NCLB was the peak of coercive power for the feds (don’t get me wrong, I’m one of the few that will still publically defend the law) and RttT was the peak of incentive power, but that’s all over—end of an era. With the Core as a new collaboration frame, we’re back to stumbling along 50 states at a time with uneven progress and whipsawed by local politics.

State education leadership will remain very important for the foreseeable future. The U.S. desperately needs a few states to show the way, like WI on welfare, to the personal digital learning future.

Regardless of what the feds and the state do, digital learning is inevitable. Our calcified system is being enveloped by an informal learning web were anyone can learn anything anywhere for free or cheap. Schools and colleges no longer own the learning franchise. Some just haven’t figured that out yet.

Free social learning apps are creeping in to classrooms. Online learning is doubling every 2-3 years. Students are blending their own learning where options aren’t outlawed. Kids with a crummy algebra teacher have a new friend in Sal Khan.

Despite what is likely to be a dysfunctional do-nothing congress, the learning revolution will march on quickly and quietly creating new options for students and families.

After this week’s election, we don't need to decipher what Americans think about education. They’ve already told us.
On Tuesday, voters elected a record number of new governors and thousands of new state lawmakers. With difficult budget decisions ahead in nearly every state, elected officials will have to prioritize.
The good news is that people have already weighed in to reveal that their priority is education, especially in the early years. In a recent Pew Center on the States report, "Facing Facts: Public Attitudes and Fiscal Realities in Five Stressed States," a survey of at least 1,000 residents each in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, and New York showed striking agreement that public education is their top priority to protect from spending cuts.
The Maryland Family Network’s July 2010 survey of registered Maryland voters found that 81 percent think it’s important for the state to expand access to pre-kindergarten for all children whose parents choose to enroll them. When asked specifically about whether or not Maryland should continue to invest in pre-k given the current state of the economy, 73 percent of voters said that investment should continue.
Preschool California’s recent survey of Latino voters in California, "Latino Voter Poll: Early Learning is a Winning Issue," found that 85 percent think children who attend preschool have an advantage over children who do not attend. And two-thirds of Latino voters think California is doing too little to ensure all children have access to affordable, high-quality preschool.
Even during tough economic times, and no matter who is in office, Americans support funding smart investments in programs like pre-k that provide the strongest returns for taxpayers and the greatest benefits for families.

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Our editor asks: “What needs to happen to propel education into a make-it-or-break-it issue for voters?”

The development of an attention span longer than an episode of “Jersey Shore” would be good for a start. Education is not something that can be funded and fixed in a single election cycle. If you look at countries whose education systems we drool over, you’ll notice an eerie pattern: most took a generation or two to improve their schools by improving the quality of teaching and curriculum. We have yet to dedicate ourselves sincerely to these two tasks. I don’t count Race to the Top, CCSSI, i3, or the testing consortia as serious attempts at school improvement because they’re just bigger versions of things that haven’t worked very well already.

Even in tiny Finland, a country with fewer students than most of our states, they took many years, moving in a smart, consistent direction, to get things working well. Hop into your time machine and head over to Helsinki circa 1970. The Finnish education system probably wasn’t quite as nifty as it seems today. Then zip over to Singapore or South Korea, or any of the dozen or so places that seem to do at least a slightly better job than we do of educating kids. Most have had simple, solid reforms, focused on teaching and curriculum, sustained in the long term by politicians of many persuasions who recognized intelligently that education is everyone’s issue and that there are relatively few ways to improve it other than improving how teachers teach and what students learn.

Here in America, we like the quick fix. We prefer earmarks, pork barrels, and tea parties to persistence, pragmatism, and long term problem-solving. We like to make education into a special interest issue instead of a common interest goal. And we all think we have the answer—as if there were only one, of course.

Like the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the War on Terror, and just about any other serious problem we try to deal with, we are currently waging a War on Learning (or a War on Teaching depending on your perspective)—an undeclared war, as yet, (so perhaps I should have lowercased it), but a war nonetheless.

How do we know we’re fighting a war? As with our usual obsessions, you can tell we’re metaphorically “at war” over education because we spend more time “warring” over problems than we do solving them.

And it is precisely this lack of a solution-focused approach that keeps education on the sidelines at election time. I mean, seriously folks, if the Minnesota Vikings can rig up a special boot so Bret Favre’s broken body can play another football game, why can’t we come up with at least one thing that solves at least one problem in our schools? Education isn’t a top political issue because we’ve placed it on the injured reserve list. Let’s get in the game. And then maybe the American people will, too.

I’m going to begin this week’s discussion by looking back to my first post of the year, an answer prompted by the query, “What should be Congress’

No. 1 priority?”

On January 6, it was thought that education would compete with the economy, health care and national security for the attention of lawmakers. That assumption turned out to be at least partly true, although Race to the Top, “Waiting for Superman,” and reform driven by high-profile education leaders placed a spotlight on education issues for a time.

As we elect new leaders and re-elect incumbents today, we hope they will begin to see that education is as important as other issues that have become familiar in political rhetoric. It is impossible to separate education reform from health care or national security and, especially, the economy. One of the points I made in January is that we need to see education as a job creator, tying it to our moribund economy. In that context alone, I think education can be seen as a “make-or-break” issue.

Certainly, our future teachers, doctors, federal agents, business innovators and lawmakers will depend on access to a good public education system to fulfill that promise. But today, education in the United States does not align with the kind of knowledge we need to propel a next-generation economy.

We need to place greater focus on increasing the nation’s high school graduation rate (which hovers around 70 percent) and prepare learners for college and careers related to a modern industrial economy. We also need teachers whose skills are aligned with the needs of the next generation. Frankly, I did not hear that position articulated frequently or urgently enough during this election season.

Thankfully, those of us in this space have the power to elevate the education discussion. In fact, we have a responsibility to help lawmakers and others understand the urgency of transforming our education system.

Finally, a few education statistics that may resonate with lawmakers:

• Three out of every 10 students in America’s public schools fail to finish high school with a diploma.

• Cutting the dropout rate in half would yield $45 billion annually in new federal tax revenues or cost savings, according to a 2009 report by Columbia University’s Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Teachers College.

• The U.S. Department of Labor estimates 90 percent of new high-growth, high-wage jobs will require some level of post-secondary education.

• The United States ranks 25th in math, 21st in science, 15th in reading literacy, and 24th in problem solving when compared with 30 other industrialized nations on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) assessment.

We could go on and on with similar stats, but for me that’s enough to elevate education in the United States as a “make-or-break” issue.

We are just two months past, however, an election in Washington, D.C. that, while not national in scope, was all about education. And those returns have been encouraging. Much attention has focused on the defeat of Mayor Adrian Fenty, who, to his great credit, appointed a dyed-in-the-wool reformer, Michelle Rhee, to fix the D.C. schools, and stood behind her most draconian measures, at the cost of his own popularity and even defeat.

What has been less commented on is that both major mayoral candidates-- Mayor Fenty and City Council Chair Vincent Gray--who by the time you read this will almost certainly have been elected Washington’s next mayor—were on record as favoring education reform. In other words, despite the controversy that surrounded education reform in DC, nobody thought there was enough opposition to support a run for mayor. There was opposition to the way reform was carried out, but little or none to reform itself.

DC voters and their leaders were following a national pattern. The 2008 election of Barack Obama represented a repudiation of almost every tenet of President George W. Bush’s domestic agenda—except education. There was no lack of controversy over the Bush administration’s signature education program, No Child Left Behind. But when the Obama administration came out with its K-12 policy, while it changed many aspects of NCLB—for the better—it retained NCLB’s philosophical foundation: schools’ accountability for their students’ educational progress—the same principle that underlies the DC reforms, Chancellor Joel Klein’s reforms in New York, and reform blueprints in other cities.

There’s still plenty to contend over, but the development of a consensus around accountability in education has been a major departure from the previous consensus, which distributed aid on a formula-driven, per capita basis, regardless of performance.

By the time the election dust has settled, we’ll know which party controls which house of Congress and by how much. What we won’t know is whether the majority and minority, in search perhaps of issues on which they can build bipartisan coalitions and demonstrate that Washington can work after all, will come together on education.

Our editor asks an excellent question: “After the election, is it possible to decipher a message from regular folks about school policies?”

Yes and no. Education is a complicated issue and most regular folks, along with most of the folks they vote for, seek simplistic solutions. If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say, “What we have to do is…”, I’d be as rich as Bill Gates—and then I’d just buy the kind of education I thought our country should have just like he’s doing. What we have to do is a whole lot of things, none of which we seem to have the courage to do.

And yet, there have been two consistent messages from the general public about education over the last twenty years or so: Message #1: American education stinks and it’s because of “those people” (whoever we think “those people” are; we just know they’re not “us”; the era of accountability in education has been marked by a suspicious lack of accountability on all sides.). Message #2: We don’t want any improvements unless they’re free, they involve punishing teachers, they take us back to pre-Brown or pre-Sputnik notions of education, or all of the above.

That having been said, we’ve actually been paying quite a lot of money for nothing of late. Inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending is way up. But achievement isn’t. So if Americans were paying attention, they really would have a serious message for politicians on education and it wouldn’t be hard to decipher. The message would be this: “Stop spending our money on things that don’t work.”

But that would beg the question, “What could we spend our money on that would work?” And because our leaders have tried so few ideas—and persisted so ardently for so long with so many that don’t work—we don’t want regular folks to ask this question because if anyone ever had the nerve to ask it, it would echo through the halls of Congress longer and louder than a member of the Obstructionist Party reading the DC phonebook during a filibuster.

Education in America touches the lives of tens of millions of people. But for most folks this is not a “good touch”. The median experience of education is not positive. But people know—intuitively if not through first-hand experience—that public outrage makes little difference. Neither does who we vote for.

[For my own part, I really hope this blog entry makes me look better than Alexander Russo. But no matter what I do, I just can't seem to get that ruddy grizzled reporter look in my headshot. Gotta talk to the folks in PR about a little Photoshoping, I think.]

Education policy doesn't break on partisan lines these days. Duncan's education policies probably have as much Republican support as support from Democrats. However, we could see Tea Party-supported winners trying to limit federal spending, including education spending meant to leverage change at the state and local level.

Education may be important for the long-term health of our economy (and our society), but people are not thinking very long term these days. They want more jobs now. Tea Partiers think government spending is strangling the economy, squeezing out private investment that could be creating private-sector jobs. They won't want to put money into Obama's college-completion agenda, despite its call for job training, because they'll see it as spending the taxpayers' money to send more remedial students to college to re-flunk math.

That said, I'm a big believer in the law of inertia.

The overriding issue in this election is the economy, and we can’t rebuild our economy without strengthening public education. The first order of business was federal funding to help local school systems survive the recession. Class sizes have increased and programs have been cut as thousands of educators were laid off over the past two years, but without federal help the situation would have been much worse.

Now we must move forward and work together to transform our public schools, especially those that serve the one out of every five children who live in poverty. The framework of that transformation will be laid out when Congress rewrites the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, currently known as No Child Left Behind.

There is bipartisan agreement that NCLB hasn’t worked. It has placed unfunded mandates on local districts and emphasized standardized tests at the expense of a deep, rigorous curriculum. Filling out multiple choice test forms isn’t a skill that will help our children prosper in the 21st Century; we must teach them how to think and solve problems.

Slashing our investment in education today might seem penny-wise, but it would be pound-foolish. Do we really want to kick poor children out of Head Start or cut college assistance for millions of deserving students? Radical proposals to abolish the Department of Education would have even more disastrous consequences for students and communities.

When the Election Day dust settles on November 3, millions of teachers and support professionals will get up, roll up their sleeves and keep working hard to improve our public schools. We look forward to working with anyone else - Republican, Democrat or independent - who shares our belief that education is a key to our economic future.

One of the things that has turned so many people off to education (and could well continue to do so in the future) is the intellectual dishonesty with which so many advocates and commentators engage in the debate. Opposing arguments, doubts, mistakes, and self-interests (ideological, financial, personal) are almost entirely absent from the vast majority of what's said by those (including some on this blog) who are in the business of explaining education to others. Disclosure has been whittled down to the slimmest of pro forma admissions. Many if not most of those who comment are advocates and participants in the issues they're commenting about, not disinterested and dispassionate observers. "The country’s 24-hour politico-pundit-perpetual-panic-conflictinator... makes solving [our problems] that much harder,” said Jon Stewart at the rally over the weekend). He's not the only one who's concerned about this issue. Longtime journalist Michael Kinsley wrote about the issue recently and called for more intellectual honesty, which he defined as, among other things, "being truthful about what’s going on inside your own head." Signs of intellectual honesty, according to me, include things like admitting doubt, acknowledging alternative views, correcting errors, disclosing self-interest, some semblance of consistency or coherence, and a willingness to differ with powerful friends and allies. Those who don't exhibit any of these characteristics are just after your pageviews, your Twitter follow, or your vote. They're spinning you , using smarts and expertise to disguise what's really going on behind the scenes and in their minds. [For my own part, I really hope this blog entry makes me look better than everyone else.] [Adapted from a 10/13/10 TWIE entry]

It's a mistake to read too much into Sharon Angle's "ideas" on education. She doesn't have any. Nor do many other people running for office this year. The Republican Party's "Pledge to America" doesn't even include the word "education." The Department of Education isn't unconstitutional and will not be eliminated. I don't even think we'll see serious funding cuts. A large number of states are hard at work implementing the Common Core standards, developing better student assessments, and turning around low-performing schools. That progress will continue regardless of tomorrow's election results, because setting high expectations and helping students meet them isn't a partisan issue.

As our editor correctly notes: “Education is on the minds of voters, but it isn’t a top tier issue like the economy or national security.”

Education isn’t a top tier issue because few of us “walk our chalk” when it comes to matching words with actions. Most of us say that education is very important. After all, we know the words to the song: “I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way.” But most of us fail to take actions that are consistent with this belief.

Yes, of course, the children are our future—literally. But we don’t do much to teach them, or much to help their teachers teach them, unless you count threat and humiliation as forms of assistance.

So perhaps the simplest reason why education is not a real political issue is that so few of us have a real commitment to it—a commitment that extends beyond convenient, self-serving platitudes to the making of hard decisions, the doing of hard work, and the embracing of hard realities about learning, leading, and living in the world.