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I can’t help but hope Obama agrees to an interview with Florida elementary school student Damon Weaver. He’s probably the only reporter who can offer court-time with Miami Heat basketball players.

Weaver, the Anderson Cooper of his school’s television station, first hit the national spotlight with his interview of then-candidate Joe Biden. What could make an educational experience more authentic than getting hundreds of thousands of YouTube views — and having your interviewee elected to national office?

[Via This Week in Education]

A couple of times during last night’s vice presidential debate, candidates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin departed from their talk of the war, Wall Street, and Main Street to extol the virtues of supporting and investing in education, which Biden called “the engine that’s going to give us the economic growth and competitiveness we need.”

That the candidates managed to mention education even though not a single question addressed the subject provided a bittersweet eulogy for Ed in 08/Strong American Schools, the bipartisan political action committee with the goal of increasing education’s profile in the national election. Ed in 08’s backers stopped pouring money into the campaign last month, far short of the investment that would have made it the wealthiest-ever single-issue PAC.

The Gates and Broad foundations, which had pledged up to $60 million for the cause, say the campaign accomplished its goal after spending only $24 million and doesn’t need any more funding before Election Day. “I think it is clear that we have embedded into the mindset of the campaign that the crisis of our schools is an essential part of the domestic policy program,” Marc Lampkin, executive director of Strong American Schools, told the Puget Sound Business Journal, which broke the story last week. (Alexander Russo of This Week in Education was the first blogger to pick up the story.)

Indeed, the founding members of Chancellor Klein’s Education Equality Project, which John McCain signed onto in August, included a number of Ed in 08 leaders, and last week the Education Equality Project and Ed in 08 released a joint statement asking for the moderators of the remaining debates to ask questions about education. (So far, they haven’t.) And a Strong American Schools spokeswoman told Education Week’s Campaign K-12 blog that both McCain and Obama supported at least part of Ed in 08’s policy agenda.

Photo from Biden's Senate webpage.

“I sleep with a teacher every night,” said Barack Obama’s running mate Joe Biden in a Democratic primary debate in February 2007. He was talking about his wife, Jill Biden, a former high school English teacher. Has this relationship provided Biden with intimate knowledge of education issues? You be the judge.

At OnTheIssues, a quick look at excerpts from speeches and debates shows Biden consistently in support of increasing teacher pay to make the profession more appealing to top undergrads. In considering merit pay, he seems to understand teachers’ concerns about being evaluated fairly by administrators. And he thinks the solution to the racial and economic achievement gap is to improve early childhood education, lower class sizes and provide the best teachers to disadvantaged students.

His voting record shows yes votes for many education spending measures, (more…)