For most candidates, education talk is high on the agenda. But reform-minded parents interested in education need to tune into exactly what is being said. Look for substantial issues, such as teacher quality, accountability and standards in a candidate's platform. Too often, funding for schools trumps solid issues of reform. Money should be a sub-issue, not the primary focus for a candidate. But talking about money often attracts votes, so be sure to parse through the rhetoric to understand precisely what it is this or that candidate is really saying about what he would do for education if elected.

The increased emphasis on education issues in state and local races is partly the result of the new "No Child Left Behind Act" of 2001, which is being implemented across the country. The law requires more of states when it comes to holding schools accountable, which is bringing new issues to the table.

Also, reform issues, including charter school laws and reduced barriers to school choice, are moving to the forefront in many political debates, in large part because active parents are becoming vocal and demanding change. As parents get involved, they are no longer taking "no" for an answer - and their push to be heard is impacting the quality of the exchange.

For years, lobbyists and organizations, such as teacher unions, have worked to elect candidates and have been a powerful influence on the political scene. Since parents can't counter with this kind of organization, it takes grassroots, creative efforts to challenge candidates to champion causes of education reform.

With the fall election just around the corner, now is the time to become familiar with the stance of your candidates. Don't rely on party labels to align yourself with the right candidate. Education reform can be embraced by both parties or equally ignored. Generally, candidates who are supported by unions are more focused on money and less on the real issues that can improve schools, while those with taxpayer group endorsements are more fiscally conservative and tend to support greater choices for parents and wiser spending. However, there really are no short cuts to finding out which candidate supports your approach to education - it just takes doing some homework.

• Listen for candidates that hone in on these top education issues: testing, charters, choice, curriculum standards, and accountability. When a candidate boasts of resources with no substantive plan for how this translates into better schools, be wary. It's easy to endorse spending more money or lowering class size and it sounds right to most parents. But in reality, improving schools is much more difficult and takes real courage.
  
• Once elected, parents should be on the officials' doorsteps. Let them know you are looking forward to working with them and you will hold them accountable to their campaign pledges. It's not over on November 5. Your work as an education reformer continues as officials turn promises into policy.

How to uncover a candidate's position on education

It's often difficult to assess how a particular candidate plans to act on education issues, particularly when their views are carefully constructed to minimize offending anyone. Polls today play a huge role in how candidates shape their positions. But you can uncover the real scoop with some easy steps that may benefit you in the future. All it takes is a little effort, and sometimes there are groups in your community willing to pose your questions if you do not feel comfortable doing it on your own.

A performance gap - namely, a language or verbal gap - still persists, maintains Dr. E.D. Hirsch, founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hirsch is widely acclaimed for bringing strong and useful curricula to hundreds of schools.

The next front in the reading wars, Hirsch predicts, is language arts wars.

Reading is more than just knowing the words on the page - it is not just a technical skill; it requires knowing a great deal of unspoken, background knowledge. Students enter school with a wide range of vocabulary skills, depending on their home environment - which is affected by class. Once in school, the reading curriculum does little to help close that gap. The reasons are many. First, if the curriculum does not present lessons that contains words or concepts that are not already in the child's mind, then the language arts lessons do little to challenge the child's comprehension skills.

Some maintain that there is nothing schools can do about this because disadvantaged homes with poorly educated parents ensure that children can never make up the gap. However, countries such as France demonstrate that the gap between classes can become narrower as kids go between grades. Meanwhile the gap widens in the U.S.

Hirsch maintains that something must be done to make better use of the growing blocks of time being devoted to language arts in the schools. Students' ability to understand what they read depends on their knowledge of the vocabulary on the page. The fact that their limited language skills do not get further challenged by what is taught in school is producing a performance gap in many classrooms across the country.

The way reading is taught has changed for the better because more children are taught how to decode words, thus improving their reading skills. But even children with high level phonics and decoding in early grades fail to demonstrate equally strong comprehension skills.

Hirsch points out that learning to read properly is only part of the battle. How teachers conduct language arts classes and the materials they use is fueling the performance gap that persists.

Schools spend too much time drilling students on comprehension skills - classifying, drawing conclusions, making inferences, solving problems, predicting outcomes, looking for the main idea. After so many repetitions, the exercises don't improve the students' skills. And, to learn these skills, children are often given fictional, vapid readings, indeed "deadly materials and deadly exercises," says Hirsch, without coherence from one reading example to the next.

Influenced by the romantic movement, which emphasized fiction and creative imagination in reading, schools have gradually lapsed into using reading examples that are void of content.

An example that we found is in the Scott-Foresman & Company language arts textbook for third graders, If You Meet a Dragon. Inside is a play called The City Mouse and the Country Mouse. It is supposed to be based on the famous fable by Aesop. But upon comparing the two, the new text has clearly dumbed-down the dialogue to include smaller, more familiar works (TV, wimp, pizza, etc). In doing so, the content does not stretch a child's vocabulary. It is this type of content or lesson that Hirsch maintains is actually harmful. Textbooks are today written down to a child's level, rather than providing challenging content that can be used to expand vocabulary and introduce them to new ideas and facts that they would otherwise not know. In The City Mouse play we found, the story is set in today's genre, and the children who will read and answer questions about the story are familiar with the theme and know the words pizza, TV and video. In the Aesop's fable (called The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse), the mice talk of the Town Mouse turning "up his nose at his country fare"; which is beans, bacon, cheese and bread. The conversation is lively and the mice banter about how the other could possibly live with his kind of fare. Conversely, the modern day version has one mouse calling the other a "wimp." If our schools only expect children to be exposed to conversation and content that they already experience in every day life, what improvement can one expect in their knowledge base?

Publishers only react to what is expected, however, and groups representing teachers of English often lobby for the kind of material noted above. Hirsch says it's a disservice to students to teach these "short cuts" - being taught how to find the main idea without needing to go through reams of difficult content or facts. The substance of comprehension is based on concrete world knowledge, which is too often absent from language arts examples.

To change the current curriculum is a challenge, however. Not only would it cost money to upgrade the existing material, but it could also stir debate with publishers who would rather opt for unobjectionable stories than ones with substance - and possibly controversy, says Hirsch.

Yet, this is an important battle to wage.

"I think the new frontier in teaching of reading and teaching of literacy and closing the performance gap is going to be how do we get coherent, cumulative substance back into language arts, so that the time is no longer wasted," Hirsch says. "We have a tremendous opportunity to improve general level of comprehension - and narrow the performance gap between haves and have-nots."

Indeed, limiting the exposure of the all children to literature that is ageless and literate will reinforce the problem.