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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.

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.

Joe Biden may bed down with a teacher every night, but Sarah Palin, the woman John McCain has picked to be his vice presidential running mate, was born to two of them — her father taught middle school science and her mother worked as an education support provider in Alaska’s public schools for many years.

Though we know her pedigree, we don’t know much else about Palin and education, especially her views on national policy issues. There’s virtually nothing about schools on her official homepage as the governor of Alaska, and the policies she has supported do not seem to fall neatly into either of this year’s school improvement camps: the “Broader, Bolder Approach” and the “no excuses” philosophy espoused by backers of the Education Equality Project. In fact, because Alaska’s schools are so different from those in the rest of the nation — for practical reasons, there are thriving distance education and homeschooling movements, for example — Palin has had little opportunity as governor to participate in national-scale education policy discussions.

Here’s what little we do know: (more…)