As we move into the general election season, let’s aim to achieve what “Ed in ’08”’s $60 million has thus far failed to do. Let’s aim to get the candidates—and, by extension, ourselves—talking about education. And not just in the “I believe the children are our future” platitudes that politicians—and, sometimes, we in the press—often revert to in talking about education. Let’s take it for granted that our youth are our tomorrow/public education is a promise we make to our future/educating our children is an investment in ourselves. True. Got it. Agreed. Let’s focus, instead, on the hopelessly dull yet desperately urgent details of fixing what ails our education system: school choice, teacher recruitment, student loans and scholarships, the place for special and bilingual and early-childhood and religious education, the costs and benefits of teachers unions, the costs and benefits of standardized testing, balancing accountability with creativity, etc.

When McCain calls NCLB a “good beginning,” what, specifically, does he mean by that? How does he plan to balance the private school vouchers he advocates with the needs of the public schools left behind? Where do charter schools fit into the picture? When Obama says he wants to find new mechanisms for student assessment, what does he imagine those might be? When he argues for an expansion of Head Start programs, how does he propose to find teachers to teach those programs, administrators to lead them, physical space to house them? And how does he propose to pay for it all?

There are, to be sure, some guiding lights through all the gloom. The New York Times’s Bob Herbert—whose columns advocating for improving our education system, whatever they lack in MoDowdian wit, are both compelling and wise—has been a one-man army in the fight to keep (hey, to get) education in our national political dialogue. Education Week, a publication aimed at teachers and administrators, has been offering coverage of education as a campaign issue (such as it is) that is both comprehensive and, in general, blessedly jargon-free.

But education should be out there in the mainstream press, as hard news, for everyday readers to digest and consider. Education-related questions—specific, detailed, appreciating the mutuality of each disparate policy point—should be a staple at campaign-trail press avails, town halls, and debates. As policy, sure, education may be as un-sexy an issue as there is; as a problem to be solved, its complexity and entrenched nature make it one of the most challenging our next president will face. But solutions are worth fighting for—and, more to the point right now, worth analyzing and debating. After all, our children are our future.

Read parts one, two, three, four, five, and six of this series.

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