{"id":10499,"date":"2007-04-26T14:03:36","date_gmt":"2007-04-26T18:03:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/04\/26\/10499.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:56:26","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:56:26","slug":"theres-the-topic-and-then-ther","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/04\/26\/theres-the-topic-and-then-ther\/","title":{"rendered":"there’s the topic, and then there’s the discussion about the topic, and then there’s the discussion about how important the topic is, and then there’s-where was I?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A lot of attention<\/a> yesterday given to a project called ED in ’08<\/a> which has as its goal “to ensure that the nation engages in a rigorous debate and to make education a top priority in the 2008 presidential election.” I’m ambivalent. I’m for the rigorous debate business, although of course it’s unclear to me whether they want debate or actual policies. That is, I suspect that they want certain policies implemented, and they are encouraging debate insofar as it is a good path toward getting those policies implemented. The relevant question here is this: Would EDin’08 prefer that all the candidates agree on policy matters, or would it prefer that they disagree, provide reasons for their disagreement, and spend rhetorical capital on persuading people to their differing policy positions?\n

But perhaps they really do want debate, because after all the Presidency of the United States is a job that only very distantly concerns education policy. Oh, there’s a Department of Education, sure, and the President can choose to send legislation to the Congress that uses the funding lever to pry up local policies, but really, the President has fuck-all to do with schools.\n

Back when I was in a congressional district with an open seat and a wide-open primary race, I attended a debate amongst eight or twelve candidates, who spent a long time talking about local educational concerns. After a while of this, one candidate was called on to speak and said “You know, the federal budget covers about 1% of local education. I’d double that to 2%, myself, but that’s still not very much. The federal budget covers (some huge percentage) of our affordable housing costs, though, and I’d like to talk more about that...” I liked the guy.\n

We have a tendency to mix up the fact that people care<\/I> about education—and we should—with the fact that we care<\/I> about a particular election—those of us who do—to get the sense that any particular election should be about education. Sometimes a particular candidate has something serious to say, as Our Only President did with his plan to vastly increase the funding and reach of the federal government. If somebody wants to reverse that, or extend it, then fine, that becomes part of the Presidential Debate. But the list of things over which the President has substantial authority and on which the candidates have differing prescriptions is very large and includes the situation in Iraq and its neighbors; larger foreign policy questions including the Middle East, Russia, China and South Asia; trade, particularly connected to issues of climate change, human rights and jobs; labor, domestic and international; energy, both conservation and investment; climate change, both prevention and amelioration of effects; law enforcement, both domestically and internationally; privacy, human rights and habeas corpus<\/I>; appointments to the judiciary and the executive; and I’m sure half-a-dozen things that I’m not thinking of at the moment. Transportation issues. There is no shortage of real issues that have something substantial to do with how the candidates would govern as President. However important education is, if the candidates don’t have substantially differing views, then there seems no need to inject it into the debate.\n

On the other hand, the quadrennial choosing is one of our opportunities to address policy issues on a national level. The advantage of “making education a top priority in the 2008 election” is that it may be the best chance of making education policy a national topic of conversation. And if you think that there is a national problem with our education systems, and if you think that it admits of a federal solution, or at least that federal action is a necessary part of that solution, this is your shot. You can’t really (or can you?) address the issue nationally in 435 Congressional races and thirty-odd Senatorial races. You go to war with the national conversation you have, not the national conversation you want.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A lot of attention yesterday given to a project called ED in \u201908 which has as its goal \u201cto ensure that the nation engages in a rigorous debate and to make education a top priority in the 2008 presidential election.\u201d…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nytimes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10499"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18011,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10499\/revisions\/18011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}