I watched the last (perhaps) Democratic primary debate last night. I am interested in the election generally, but over the past few weeks I have been noticing that education seems to be taking a back seat. Education was not a huge topic in the first democratic debates of the season (there have been 20!), but it usually made it into a question or two. In the CNN/YouTube debate, if I remember right, there was even 4 questions related to education.

But last night, there was a grand total of ... zero. In fact, I can't remember a question related to education since it was down to Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama (the last 3 debates) and I can't specifically remember a question on education when it was down to 3 (including Sen. Edwards). Now, on occasion, the candidates have interjected a small element of education policy into their answers (Obama's merit pay for teachers or repudiating NCLB have come up a couple times recently) but largely the topic has been forgotten. I don't know if I consider that a bad thing (I am a big supporter of state's rights in education as regular readers know), but it is worth noting because it indicates either 1) the democratic candidates don't have recognizable differences on education (likely) or 2) education is not as important as some of the other issues in the mind of the candidates and the media (also possible).

We'll see if this changes in the general election debates when there should be real differences between the candidates (Sen. McCain has finally listed Education as an issue on his website), but as of now education is not getting much play. Of course, this all is ironic because education is likely the first major domestic policy item that any of these candidates will have to address in their presidency as it is more than likely that NCLB reauthorization will wait until after the election and be a first 100 days issue.

If you have an hour and a half to spare, you can watch the whole debate from last night below (it was mildly entertaining - mostly because Sen. Clinton seemed frustrated about everything).

UPDATE: Apparently, I was not the only one that noticed. BoardBuzz has Wendy Puriefoy from PEN, with an editorial to the same effect in the USA Today.