We just went through 120 minutes of a Presidential debate amongst DEMOCRATS with hardly a mention of one of the single most important issues facing our country, education. Our public schools are the front line in the fight for progress. They represent the single greatest hope of solving the long term issues we face in climate change, energy independence, a strong economy, and a moral foreign policy. We heard the candidates discuss how they would use Bill Clinton in their administration and answer abstract hypotheticals, but only when candidates were asked what they would do in their first 100 days was education even raised, albeit briefly, as an issue. CNN and the mainstream media along with each and every candidate need to be held accountable.
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Unfortunately, we can’t wait for presidential leadership on this issue. No Child Left Behind or "No Behind Left" is up for reauthorization this year. Many of the candidates are currently in congress, and they need to be leading the charge against reauthorization of NCLB. It now seems that many in the leadership of the Democratic Party have a simple plan: save their political capital for something deemed "more important." Many in the education field now fear that what will happen is NCLB will be silently reauthorized without a vigorous debate. As I don’t have to tell most people in this community, NCLB is destroying our schools and handicapping our teachers. The idea is simple: create standards so high that many of America’s struggling schools can’t meet them, deem that school "failing," cut off its funding, and replace it with a private school. It fits right into the conservative ideology, undermining our most effective social institutions until they are bankrupt and replaced by their friends in big business. In addition NCLB has drastically cut down on critical curriculum. We NEED good civics classes in our schools, we need arts and sciences, and NCLB forces schools to throw all of their resources into teaching two subjects, math and English, at the expense of a broader curriculum.
This can not be a "second tier issue" in the Democratic primaries. If our education system doesn’t work we can’t solve any of the great challenges we are going to face in the coming years. Let’s put pressure on the mainstream media and our own favorite Democrats, don’t forget about education in this campaign. Don’t abandon our teachers who work every day to prepare the next generation of leaders despite a policy that ties their hands at every turn. Ed in ’08 has been leading a campaign to make education a prominent issue in the coming elections, and we should all join them in their fight- http://www.edin08.com/