Soon the presidential candidates will meet for the last time to debate and with the topic focused on foreign policy, one may be tempted to think education has no place in the discussion. But one would be wrong. There are at least two critical education questions that should be addressed.

QUESTION 1: A recent report from former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Chancellor of New York city schools Joel Klein found that “Educational failure puts the United States’ future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk.” The task force behind the report argued that too many young people are not qualified for the military because they do not have an adequate level of education. Do you agree with them and how would you address the issue?

QUESTION 2: Condoleezza Rice recently told a gathering of education leaders at Education Nation last month that a child in Korea learns in 3rd grade what our kids learn in 5th grade. We know that U.S. students rank 25th out of 34 on math scores among Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, with nearly one-quarter of U.S. students unable solve the easiest level of questions. Does this lack of international competitiveness concern you and what would your Administration do to address it?

In the previous two debates, President Obama and Governor Romney have talked about education in many contexts: economic, achievement, school choice, and the role of the federal government among others. In this final debate, they have one last chance to inform voters about their vision for education in the country.

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For more on where Romney and Obama camps stand on critical education issues, head over to our Education and the Presidential Candidates page.

There is a bright spot to the Chicago Teachers Union strike that ended Tuesday after keeping the city’s kids at home and its public-school teachers picketing the streets: People are actually talking about education.

They are saying things like this: “When you have two-thirds of our children not college- and/or career-ready and we spend more per student than any country in the world, that is a societal problem. What’s going on in Chicago is sort of a leading indicator of things to come.” That’s Florida’s former Republican Gov. Jeb Bush on MSNBC. Bush is an advocate of student assessments who occasionally clashes with teachers unions.

Or this: “The more difficult task is to make sure the right people are getting into the classroom. I think it is the wrong mental model to let anybody in and then make it easier to fire our hiring mistakes.” That’s National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel on C-Span. NEA is not involved in the specifics of the strike, but it is supporting the Chicago union in principle.

Voters care greatly about education. In a Pew Research poll earlier this year, 72 percent of respondents rated education as “very important” to their vote. Yet both presidential candidates have largely ignored the concept in their campaigns. For whatever reason, education isn’t the kind of winner that moves the dial for a candidate in the electorate.

“People typically put education in their top three, or at worst, top six issues. But I believe they don’t know how to vote on education. They are so convinced that schools are local,” said Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, a group that is critical of teachers unions.

Allen says the Obama administration isn’t weighing in on the Chicago dispute because it is afraid of offending the unions. Education Secretary Arne Duncan issued a brief statement last week saying he hopes the parties can “settle this quickly.”

Union officials say it would be inappropriate for a president or a presidential candidate to weigh in. They say the national conversation with Obama is settled. The unions have by and large made peace with President Obama about his Race to the Top competitive grant program, which rewards states for teacher evaluations and turning around or closing failing schools. Both of those issues are at the heart of the Chicago dispute. Still, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is one of many union officials who say that the issues in Chicago are “very localized.”

Meanwhile, the presidential campaigns have not touched the thorniest of education issues that are also raised by the strike—student assessments, teacher evaluations, and failing schools. President Obama has chosen to focus on higher education, highlighting student loans and the high cost of college as part of his narrative on jobs. Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s few mentions about education have been about school choice, proposing vouchers and state-wide open enrollment for disadvantaged kids.

The advantage of the public attention raised by the Chicago strike is that it gives educators and policymakers the chance to publicly grapple with the genuine qualitative issues that affect all schools. How much do you hold teachers responsible for? What employment guarantees are teachers entitled to? Should the answers to those two questions impact teachers’ pay?

A poll conducted last week for the Chicago Sun-Times showed that 47 percent of Chicago’s registered voters support the teachers union, and less than 20 percent think that Mayor Rahm Emanuel is doing a “good” or “excellent” job in handling it. The approval of the union may slide as the strike drags on, however. No matter what happens in the talks, the union will be able to declare victory in the end if they win any concessions.

Pay attention now that it’s over. Center for Education Reform’s Allen thinks that a perceived victory on the part of the unions in Chicago will cause Democratic mayors in other cities to pause before pushing for anything that looks like merit pay or other teacher-employment decisions based on performance.

Timid Democrats in schools can only strengthen Republicans’ position with the public, at least the half who dislike unions. “It will bolster the case and cause of the accountability-minded reformers, who are often Republicans,” Allen predicted. Included on that list is Jeb Bush, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and Idaho Superintendent Tom Luna, who wrote the Republican National Committee’s education platform.

Democrats who have pushed for accountability—Emanuel, Duncan, and House Education and the Workforce ranking member George Miller, D-Calif., to name a few—will need to recalibrate their approach. It will remind everyone of what the education-policy community has been saying all along: The only way to dramatically improve public education is through bipartisan collaboration. If that seems an anathema now, perhaps the Chicago negotiations can make it seem a possibility.

Unfortunately, the talk about the strike has degenerated quickly into accusatory statements like these from Weingarten and former District of Columbia schools chancellor Michelle Rhee—former adversaries in the scuffle over Washington public schools’ teacher layoffs in 2009.

Here’s Weingarten on Bloomberg TV: “What you’re seeing play itself out in Chicago is this fixation on accountability, top-down sanctions, and fear.”

Here’s Rhee’s statement on the second week of the strike: “If it were about the kids, 350,000 students would be in class tomorrow morning instead of at home or on the streets.”

The blame game continues, which eventually will cause voters to tune out. Steve Peha, and education consultant and founder of the nonprofit Teaching That Makes Sense, recently spent a week in two elementary schools in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood. “Tough place to be a kid. Tough place to be a teacher. Tough place to be alive,” he observed on National Journal’s Education Experts blog. “What I can’t see is the value for management in squeezing labor, or the value for labor in holding out.”

This week both presidential candidates turned their attention to education, signaling a new focus on education reform as a campaign issue. Yesterday the Obama Administration announced a new round of Race to the Top (R2TT) grants aimed at schools districts and Mitt Romney is making speeches in New York and Washington, D.C. to outline his education plan. Today, The Center for Education Reform (CER) applauded the emergence of structural change in education as a key theme in both campaigns and counseled the candidates to make the issue a cornerstone of their campaigns.

CER President Jeanne Allen made the following statement:

“I’m pleased that both Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney are finally paying serious attention to education reform. I hope this signals a shift to a serious focus and healthy debate about reforming our education system in a real and substantive way.

President Obama is now proposing that Race to the Top – the centerpiece of his education plan which has had mixed results in the first round – should aim federal funds at schools districts, clearly a constituency he needs to win re-election. But while creating a competition for money at the district level is alluring, history tells us that it will make no difference in the lives of children, so long as school systems continue to be hogtied by unreasonable union contracts and subject to laws that hamper reform.

“Governor Romney, who when he ran Massachusetts was leading the charge for the kind of reforms that have been often touted by the Obama and previous administrations has launched an effort to reenergize his education credentials with his speeches last night in New York and today in Washington. His comments on putting kids before unions are encouraging as were his support for accountability and choice.

“Both candidates are now firmly fighting for the education reform moral high ground. But it is school choice, which the Black Alliance for Education Options and others consider the true civil rights issue of our time, where Romney and Obama differ. Here in D.C., Governor Romney has defended the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. Today everyone from parents to the Washington Post are urging President Obama not to kill it. This indeed could be the defining issue of the 2012 presidential campaign – whether our next President is courageous enough to buck the status quo and truly embrace a bold reform agenda that puts parents’ interests ahead of special interests. We salute any leader who does just that.”

Is President Barack Obama a snob? A brief look at his personal education might make you think so. He attended the prestigious Punahou prep school in Hawaii. He is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review. If I had seen that resume at age 18, I would have rated him high on the snob meter knowing nothing more about him. (I was starting college with lots of prep-school classmates, which made me acutely self conscious about my public school education.) Personally, I don’t know if Obama is a snob, and I don’t care. I figure that as president, he’s entitled either way.

I am intrigued, though, with Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum’s use of the sassy slur to lambast Obama for his efforts to increase college attendance and graduation. “What a snob,” Santorum said, railing about “liberal” college professors “trying to indoctrinate” impressionable teens. The huffy reactions to Santorum’s rants are to be expected. He’s good at eliciting them. An essay from the Harvard Crimson entitled “In Defense of Snobbery,” which is quite well written, is just one sample of the many people who disagree with Santorum.

But I wonder if Santorum is on to something. It has become increasingly clear over the last 20 to 30 years that college is a necessary component of a middle class lifestyle in America. Should it be that way? Do we want to be the kind of country where a mortar board is a de facto requirement for being a part of the community? Perhaps Santorum is simply expressing the frustration many people feel that the achievement goal posts keep moving.

It’s certainly easier to get a job with a college degree. The unemployment rate for high school graduates with no college is almost double that of people with at least a bachelors degree. Even if some jobs don’t technically require B.A., many businesses use college degree as one of their first hiring screens to make sure they get competent candidates. Obama has made a point of advocating shorter-term community colleges and technical degrees in his higher education campaign, but there is still a paucity of alternatives to college for kids who want to work sooner or are not interested in four years of dorm life and campus politics.

What are the current, viable alternatives to college? In a perfect world, what alternatives should there be? Could employers be more open to looking at different kinds of job candidates? If so, how? Can the K-12 education system improve enough to make college less of a necessity? Are we becoming a snob nation?

Response: Meaningful Thoughts Underneath
by Jeanne Allen
National Journal

Great question, and well outlined. I have not spoken to Rick Santorum about this, but I suspect his gaffe actually did have a meaningful thought underneath, which no one yet has articulated. And that is, that the individuals and families that currently make up working-class America, who do not have the density of college degrees as the professional business class, have an unbridled work ethic and put their all into their work resulting in tangible products and services. Conversely, and sadly, I would argue that the college-bound kids and graduates believe that their intellect and effort make them superior. We see this in government; we see this in Academia. They do indeed act like snobs.

Friends and I bemoan how privileged our own college kids act. We taught them hard work, or so we thought. They look down on people without college degrees. And frankly, what many of them go to higher education to learn is entirely subjective, often pablum and rarely the stuff we thought college was for. Courses such as “Discover NY”, ” The Five Lies George Bush Told You About Iraq;” “Sociology and the Beatles;” “Making Sense of the 1040″ cost the parent, the taxpayer, millions every year.

As the trains run, the cars get fixed, the bars open and close and our every needs are met, I too wonder if we haven’t made Higher Education just a tad bit elite. I want every child to have the opportunity to be well educated – in substance – from the early years through college age. They should all have the chance. I can only imagine that Senator Santorum was looking out at a sea of “real” people who are a mix of high school, GED, Associates and Bachelors who have no time to decipher the BS parading as discourse today when he made that statement. It was not wise, nor did it make sense. But it is perhaps those little non-sequiturs that should make us all think a little more about how those with fewer years of education and perhaps no pedigree for higher Ed might think about these challenging times.

We might also consider that no matter what the president suggests, a good higher education is out of the reach of most Americans and a struggle for those of us who even make good money.

Feed your family, or “Discover NY?”

Depending on what you do everyday, the answer is clear. Maybe if K-12 were worth a little more in terms of proficiency “dollars,” higher ed would not need to be so expensive. There could be fewer courses but more focus. Perhaps the entitlement of government support has, as many economists argue, created the inflation of higher Ed that puts it out of reach of most Americans, making higher ed a luxury for the those with disposable income, the so-called snobs.

It wasn’t always this way. The proliferation of sophisticated eating spaces, gyms, dorms, frivolous courses and more has built a public perception that only the elite go to college, and those who are subsidized make up the bulk of defaults.

It is not right. It should not be this way. But it is. Maybe the candidate was onto something.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama Monday urged the nation’s governors to invest more state resources in education, saying a highly skilled workforce is crucial for the U.S. to remain competitive with other countries.

Obama made his pitch at a White House meeting with governors in Washington as part of the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association. The president and first lady Michelle Obama hosted a black tie dinner with the governors Sunday night.

Obama said at Monday’s session that he sympathized with governors whose state budgets have been badly squeezed during the economic downturn. But he said that was no reason to trim resources from schools.

“The fact is that too many states are making cuts in education that I think are simply too big,” Obama said. “Nothing more clearly signals what you value as a state than the decisions you make about where to invest. Budgets are about choices.”

He reaffirmed his view that decisions about education should be left to states and not the federal government. “I believe education is an issue that is best addressed at the state level,” the president said, “and governors are in the best position to have the biggest impact.”

It was a message directed largely to Republican governors, many of whom have complained of too much federal intrusion in state matters including education. Several prominent GOP governors were in the room as the president spoke, including Chris Christie of New Jersey and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.

Obama earlier this month granted waivers to 10 states, freeing them from some of the toughest requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, as long as they measure student progress with their own standards.

He called on governors to assist that effort toward a more state-centered approach to education by spending more on education.

“That does not mean we have to invest in things that aren’t working,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t make sense to break some china and move aggressively on reforms. But the fact of the matter is we don’t have to choose between resources and reforms, we need resources and reform.”

Specifically he called for more teachers in the classroom. He also noted that 21 states require students to stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18.

“I urge others to follow suit of those 21 states,” Obama said.

On higher education, Obama said more than 40 states have cut financing of public colleges and universities over the past year. “This is just the peak of what has been a long term trend of reduced state support for higher education,” he said.

The president said more than 40 states have cut funding for public colleges, universities and community colleges over the past year.

Obama said his administration, Congress and the institutions themselves need to do more to make higher education more affordable. And he warned that other countries have been “doubling down” on education funding while the U.S. has cut back.

“The countries who out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow,” Obama said. “If we want America to continue to be number one and stay number one, we’ve got some work to do.”