Dana Goldstein | The Nation

On Tuesday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan invited a group of education reporters to breakfast. Student debt is a campaign issue, and Duncan’s goal was to promote the administration’s record on higher-ed accountability, such as its attempt to limit federal student loan subsidies to low-performing, for-profit vocational colleges; its simplification of the FAFSA form; and its launch of College Navigator, which allows families to compare the costs and graduation rates of thousands of schools across the country. (The DOE plans to eventually include in this database “gainful employment” statistics, which measures the ratio between students’ debt and their earnings. But the move to hold for-profit colleges accountable on employment outcomes has attracted political opposition and a lawsuit, and on Tuesday department officials would not commit to a timeline for putting this data online.)

A common misinterpretation of President Obama’s higher-education agenda has been that he expects all students to attend a four-year college. This isn’t true. The president’s stated goal is, by 2020, to increase by 50 percent the number of young adults who hold a bachelor’s degree or an associate’s degree, in order to put the United States back on top in international rankings of college completion.

When I asked Duncan what high schools can do to better educate students about the risks and rewards of various post-secondary opportunities, he said teachers and counselors should mention community college, the military and vocational training as potential options, in addition to four-year colleges. As I’ve written many times, I’d like to see high schools take a more active role not just in counseling students toward higher education and career training, but also in providing structured exposure to the world of work. Although there are some excellent local programs that do so, career education at the secondary level is unlikely to become a national priority any time soon, due to budget constraints and the political toxicity of anything that smacks of “voc-ed” or “tracking.” But I was encouraged to hear Duncan speaking openly about the need to help struggling students enroll in the type of post-high school experiences that will best prepare them to get an actual job.

As Ben Adler reports, there are few surprises in Mitt Romney’s education platform, which the candidate finally unveiled yesterday in a forty-page white paper and a speech to Latino business owners. Guided by Bush administration veterans, Romney is pushing teacher accountability policies tied to student achievement data, an expansion of the charter school sector, and more freedom for parents to spend their children’s federal education dollars on private tutors and online learning—but without guaranteeing the federal funding or regulatory support necessary to ensure quality in any of these areas. All in all, Romney has skirted some of the most important and controversial issues in school reform, both within his own party and nationally. Here are my remaining questions for his campaign:

Does Romney support the implementation of the Common Core curriculum standards? Partly in response to federal funding incentives put in place by the Obama administration, forty-six states have agreed to adopt these shared English and math standards, which will be far more challenging than many current state curriculum guidelines, and will include more writing, more non-fiction reading, and greater conceptual depth in math. Meanwhile, conservative legislators in South Carolina and several other states are pushing to prevent the Core’s implementation, complaining it robs parents and local districts of influence. Romney’s education white paper never even mentions the Common Core, and makes no statement at all on matters of curriculum. A campaign staffer told Education Week that while Romney supports the Core, he believes the Obama administration has gone too far in pushing states to adopt the standards. That’s a pretty theoretical definition of “support,” since implementation of the standarnds will be the program’s key challenge.

Will Romney protect funds for poor and disabled kids? Romney’s white paper lays out a teacher quality proposal similar to the one advanced by House Republicans earlier this year. But he has been silent on another priority of the Congressional GOP: allowing local schools and districts to redirect Title I and IDEA funds—now targeted exclusively toward poor and disabled children—toward other types of programs that serve larger populations. This is a direct attack on the federal government’s traditional, civil rights-oriented role in education funding. Would Romney sign such legislation?

Richard Kim is right: it has been farcical to watch President Obama—a politician who once wrote, “I favor legalizing same-sex marriage, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages”—shift to the right on marriage equality, and then tentatively swing back now that the public is more favorable to his original position. This tango between Obama and opinion polling has always been about crafting a narrative that can supposedly account for the president’s evolution, in which a struggling, family-values Christian eventually learns to love thy gay neighbor as thyself.

Male Democrats have been writing these gay-marriage “evolution” stories for a long time. During a series of presidential primary debates in 2007, both Obama and John Edwards were asked repeatedly about marriage equality. In July of that year, Edwards told Anderson Cooper he opposed gay marriage but his wife supported it; in September, Edwards added that his then-25-year-old daughter, Cate, also supported marriage equality, and that he expected his two younger children to someday support it, too. That same evening, Obama said his own daughters, then 6 and 9, were already aware of gay couples, and while he hadn’t spoken to them directly about gay marriage, “my wife has.”

These deflections were clever. They allowed the candidates to technically oppose gay marriage while signaling deep sympathy—even love—for those who supported it. For Obama, the purpose of crafting this years-long narrative has clearly been to pave the way for the kind of come-to-Jesus moment Richard so deftly imagines, in which the president delivers an emotional speech crediting his friends and loved ones with helping him see the light on full LGBT equality.

Katie Roiphe has written a link bait-y Newsweek cover story making an interesting claim: that the pop culture appearance of submissive female sexual fantasies, in shows like Lena Dunham’s “Girls” and pulp fiction like Fifty Shades of Grey, is somehow a backlash against women’s increasing economic power.

I think this is generally wrong. It’s true the advances of feminism mean women today are freer than ever to explore their sexuality in art and in their personal lives, without worrying too much about negating their power at work, in relationships or in the political sphere. In fact, it is a basic contention of sex-positive feminism that asking for what you want in bed is a feminist political act—whether you want to tie your partner up, be spanked by him/her or be tenderly made love to with lots of kissing.

Taboo-breaking sex is culturally prevalent right now not because of macroeconomic trends like the decimation of the male manufacturing sector but because we live in an age in which all sorts of sexual practices are incredibly visible and talked about. In particular, easy access to online pornography allows people, at a younger age than ever before and with more privacy, to explore non-vanilla sex, whether low-key spanking and restraints or much kinkier stuff. Female-authored erotica and sexualized fan-fiction are burgeoning genres online, as well, and e-readers have made it possible for consumers to purchase and read this material with perfect privacy. This is the world from which Fifty Shades of Grey emerged.