Last month, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the Race to the Top High School Commencement Challenge.

The challenge encourages schools to show how they are making great strides on personal responsibility, academic excellence and college readiness. In your application, tell us why your school is special and why it should be a model for other schools around the country.

…The President will select a national winner from these three finalists and visit the winning high school to deliver the commencement address to the class of 2010.

Click here to learn more about the challenge, then pass this message along to the high school students, teachers, parents, faculty, or community leaders in your life.

Commencement Challenge applications must be written by students, detailing the ways their schools are helping them prepare for success in the classroom, in the job market, or in college. Finalists will be selected based on how well their schools are helping students prepare for the future, and then the public will be able to weigh in, and judge which schools are making the most progress in the fight to reform public education.

Education usually doesn’t dominate presidential race issues, but researchers say it’s unusual for schools to slip off the radar as they seemingly have in the face-off between John McCain and Barack Obama.

“This is the first time in 20 years in my experience that education has been almost marginal in the presidential race,” said Chester Finn, who heads the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a nonprofit education policy group in Washington, D.C.

And it’s not as though the candidates don’t have plenty to disagree about.  The article goes on to enumerate the differces between Obama and McCain on things like school vouchers, reforms to NCLB, and federal funding for better early childhood education.

However, education did get center stage at a slightly lower profile event yesterday evening.  The chief education advisors for Barack Obama and John McCain, Linda Darling-Hammond and Lisa Graham Keegan, met at Columbia University to lay out their candidates’ respective positions on education policy. And they spoke before a full house, perhaps a sign that there’s hunger out there for more coverage of this issue. From the Columbia Spectator:

Teachers College students attending the event said that the debate held special meaning because the policies discussed could very well impact the nature of their jobs in the coming years.

“All of the decisions that are going to be made in the next few years are going to affect us as teachers, so I think it’s really important,” Jessica Weinstock, TC, said after the debate. “We’re supposed to be progressive and look at education in a new way and challenge what’s historically been done, so it’s very relevant to us.”

TC student Sarah Bever said she was impressed by both advisers, but that as a former public school teacher outside of Washington, D.C., she was excited about Obama’s emphasis on teacher training.

“When the candidates were first running in the primary, they sent out articles about their education policies and there was … very little from the John McCain campaign that was disclosed.” Bever said. “All the charts—no information, no information, no information.”

Even so, she concluded, both advisers seemed to have the nation’s best interests at heart.

“It’s obvious that they both want really what’s best for the country,” she said. “They just have very different ideals in terms of how they do it.”

Debate about education, despite its seeming second-class status in this election cycle,  informs discussion about fixing our economic woes, solving the problem of burgeoning health care costs, and developing renewable energy resources.  It’s going to take a lot of engineers, scientists, economists, accountants, and technology experts to deal with all of these issues — and tomorrow’s engineer is today’s kid sitting in 6th period algebra.

In three weeks we’re going to be electing a new President, and probably putting some fresh faces in Congress – take this opportunity to weigh in on where you stand on critical education issues we want to put before them when they take office.  Take the education voters quiz: