Is Education Worth Just 11 Minutes?

This year it was Joe the Plumber. In 2000, the average-American stand-in in the presidential debates was Kailey, a student at Sarasota High School in Florida who had to stand in the back of her science classroom because the class was severely overcrowded and there wasn’t enough space to give her a desk. Vice President Gore pointed to Kailey’s experience repeatedly in the 2000 debates to illustrate the need for smaller class sizes and federal funding for school construction.

“I want the federal government, consistent with local control and new accountability, to make improvement of our schools the number one priority,” the Vice President said in the first debate, “so Kailey will have a desk and can sit down in a classroom where she can learn.”

Of course, that was before September 11, the Iraq War, and the current financial crisis — issues that have consumed most of the attention in the current presidential campaign cycle, leaving relatively little space for substantive discussions of education policy. In contrast to the 2000 campaign, when voters rated education as their #1 issue, and each debate featured at least one exchange on education, education slipped into the 2008 presidential debates just minutes before the final buzzer sounded. This year, the candidates spent just eleven minutes talking about education in one debate, in a rushed conversation that barely touched on their actual policy differences between them. Gov. Palin also made a brief statement on education in response to a question about working class Americans. Those 11 minutes seem paltry compared to the 28 minutes that then-Governor George W. Bush and then-Vice President Al Gore devoted to education in 2000. But it’s better than the 2004 debates, when moderators didn’t ask a single question about education, and the candidates spent only 2.5 minutes talking about it.

Early Ed Watch did the math*:

2000: Bush-Gore

First Debate: 9 mins (question and answer)

Second Debate: 4 mins (2 mins each in Bush and Gore statements)

Third Debate: 10 mins (question and answer)

Vice Presidential Debate: 5 mins (question and answer)

Total: 28 mins

2004: Bush-Kerry

First Debate: Nothing

Second Debate: Nothing, again

Third Debate: 1.5 mins (in statement by Sen. Kerry)

Vice Presidential Debate: 1 min (in statement by Vice President Cheney)

Total: 2.5 mins

2008: McCain-Obama

First Debate: Nothing

Second Debate: Nothing, again

Third Debate: 11 mins (question and answer)

Vice Presidential Debate: 2 mins (in statement by Gov. Palin)

Total: 13 mins

It is unfortunate that education gets such uneven attention in the debates and the presidential campaigns in general. Of course, a lot of things change from debate to debate, and campaign to campaign, including formats, moderators, and the priority of issues in voters’ minds. This year, surveys show that economic and national security concerns have nudged out education from voters’ priority lists. At this rate, we may not hear much more about the candidates’ education plans until one of them is elected president. As final debate moderator Bob Schieffer noted, however, our failure to adequately educate all American children is an issue with serious long-term economic and national security implications, so how we’re going to improve our children’s education needs to be included in conversations about those issues.

Of course, some things never change: Like Joe the Plumber of 2008, the plight of Kailey the Student in 2000 was exaggerated in the debates. While her school was very crowded, it turns out she stood in class for only one day.

* These times include both questions and answers about education, as well as occasions when the candidates initiated a substantive discussion on education in statements or responses to questions on other topics. It does not include passing references to education – for example, “I will focus on X, Y, Z, and education …” – which were in fact quite frequent in the 2004 debates. Nor does it include conversations about University of Illinois-Chicago Professor of Education Bill Ayers.