The Missing Education Debate

I am pretty uniformed when it comes to education policy, almost to the point where I don’t feel comfortable tossing in my two cents. The keyword in that last sentence would be ‘almost’.

The extent of our education debate seems to start and stop with No Child Left Behind, school vouchers and charter schools. With the debate and exchange of ideas so limited it really shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the state of our educational system is less than ideal. On any given night the 24-hour news channels parade foreign policy and economic experts back and forth across the screen. Where are our education experts? Give me 20 minutes and I could probably find an army of parents pissed off about their child’s school. So why are we only skimming the service of this issue?

Perhaps an expanded national debate on education could start with Universal pre-K. Ezra Klein believes that ‘one of the great disappointments of contemporary liberal politics that so many folks who call themselves liberals spend their time arguing about teacher's unions, testing, and merit pay, rather than uniting behind universal pre-k.’. From my understanding such an undertaking would carry a pretty staggering price tag. It would be interesting to hear from some experts if they feel that such a program and the spending needed for such a program could offset some of the costs we eat down the road. First, we need to start pressuring our elected officials to start talking about education. I won’t be holding my breath.