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A Lost Issue in 2008?

Educating the Presidential Candidates

By Arthur Levine

In their first seven debates, Democratic and Republican presidential candidates have presented America with a cornucopia of plans for solving a plethora of urgent issues—health care, national security, energy, the economy. But the candidates in both parties have had relatively little to say to most viewers about one of the most prominent issues of the past several elections: education.

Education is falling off the nation’s priority list. Indeed, during the 2000 presidential election, Americans ranked education either first or second among the nation’s priorities. In 2004, it fell to fifth.

And now, as the 2008 election season gathers steam, the presidential candidates are demonstrating just how precipitous the decline has been. In the first 12 hours of debates, they gave education less than 33 minutes of air time—19 of them in the June 28 Democratic debate at Howard University, aired by PBS and, most pundits agreed, little watched. Until that debate, only three of 17 candidates said anything of substance about how they would improve our schools. Even one of the candidates, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, observed that the late-June debate marked the first occasion on which education had been discussed. Three of the candidates still don’t include education in the platforms that appear on their Web sites. Many of the rest rank education low among their concerns—putting it seventh, eighth, or even 10th...