Why The Democratic Presidential Debate Ignored Education
The recent Democratic Party presidential debate in Las Vegas left many observers scratching their heads. Why did the candidates and their CNN hosts ignore K-12 education?
Is education not important enough to merit discussion as a top national priority in 2016? The public clearly cares about education. US News reports that education is the third ranked search term on Google. When Gallup asked an open-ended question on the most important issues to voters in the 2016 campaign, education came in sixth.
Perhaps the silence is due to the fact that the Democrats have basically adopted the Republican approach to education from the 1990s.
As a university professor, I know plagiarism occasionally comes up in student work. Perhaps the Democrats are not discussing education because they don’t want to be accused of plagiarism by the Republican Party.
If you look at George H.W. Bush’s education platform of 1992, you see that Republicans have been focused on maligning unions, promoting alternative certification for teachers via programs like Teach For America, and pushing an agenda of school choice, assessments, and one-size-fits-all standards.
The Democrats’ current approach to education policy, as practiced by President Barack Obama and his acolytes (including Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel), appears to be the same. Obama did not create “change” in education. He pressed the educational policy status quo that the Republicans engineered in the 1990s. For most of Obama’s presidency, George W. Bush’s NCLB (directly imported from Texas in the 1990s) was left alone and even enhanced via “waivers” and Race to the Top.
Is that why the Democratic Party candidates are so quiet on education? Many in the education community are worried that the current slate of candidates will adopt ideas for
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