Last spring Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval, sitting at a school desk in Virginia City, Nev., signed into law the nation's first universal school-choice program, an education revolution. Assuming the law survives court challenges, Nevada will soon provide public school funding not to schools, but to parents, who will send that money to whatever school--public or private--the family chooses.
This will cut out unaccountable school boards and bureaucrats in favor of direct relationships between parents and their schools. And while rich families have always had school choice through their home-buying decisions and private-school tuition, Nevada will offer school choice for the rest of us.
Nevada's unique school-choice law quickly attracted attention across the political spectrum, from free-market-oriented think tanks who hailed it, to teachers' unions who opposed it. The American Civil Liberties Union is suing Nevada to keep low- and middle-income parents from having the liberty to choose their children's schools.
Given the education revolution in Nevada, when CNN announced the Las Vegas locale of the first Democratic presidential candidate debate, I assumed the candidates would show their hands on K-12 education reform. They could have gone for both public and private school-choice schemes like Republicans and the Democrats For Education Reform; or they could have supported public-sector school choices like charter schools, as does the Obama administration; or they could have opposed publicly funded school choice of any kind, arguing, as teachers' unions do, that school choice undermines traditional public schools.
How could the Democratic presidential candidates not take this golden opportunity to say something, anything, for, against, or about school choice generally or K-12 education in particular? The script practically writes itself.
Yet instead of defending parental choice or public monopoly, the candidates all walked away from the table. There was nothing from host Anderson Cooper that even resembled an education question. No concerned parent tweeted to ask candidates to defend their support of the controversial Common Core State Standards. No teacher appeared on video to ask the candidates to curb standardized testing. No education question came up, ever. And when Cooper asked how the candidates would differentiate themselves from President Barack Obama, their responses ran the gamut, but none mentioned education.
The presidential candidates did not completely ignore education, arguing for universal pre-K and college affordability in various asides. Yet they sidestepped the whole 13 years of school between pre-K and the college first year.
That stands in sharp contrast to the GOP presidential candidates, who to a person back expanding school choice. It also contrasts the Obama administration, which encouraged high-poverty/high-achievement charter schools and also pushed for more accountability in traditional public school by measuring student academic progress and making some use of those measures in evaluating teachers. Indeed, Republican education reformers like former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels have praised the Obama administration's efforts to improve public schools.
And that may explain why education went unmentioned in Las Vegas. The Obama administration backed school reform, while the teachers' unions behind Hillary Clinton do not, with National Education Association leader Lily Eskelsen Garcia accusing President Obama's then education secretary Arne Duncan of "destroying what it means to teach, what it means to learn."
This puts Democratic presidential candidates in the difficult position of either supporting a Democratic president, or the three-million-member NEA. It also means that for the most part, Democratic presidential candidates do not want to talk about education.
This has to change. We may disagree on education policy, but we all must agree that K-12 education can't be missing in action. One of the Democrats needs to speak up for kids.
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A former teacher, Evan Rhinesmith is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and co-author of Education Reform in the Obama Era.
Editorial on 11/23/2015