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According to a recent poll, 67 percent of registered voters in swing states said education was "extremely important" to them in this year's election. Parents of high schoolers and college students are particularly worried, or they should be, that the interest rate on federally backed student loans is set to double in July, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. Meanwhile, only 8 percent of low-income students even make it out of college by age 24. Business leaders agree America needs to do a better job educating its kids if we want to remain competitive globally.  Yet despite all that, President Obama and Mr. Romney aren't talking about education's hard questions. They aren't even talking up their own successes. Why? Because education reform doesn't fit well with the overall argument either candidate is making about why he should get to sit in the Oval Office next January.

From the outside, it looks like a single school, with one main door, one security guard, one principal greeting students. But on paper, the Charter School of Excellence at Tamarac is actually two schools in one - a bookkeeping strategy allowing the school to collect an extra $250,000 in grant money from the state. The grant money is intended to help new charter schools get started. But several South Florida charter school operators have tapped into this money by creating new "schools" within existing schools. In many cases, the two schools are indistinguishable, sharing the same building, equipment and administrators. The practice is perfectly legal, state and federal education officials say. But some critics say this allows existing schools to collect extra money instead of promoting new start-ups.

Public education is by necessity an extension of our political system, resulting in schools being reduced to vehicles for implementing political mandates. For example, during the past thirty years, education has become federalized through indirect ("A Nation at Risk" spurring state-based accountability systems) and direct (No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top) dynamics. As government policy and practice, bureaucracy is unavoidable, but the central flaw with the need for structure and hierarchy is that politics prefers leadership characteristics above expertise. No politician can possibly have the expertise and experience needed in all the many areas a leader must address (notably in roles such as governor and president). But during the accountability era in education over the past three decade, the direct role of governors and presidents related to education has increased dramatically-often with education as a central plank in the campaigns and administrations of governors and presidents. One distinct flaw in that development has been a trickle-down effect reaching from presidents and governors to state superintendents of education as well as school board chairs and members: People attaining leadership positions that form and implement education policy have no or very little experience or expertise as educators or scholars.

A bill that would offer private and parochial school scholarships to some Newark students would give those children the chance at a bright future that many of their public schools deny them today, Newark Mayor Cory Booker said during a keynote address in Jersey City. Booker spoke to the American Federation for Children, a privately funded group that advocates for school choice in select states across the country. Gov. Chris Christie delivered a keynote address to the group Thursday and also urged passage of the bill, known as the Opportunity Scholarship Act.

The single greatest bi-partisan success of NCLB, the argument has been, is that the federal government began forcing all schools to address the achievement gaps among subgroups of students, impacting significantly how schools identified, tested, and displayed test data related to English language learners, African American students, and special needs students. Here, though, the use of the term "achievement gap" has never been challenged or examined for what agenda it fulfills or how it positions our entire national view of students, teachers, and schools.

The Obama Administration's approval last week of 10 state applications for waivers from NCLB was another missed opportunity to learn from a decade of policy failure. Instead of changing the disastrous direction of federal education policy, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's waiver process allows states to reproduce some of the worst aspects of NCLB's "test and punish" approach while continuing to ignore real issues, like reducing concentrated poverty or providing equitable funding and high quality pre-K for all schools.

The breakthrough experiment in New Haven offers a glimpse of an education future that is less rancorous. It's a tribute to the savvy of Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and as shrewd a union leader as any I've seen. She realized that the unions were alienating their allies, and she is trying to change the narrative. New Haven may be home to Yale University, but this is a gritty, low-income school district in which four out of five kids qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. Eighty-four percent of students are black or Hispanic, and graduation rates have been low. A couple of years ago, the school district reached a revolutionary contract with teachers. Pay and benefits would rise, but teachers would embrace reform - including sacrificing job security. With a stronger evaluation system, tenure no longer mattered and weak teachers could be pushed out. Roughly half of a teacher's evaluation would depend on the performance of his or her students - including on standardized tests and other measures of learning. Teachers were protected by a transparent process, and by accountability for principals. But if outside evaluators agreed with administrators that a teacher was failing, the teacher would be out at the end of the school year.

Sixteen years ago, Charlotte Danielson, an Oxford-trained economist, developed a description of good teaching that became the foundation for attempts by federal and state officials and school districts to quantify teacher performance. The Danielson method - articulated in her book, "Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching" (ASCD, 1996) - describes good teaching using numerous criteria within four broad areas of performance: the quality of questions and discussion techniques; a knowledge of students' special needs; the expectations set for learning and achievement; and the teacher's involvement in professional development activities. "If all you do is judge teachers by test results," Ms. Danielson told Ginia Bellafante in an interview for a Big City column in the Metropolitan section of The New York Times last month, "it doesn't tell you what you should do differently."

The United Federation of Teachers lost what appears to be its final chance to block the release of thousands of teachers' ratings, and school officials said Tuesday they will make the reports public within the next couple of weeks.

The New York Times online indexes the article "$5 Billion in Grants Offered to Revisit Teacher Policies" as education. It probably should have been listed under politics. After three years of demonizing teachers as the problem with American education with its Race to the Top program, the Obama administration apparently now realizes it will need teacher union support and teacher and public school parent votes to be reelected. Suddenly, Education Secretary Arne Duncan wants to "work with teachers in rebuilding their profession and to elevate the teacher voice in federal, state and local education policy." Other than promising respect, the proposal is called the RESPECT (Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching) Project, the Obama-Duncan team is offering teachers very little. The title of the program is apparently taken from a top of the pop charts song sung by Aretha Franklin in the 1960s. What Duncan seems to have missed is that the song is actually a complaint because as a woman she is not receiving any respect.

The New York City teachers' union has long called the process used by the city's Education Department for reviewing and dismissing struggling teachers partisan and unfair. But now, as part of an agreement reached Thursday, the Education Department and the United Federation of Teachers will put into effect an evaluation system that will bring independent observers into the city's classrooms to monitor the weakest teachers.

School in New York is probably going to get a little more dull. Yesterday the United Federation of Teachers and Governor Cuomo struck a compromise on the issue of teacher evaluations that will probably mean less focus on creative assignments and more on standardized testing.

Changes to the state's testing program could leave public- schools kids in grades 3 through to 11 taking as many as nine exams per year in English and math - more than four times the current number, officials said yesterday. The potential jump comes from New York's participation in a federally funded consortium of 25 states that's seeking to make exams computer-based, more challenging and administered several times per year. The latest consortium plan calls for students to be tested as many as four times annually in math and five times a year in reading, starting in 2014.

Teachers at the New York French American Charter School in Harlem will be allowed to unionize, a state agency decided on Wednesday, overriding objections from the school's administration. The United Federation of Teachers had filed a petition with the state's Public Employment Relations Board in December to represent teachers and other staff members at French American, a Harlem charter school with bilingual instruction that opened in 2010. But the school challenged the petition, arguing that three teachers had been coerced into joining the union.

More than a dozen school districts are taking part in a leadership fellowship sponsored by the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) charter network, in order to learn how the network trains its school leaders. The KIPP Leadership Design Fellowship, which is funded through a $50 million federal Investing in Innovation grant, has also brought together representatives from charter management organizations and educator training programs.

Talk K-12 education for more than five minutes, and inevitably, the conversation turns to charter schools-those publicly funded, privately administered institutions that now educate more than 2 million American children. Parents wonder if they are better than the neighborhood public school. Politicians tout them as a silver-bullet solution to the education crisis. Education technology companies promote them for their profit potential. Opponents of organized labor like the Walton family embrace them for their ability to crush teachers unions. But amid all the buzz, the single most important question is being ignored: Are charter schools living up to their original mission as experimental schools pioneering better education outcomes and reducing segregation? That was the vision of the late American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker when he proposed charters a quarter-century ago-and according to new data, it looks like those objectives are not being realized.

American teachers deal with a lot: low pay, growing class sizes and escalating teacher-bashing from politicians and pundits. Federal testing and accountability mandates under No Child Left Behind and, more recently, Race to the Top, have added layers of bureaucracy while eliminating much of the creativity and authentic learning that makes teaching enjoyable. Tack on the recession's massive teacher layoffs and other school cuts, plus the challenges of trying to compensate for increasing child poverty, homelessness, and food insecurity, and you get a trifecta of disincentives to become, or remain, a teacher.

Lamenting that millions of American children receive "a third world education," Mitt Romney on Wednesday called for poor and disabled students to be able to use federal funds to attend any public, private or online school they choose.

The NJ Department of Education (NJDOE) under Acting Commissioner Christopher Cerf is gearing up to intervene in 75 predominately Black and Latino "Priority" Schools, action that could lead to massive school closings within three years. The schools targeted by NJDOE for closure are in very poor neighborhoods across the state and have served these communities for decades. The NJDOE plan for "aggressive intervention" and potential school closures is the centerpiece of a new "accountability" initiative launched by the Christie Administration after obtaining a U.S. Department of Education waiver from certain provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2011. The waiver allows NJDOE to use test scores and graduation rates to create three new classifications of schools: "Priority," "Focus" and "Reward."

The question today is whether a democratic society needs public schools subject to democratic governance. Why not turn public dollars over to private corporations to run schools as they see fit? Isn't the private sector better and smarter than the public sector? The rise of charter schools has been nothing short of meteoric. They were first proposed in 1988 by Raymond Budde, a Massachusetts education professor, and Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. Budde dreamed of chartering programs or teams of teachers, not schools. Shanker thought of charters as small schools, staffed by union teachers, created to recruit the toughest-to-educate students and to develop fresh ideas to help their colleagues in the public schools. Their originators saw charters as collaborators, not competitors, with the public schools. Now the charter industry has become a means of privatizing public education. They tout the virtues of competition, not collaboration. The sector has many for-profit corporations, eagerly trolling for new business opportunities and larger enrollments. Some charters skim the top students in the poorest neighborhoods; some accept very small proportions of students who have disabilities or don't speak English; some quietly push out those with low scores or behavior problems (the Indianapolis public schools recently complained about this practice by local charters).