Note to candidates: Classrooms are more important than condoms!

"It's Super Tuesday, and Ohio kindergarten teacher Nicole Kessler is frustrated. Budget cuts turned her life upside down this year: To save money on bus routes, her district turned half-day kindergarten into two full days a week and every other Monday. Her school can't afford field trips or professional development, and her classroom supplies were cut in half."

According to a recent article, Kessler is frustrated because none of the Republican candidates looking for votes in Ohio is saying anything about the nation's education problems. "I've not heard anyone say anything in Ohio about education," Kessler said. "Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have been here a lot this week -- and it's been a lot about social issues. And factories."

When the candidates have discussed education during the debates, the major issue has seemed to be who will be the quickest to eliminate the Dept. of Education at the federal level. 

"While [Kessler's] district was able to pass a tax levy to prevent widespread teacher layoffs, if similar levies don't pass in other districts, many Ohio teachers stand to be fired. To add to that, Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) has "significantly" cut school funding, Kessler says, and plans to implement a content test for every teacher in the bottom 10 percent of schools, but "he's not sure how he's going to fund it."

Joel Klein is the former head of the NYC school system, and currently heads the education division of News Corp. (Rupert Murdoch's umbrella organization which includes Fox News).  According to Klein: "Unless voters insist that candidates give education the attention it deserves, this will be another political season in which both sides offer pablum without seeking a mandate for the ambitious reforms our schools require."

Klein notes that "the "pablum" comes from "this notion that education is a state issue, which is a traditional Republican notion. ... To simply say, 'Let the states take care of it' -- that's not going to get us anywhere."

One wonders if there were to be an outbreak of bubonic plague in several of the states, would the nation be content to view this as a matter to be handled at the state level?

According to John Barge, who heads the education system in Georgia: "There aren’t candidates that appeal to me on education right now, since I just haven't heard them discuss it.... But in my opinion, education is the number one economic development tool a state or a city can have."

Look around the world. The countries now "eating our lunch" in the education arena all realized that education was the most important factor in economic development and attacked--and solved--their education problems at a national level. Many, like Finland, still give much autonomy to provincial authorities, but the standards are set at the national level. 

Let's tell the candidates (both Republican and Democratic) that while the hot-button issues of abortion, gay marriage, birth control, gas prices, etc. are important to many, the issue of making the American educational system once again the best in the world is a critical issue when it comes to the economic well-being of our children and grandchildren.

And finally, let's not let them get away with the fiction that our educational problems will magically disappear once we weed out the bad teachers and destroy teachers' unions. We need to be smarter than that!