappeared under the Reagan Administration's block grant, but it was no great loss because it had turned primarily into a way of supporting program fiefdoms within state education agencies. About the same time, state budget-cutting further eroded state capacities. When the U.S. Department of Education (ED) started to try to enforce the quality-monitoring components of the 1994 reform legislation, it backed away. …