In 1996, just a year into my work in schools, I read Regie Routman’s book “Literacy at the Crossroads.” It wasn’t just a book about literacy; it was a book about the coming age of edupolitics (or “politeracy” in this case). Ms. Routman’s essential thesis was this: while educators may not have signed up for political lives, running a first grade classroom was about to become just as dicey as running for office. And so it has.

Heading into the second decade of the 21st century, few issues have become more politicized than education. Historically, as political awareness rises over time on any given matter, our nation’s politicians have turned themselves to the task of dealing with it and making things better. (Slavery and Civil Rights are the two most notable exceptions, and I think the connection between these two issues and education is more than just a coincidence.) Progress is often slow in coming, but even our cleverly designed sloth-like system of self-hobbling government usually manages to get some good work done.

But not with education.

Somehow, education leaves our politicians forever flummoxed. And this year’s mid-term election has merely replaced the Party of the Bewildered with the Party of the Bemused. Will the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act (also known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act or ESEA) break out along slightly different lines now? Perhaps. Will Arne Duncan be denied some future spending money? Perhaps. Will eccentric Tea Party types try to teach us important lessons about the U.S. Constitution, along with leading the charge for improved spelling, grammar, and punctuation? Almost certainly. But at least there’ll be some entertainment value in that.

If you’re a kid sitting in a school lunchroom as I sit down to begin writing this piece at noon on Wedenesday, November 3, I can say with some certainty that trading your PB&J for a shot at real education reform is likely to leave both your stomach and your mind a little empty. Even if you don’t like PB&J, I don’t think you’re going to like much of what’s coming down the pike in education any better. Mostly, it’s the same old same old—just more of it. Rather than working smarter with bold, innovative ideas, we’ve decided simply to work harder at things that haven’t worked very well in the past. What does this mean for you? Probably just more hopelessly boring homework and tedious tests.

We do education and politics like this because this is what seems to help people get elected. Nobody ever won a race by being “smart” on crime or “smart” on terrorism. People only win if they’re “tough” on society’s ills. A kind of anti-intellectual populism has often run through American politics. Since being smart is stupid, politicians would much rather be tough. Being “tough” on education means that education is going to be tough on you, teenagers, because guess what? You’re the only ones in the system who don’t have a vote. This is nothing less than education without representation. Maybe it’s time for a little tea party of your own.

The are only two things that are likely to change in coming years: Which  party gets blamed for failing kids, and the folks you will eventually get to vote for to replace them—who will then be failing more kids.  I’ll admit there is a kind of perverse fairness about this as everyone continues to get a mediocre education. At least we won’t all be crabbing so much in the old folks home. As the decades tick by, fewer and fewer of us will be able to look back fondly on the “good old days” of American education and bemoan the current state of affairs as somehow inferior.

Though education consumes a lot of time for many families—and for a small percentage, their money as well—there really isn’t much to think about when it comes to the political dimension of schooling because regardless of who we elect, very little ever changes in our schools. This may just be because education is hard to change. Or it may be that the people we elect have no idea how to change it. There’s probably truth in both of these notions.

But the biggest truth of all is that school is not that different today than it was in 1983 when we boldly pronounced ourselves “A Nation at Risk”. Chester Finn, former Assistant Secretary of Education and probably one of our country’s most respected education historians, summed up the state of education reform earlier this year in an article called “The End of the Education Debate” that he wrote for National Affairs that: “The education reform debate as we have known it for a generation is creaking to a halt… and the conceptual framework built around them, are clearly outliving their usefulness.”

Record funding from DOE is driving reform, just like record funding from Bill Gates and other philanthropists is driving DOE’s agenda. But one wonders  even more than usual about why education doesn’t just take a wide turn into something that makes a little more sense. We’re all pushing the pedal to the metal on reform these days, but to the extent that the past predicts the future, we can safely say that even if we can get the buses running faster, we still won’t have figured out any new routes.

They say that politics makes strange bedfellows. But it’s clear that edupolitics makes even stranger ed fellows. We have a Democratic president pushing Republican themes and now a Republican House, and a revitalized not-so-minority Republican Senate, about to push their weight around. One might think that with a president who acts like a Republican on education, and a powerful new crop of Republican legislators, we might move even more strongly in a Republic direction on schools.

But what would such a directional move look like? As many folks like Mr. Finn have pointed out, the Republicans long ago won every major argument about reform. The Democrats just signed on because they didn’t have any workable ideas of their own, and because they didn’t want to look stupid. So all we’re going to get is more of what we’ve got: More testing, more charters, more choice, more merit pay programs, more market-based reforms. But, as Mr. Finn points out, this is not at all what we need. Suburban Republicans must understand that, as Finn points out, local control and funding aren’t panaceas; school choice activists must learn that the difference between private school choice and greater public school flexibility, variety and accountability isn’t all that different; and that national standards are needed to improve education. Centrist Democrat and progressive reformers on the other hand, will need to realize that the public school monopoly will no longer work; that teachers will need to be held accountable; and that we will need to go to the model of self-governing governing schools with control over their own budgets and staffing.

One might credit President Obama for leapfrogging the Republicans, and for bamboozling us all with his Bush-like approach to education. But if you think about it, after the mid-term, there should be very little tension left about which reforms our nation will pursue. But, as Mr. Finn points out, all we’ll be doing is pursuing the same tired reforms together. Quality reforms, not consensus reforms, will make the difference.

Education is full of sound and fury. But as Shakespeare wrote, and Faulkner alluded to, most of it is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. There was little point in moving education up to the top of our agenda this Tuesday as we headed into and out of the voting booth because regardless of who we elected, education is unlikely to change. Education gets a lot of press—and well it should—but it’s always a down-ballot issue regardless of whatever else may be in play. We all know that Carville said, “It’s the economy, stupid!” We know, too, that no one has ever said, “It’s education, stupid!” Though it sure does seem stupid for us to keep ignoring education at the ballot box. And not entirely unlike the way our country ignored slavery and Civil Rights for so very, very long. Could it be that we’ve always known exactly what we were doing with education in this country? Is there a connection between what is happening today in schools and laws against slaves learning to read or literacy tests for voting? Is there really much difference between the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and the phrase “life, literacy, and the pursuit of happiness”?

Education is a top political theme but it a isn’t a top political issue because few of us “walk our chalk” when it comes to matching words with actions. Most of us say that education is very important. After all, we believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Sadly, however, the greatest love of all turns out to be how much politicians love being elected. All this patriotic pap about the future of our democracy and our global competitiveness is nothing more than a self-serving smoke screen as politicians of all parties fail to take actions that are consistent with the beliefs they profess about the importance of education.

Yes, of course, the children are our future—literally. But we don’t do much to teach them—or much to help their teachers teach them. Education is not a real political issue because political discourse on education is really just code for caring and compassion (and sometimes veiled racism or classism), most of which is entirely sincere. I’m not sure whether education is a straw man or a red herring. But it’s a metaphor for something—a phantom, a figment, perhaps even at times a ruse. The politicians I’ve known have all been incredibly sincere about education. They really do want to help. But euphemism quickly replaces euphoria shortly after the votes are counted. When it comes to education, most legislators remind me of Robert Redford at the end of “The Candidate”. Whisked away on victory night by an ecstatic throng of supporters, Redford finally reaches the safety of his official car, turns to his campaign manager and says, “What do we do now?”

Perhaps the simplest reason why education is not a real political issue is that so few of us have a real commitment to it—a commitment that extends beyond convenient, self-serving platitudes to the mastering of hard facts, the making of hard decisions, the doing of hard work, and the embracing of hard realities about learning, leading, and living in the world.

It’s an odd thing for me as a lifelong liberal and son of a big city public school teacher, to admit that I’m tired of the government reaching into the school house swinging blunt instruments like an out of control rock band (or Charlie Sheen having an “allergic reaction” to some medication). Since World War II, the federal government has succeeded primarily at increasing educational access to historically marginalized populations. This is a reasonable role but it has more to do with human decency than it does with building a decent system of education. Improving access to education is a significant achievement. But achieving it has little do with improving the quality of our schools.

Many states list education as the top priority in their constitutions. But while education is often a top expense, it’s clearly never a top priority. Locally, we fund education inequitably through property tax approaches that are unlikely ever to change, except to the extent that they will surely continue to favor the interests of property holders over the interests of those whose children most need our help.

Government is good when it comes to making us have schools, and it does a decent job of getting us to let kids into them. But once they get there, I think government’s track record is not so hot, and that it’s influence should be limited accordingly—not because government doesn’t have a role to play but merely because our government seems to play it so poorly. The game of education is won and lost in the classroom, not at the ballot box. We all know this intuitively, even if we don’t want to deal with it in a healthy, constructive, and responsible way.

I say all this based not on ideology—my center-left worldview would lead me to the opposite conclusion—but on past performance. I think that if government at all levels focused solely on access, funding, and research, that would be great. Let’s leave improvement to people who actually know what improvement is and who aren’t afraid to do it. Or let’s just leave education alone for a little while. Let’s ponder Mr. Finn’s thesis and see that if doesn’t inspire us to come up with something new and truly improved. I think this 4th of July, I’ll be flying a libertarian educator’s flag, one that says “Don’t Ed on Me!”