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Hunter College High School was open today.

Almost all city schools were closed today to allow voting, but not Hunter College High School, which is in a murky land of its own, being a free school and a publicly funded one, but one that is not under the city Department of Education’s purview.

Hunter students did not let themselves or their teachers forget that it is Election Day. A ninth-grader, Simone Policano, told me the hallways were filled with students wearing Obama T-shirts and pins, some homemade, and one student wore an Obama Halloween mask to every single class. (“Obama For Your Momma” was a popular slogan, Policano said.) Policano said she even saw two McCain T-shirts — yes, even at Hunter, on the traditionally Democratic Upper East Side.

The election also came up during lessons. Policano said she spent her entire global history class talking about where each student stood, where his family stood, and how the Electoral College’s votes might play out. (Three out of 24 families were supporting McCain, Policano said.)

Among the high school seniors who could vote, Policano said that one stood out: a girl who turned 18 yesterday.

John McCain paid tribute to the New York City schools at last night’s debate, using the system as one of two examples of how “choice and competition” can improve public schools. (The other example was New Orleans.) McCain also borrowed a phrase Schools Chancellor Joel Klein often uses. “Well, it’s the civil rights issue of the 21st century,” was the first sentence of his response to Bob Schieffer’s education question. This follows McCain’s endorsement of Klein’s national manifesto on how to improve schools, the Education Equality Project, over the summer.

Barack Obama did not mention New York City’s school overhaul, but he did sing the praises of a chancellor who has cited Klein as a mentor, Michelle Rhee of Washington, D.C. Klein has praised Rhee and worked together with her on his Education Equality Project effort, while the teachers union president, Randi Weingarten, has criticized her more than once.

Given all the New York City love, it’s no surprise NYU education historian Diane Ravitch’s was not impressed: “Neither candidate showed a deep understanding of the needs of our public schools,” she wrote at Politico.

The Palins with son Trig.

Following last night’s debate, where McCain promised to “care for these young children [with autism],” Charles Fox, a parent and legal advocate for children with special needs, has strong words for the candidate and his running mate:

I have been simmering on a daily basis every time Governor Palin holds up her son Trig as a political symbol. I have to say, that I think all small children should be left out of the political forum, and it is wrong to use an infant with special needs as an emblem of your own personal rectitude.  As to her comments that she will be an advocate for children with special needs, this statement rings hollow with me personally. She may be sincere in these statements, but I do not think she realizes how little she knows about what it means to raise a child with special needs, or the daily struggles against deeply ingrained stereotypes about children with Downs and special needs generally.

“[T]he big arena that she has not experienced at all is the fights over so many things in school,” Fox adds. He also explains why he thinks McCain’s appeal to parents of autistic children was cynical and manipulative; the whole post is well-worth reading.

The final debate before the presidential election is tonight, and though education has rarely reared its head this campaign season, educators have plenty of ideas for McCain and Obama.

Teachers responding to a poll at TeachersFirst ranked equity — “a way to fund America’s schools to assure equal access to adequate facilities, equipment, and materials” — as a top priority, a view echoed by principal George Wood in his letter to the next president. Wood also lists attention to teacher quality, expanded after-school programs, and increased social services as priorities.

But educators have more to offer than policy ideas, says EdWeek commentator Lew Smith, who studied 54 successful school principals. He thinks good principals could teach the candidates something about leadership:

Regardless of their particular circumstances, these successful principals shared nine important characteristics: They were focused, visionary, change-sensitive, and courageous; their management style was empowering, relational, and strategic; and their personal traits made each one both a learner and a communicator.

Even if talk of education gets drowned out by economic worries tonight, the candidates’ education advisers will debate next Tuesday at Teachers College. Watch it live at EdWeek or read about it here at GothamSchools.

Even without Ed in ’08‘s urging, education is likely to pop up during tonight’s town hall-style presidential debate, which focuses on domestic policy issues. For a primer on the candidates’ education views, read GothamSchools’ coverage of Barack Obama’s platform and John McCain’s platform.

Dana Goldstein at the American Prospect says she wishes the candidates would address the growing segregation in our country’s schools, which Sen. Ted Kennedy argues in a new article has received far too little attention from the justice department under the Bush administration. I’d like to hear more about which elements of their education plans they realistically think can be implemented in lean financial times. If the worsening economy crowds out these topics tonight, they’ll likely be on the agenda of the education-only debate between the candidates’ leading education advisers, taking place Oct. 21 at Teachers College. That debate will be streamed live online.

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.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is notoriously right-wing, so it was no surprise when, earlier this week, it endorsed John McCain’s education plan. But I was surprised to see that its editorial suggested that McCain cite Edison schools’ performance in Philadelphia as an example of a successful privately-run alternative to public schools — because no one, not even Edison’s leaders, disputes the company’s failure.

I was under the impression that Edison’s free-market glow had dimmed as its schools barely inched up academically, lost enrollment, were plagued by safety issues and high teacher turnover, and ultimately even were taken back over by the district that once saw the company as path out of persistent failure. The Journal mentions the six-school seizure in Philadelphia but attributes it to Democratic myopia, not market forces. Last month, the company announced that it was becoming EdisonLearning, an education technology and data management provider. Looks like the only folks who didn’t get the memo about the end of the Edison era were those penning the Wall Street Journal’s education editorial.

In just a few moments, Republican presidential candidate John McCain will begin his speech to the NAACP outlining, at long last, his education platform. The highlights have just gone up at McCain’s web site, and at first blush his plan clearly betrays the fact that he consulted with Chancellor Klein while developing it, particularly when it comes to accountability, teacher quality, and who ought to be charged with making school-based decisions.

First, McCain’s platform calls for the focus of accountability to shift from “group averages” to achievement by individual students. Last fall, New York City released for the first time accountability reports for each school based in large part on the progress of individual students. Adopting this approach for No Child Left Behind accountability would be a significant departure for the federal government, and while doing so might alleviate some of the pressures that the “adequate yearly progress” requirement places on schools, it could also introduce new pressures.

McCain proposes to spend 60 percent of federal Title II funds, meant to improve teacher quality, on performance pay for successful teachers and recruitment bonuses for teachers who agree to teach at high-need schools, something that Klein has recently worked hard to muscle into the city’s schools. In addition, McCain plans to use Title II money (5 percent) to help states recruit top college graduates to teaching, including through alternative certification paths such as Teach for America and the New Teacher Project. Under McCain’s plan, schools would be able to choose professional development programs on which to spend the remaining 35 percent of Title II funds. Title II funds comprise $3 billion of the federal Department of Education’s roughly $70 billion budget.

McCain’s proposal also echoes Klein’s belief that principals ought to be the “CEOs” of their schools. “The money must be controlled by the leader we hold accountable: the school principal with a single criterion to raise student achievement,” McCain’s press release states. One question voters can ask McCain through the long campaign is how he proposes to make sure that principals spend funds according to federal guidelines. Here in New York, we’ve seen that some principals, once released from funding mandates from above, sometimes try to maximize their budgets by cutting non-essential programming and, more relevant to the question of federal funds, inadequately providing services to students with special needs, including those in special education and those who are learning English.

On the subject of school choice, which makes up the remainder of his education policy, McCain toes the Republican line. He proposes to expand DC’s school voucher program (despite the program’s own evaluation that showed that participants did not do better than those who were rejected). He also promises to invest heavily in virtual learning, distance education, and supplemental services to give students enrollment options outside of the traditional schoolhouse. Unfortunately, McCain’s plan would create ample opportunity for corruption by redirecting federal education funds from schools to businesses.

McCain’s press release suggests that he may disagree with President Bush’s education policy in one key respect: as one of his top advisors recently indicated during a “Meet the Press” appearance, he wants to “fully fund” No Child Left Behind. “John McCain is committed to high standards and accountability, but he is also committed to providing the resources needed to succeed,” the press release reads. Should McCain become the next president, a shift toward funding existing federal requirements would provide welcome relief for strapped school districts.

You can read all of McCain’s speech to the NAACP online.