Why it’s good that the candidates are not talking about education

The74 asks “With only 9 POTUS candidates left, why isn’t anyone debating #edpolicy?” and they link to a heroic attempt to summarize the candidates’ positions on K-12 education.

The reason the presidential candidates are not talking about education policy is that there isn’t much to gain. This is primary season. The Republicans are trying to prove to their base how conservative they are and the Democrats are trying to prove to their base how progressive they are. Those strategies hinge on talking tough about taking on the bad guys, like ISIS or Wall Street.

And that is why I am glad they are not debating education policy. If they were, we’d have candidates staking out extreme positions that the eventual nominee, and the eventual President, would be more inclined or compelled to carry out. They would be hunting for enemies, which requires villifying someone in education — teacher unions or “privatizers” and “deformers.” None of these actors in the education world deserves the demonization treatment. Also, the positions would have to be extreme. Picture your most antagonistic privatization or harshest accountability measures, your most extreme anti-testing position, huge commitments to unsustainable and poorly thought out “moonshot” plans to “fix” education, and the burn-it-to-the-ground rhetoric like closing the U.S. Department of Education and blowing up ed schools.

The best candidates can always temper their positions when they break out their Etch-a-Sketches and pivot for the general election. But with video, internet memes, and social media, this gets harder and harder every cycle. We should want the next President to be able to govern, to not be locked into untenable positions. Maybe in a general election at least we might expect some education policy debate to emerge that requires thoughtful diagnosis of education problems and creative solutions. Or not. But in any case, I’m glad this circus we’re watching now doesn’t include too much dumbed down combat over education policy.