;)
EDlection 2016 is The Seventy Four’s ongoing coverage of education news, debates and votes in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election.
But despite all the polls we’ve seen showing education as a key issue to swing-state voters, and all the substantive proposals we’ve heard from top candidates who have sat down for extensive one-on-one video interviews with Editor-In-Chief Campbell Brown to talk about their K-12 platforms, debate moderators continue to seemingly forget the topic — and the candidates don’t seems eager to broach it themselves.
As a result, K-12 education has been all but absent from the debates — and the campaign trail.
But don’t take our word for it. We downloaded and reviewed every single debate transcript, searching for every mention of schools, every utterance about education and taking note of the other terms that earned more air time.
And we think you’ll be every bit as surprised as we were, about what got bigger play at the debates than the education of America’s next generation:
“Reagan” vs “Education”
“Obamacare” vs “DOE”
“Build a wall” vs “Common Core”
“Climate Change” vs “K-12”
“Taxes” vs “Common Core”
“Immigration” vs “Education”
“Hillary” vs “college”
Dems say “college” vs GOPs say “college”
