Are Candidates Ignoring Education? Should We Care?

In a new Education Week piece, Bettina Love bemoans the lack of interest in education expressed by the Presidential candidates this time around, deeming it an afterthought. Does she have a point?

After all, Donald Trump has both Project 2025 and Agenda 47 out there, both of which promise to dismantle the Department of Education and push the heck out of vouchers. Harris, on the other hand, has Tim Walz who was a teacher, so that's ... something?

Love argues that candidates have proposed "bold and ambitious solutions to fix an American public school system rife with inequalities" in the past 40-ish years (aka ever since A Nation At Risk). Then she ticks off the attempts.

George H. W. Bush wanted to be "the education president," and he set some bold and ambitious goals without any particular ideas about how to achieve them, and he did, in fact, come up "woefully short."

Love says that Clinton made education a "cornerstone of his administration," but I was in the classroom at the time, and it sure didn't feel that way from out in the cheap seats. Mostly we got hit with new testing regimen, little realizing that they were a prologue to bigger and worse things. Love notes "By all measures of improvement, Clinton missed the mark entirely."

Then Bush II hit us with No Child Left Behind and that "soft bigotry of low expectations" line which presaged the hard tyranny of unachievable goals and guaranteed failure (everyone above average by 2014!! Whoopee!) Love correctly notes that NCLB "proved to be one of the biggest education policy failures in recent history."

Followed by Barack Obama, who had many of us in the field convinced that he Got It and his administration would reverse the damage inflicted by the last three. Ha, just kidding. Instead his administration doubled down on all the worst parts of NCLB. It was such a mess that one of the few bipartisan accomplishments of Congress was to finally come up with the overdue rewrite of NCLB and include a subtle scolding of Arnie Duncan. 

Many folks though this would tee up education as a Big Policy Topic for 2016. Jeb! Bush was all set to run as a champion of Common Core and Florida style reform. That did not pan out. Campbell Brown set up The 74 and positioned herself to be a major player in the many education policy debates that did not actually happen. 

It's not entirely education's fault. Donald Trump ran on no policy ideas at all other than "Black and Brown people are scary" and "But her e-mails!" He has been consistently uninterested in equity issues not just in education, but in all aspects of American life. 

And meanwhile-- Joe Biden, nice guy. I heard him live and in person say that he would sweep away DeVos policies and testing, and that didn't happen either. (Nor did an acknowledgement that the Obama-Biden education policies were a failed mistake).

I have long complained about how little real, serious attention education gets at election time, but reading through her brief history, I began to wonder if maybe education is better off if Presidents just keep their mitts off.

Still, serious issues in education remain, though my list and Love's don't entirely match. There's the attendance issue. The teacher morale issue. I'm not so concerned about lower scores on the Big Standardized Test, and as much as I respect her work, I have to cringe when Love brings up the loss of part of a year of learning--a month or year of learning not a thing, or rather, it's a made up thing to make test scores seem sexier.

Her big concern is equity:

As an educator and researcher deeply concerned about the future of education policy, I firmly believe that K-12 policy must undergo an unraveling if equity is to become the true goal of education. Currently, the unspoken but very real aim of our system is to maintain a two-tiered structure that perpetuates the divide between the haves and have-nots. Our education system is not an engine of social mobility, and this is a direct result of flawed policy.

I'm not sure the two-tiered system aim is all that unspoken. Certainly the choice policies pursued in some states set up a two-or-more tiered system.

The gap between haves and have-nots continues to be one of the central challenges of education, and its central problem is somehow getting the haves to fund education both for themselves and the have-nots. Is this a problem that can be solved by federal policy? History certainly doesn't suggest it could be, and most of the policies that steer education dollars away from the have-nots are state and local policies.

But as a certified old fart, I'm pretty much over federally-generated "solutions." The problems are many, from the vast distance between DC and your local district to the related problem that people who get positions of fed-level political power over education tend to know a lot more about politics than they do about education. That in turn makes them particularly fond of big PR-worthy silver bullets for education, and they might as well insist that those bullets be carried by Yetis playing bagpipes and riding on the back of rainbow unicorns. 

They could undo some of the previous bad attempts, like (as Love also suggests) doing away with the Big Standardized Test, the single most toxic development in public education in the last forty years. They could take steps to decrease the wealth gap in this country, which would help with the funding base of public education; this would be way more useful than following the myth that better education will fix poverty. They could help fix education funding in states, perhaps. They could monitor state and local systems to make sure that inequitable systems feel pressure to shape up. 

But honestly, after all these years, any time I hear a national political candidate start with "I have a program that will advance education in this country..." my bullshit alarm starts whooping so loud I can't hear anything else they say about it. The best thing they could do to get my attention is something along the lines of "My administration will listen to people who actually know stuff about teaching," though how we build a bridge between DC and those people I do not know. 

In the meantime, I agree with Love that it sucks that no Presidential campaigns have anything substantial to say about education. Unfortunately, historically, the only thing worse than when they ignore education is when they don't.