ASHINGTON - One is the son of an elementary school teacher, and a second was a high-ranking Education Department official. A third says her most memorable year was teaching at Melrose (Mass.) High School, a fourth is the heir to the ''education president,'' and a fifth says his life goal is connecting every classroom to the Internet (which he didn't invent).
Any serious student of the 2000 presidential campaign should score 100 percent on this back-to-school, name-the-candidate quiz. In order of one through five - Bill Bradley, Gary Bauer, Elizabeth Dole, George W. Bush, and Al Gore - have made their credentials and commitment to education key in their races to the White House.
It is no secret why: Most national polls show education as the number one concern in America. In a Harris poll taken last month, respondents put education ahead of taxes, crime, health care, and Social Security as the most important issue for public officials to address.
Presidents don't have a particularly large role in setting education policy; 93 percent of school money and most decision-making come from state and local governments.
But the anxieties of families about both the quality and safety of the learning environment in the nation's public schools at the start of a new century is making education just too ripe for the presidential candidates to resist.
In their zeal, they are blurring the ideological lines between the GOP, which historically has stood for shrinking the already-small federal role in education, and the Democratic Party, which in the past has stood in solidarity with national teachers' unions against cutting the strings tied to federal money.
Not one of the Republican candidates is calling for abolishing the Department of Education, though that was a plank in the party's 1996 platform and for many years a popular GOP rallying cry. Neither Bush nor Dole will talk directly about providing tuition vouchers for children to attend private and parochial schools, another important conservative cause.
Gore, reaching beyond the loyal union constituency, said he supports teacher testing and giving autonomy to experimental charter schools. Bradley, the former New Jersey senator who is challenging Gore for the Democratic nomination, also said teachers must be held accountable for student performance.
In Los Angeles on Thursday, Bush went beyond his GOP rivals with details, offering the first of what he promises will be three substantive speeches on education. The Texas governor pledged to upgrade the Head Start preschool program into a national literacy program, and he proposed taking away federal money from disadvantaged public schools that perform poorly over three years and giving it to parents to spend on education alternatives, such as private schools and tutors.
''In my administration, federal money will no longer flow to failure,'' said Bush, who did not call his plan a voucher program. Bush has not made a strong push for vouchers in Texas, either, though he has been an activist on education, implementing statewide skills assessment tests and taking credit for a notable rise in student test scores, particularly among black children.
Anticipating the Bush speech, Gore on Wednesday traveled to a poor Hispanic neighborhood in San Antonio, toured a dilapidated elementary school, and decried the condition of school buildings in Texas as ''particularly bad.'' Gore, too, has put forward an ambitious education agenda, from expanding opportunities for preschool and college to mandating national testing, ending social promotion, guaranteeing technology literacy, building classrooms, and hiring more teachers.
Despite the blizzard of education proposals, it is too early to tell if they will penetrate the public mind and influence voting behavior in next year's primaries and general election. A new study by Ralph Whitehead, professor of public service at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, suggests they might not.
Whitehead compared presidential voting patterns in 1996 and 1972, when enrollment in grade school was peaking and the nation had a laser focus on education. He found that while there were more parents of schoolchildren in 1996 than in the early 1970s, they made up a smaller percentage of those voting for president. In 1972, parents accounted for 33 percent of all voters; in 1996, it had fallen to 24.6 percent. Turnout among the elderly, by contrast, grew 6 percentage points in the same period.
Perhaps today's parents are too busy to vote, or too socially and economically diverse to be organized into a voting bloc, or too cynical to believe that public policy makers touting national achievement tests or school uniforms can wave a magic wand and bring discipline, character-building, and scholarship into the classroom, Whitehead said.
''It may be that `education' has a symbolic resonance that goes far beyond how the nation treats its schoolchildren,'' Whitehead said. ''What is clear is that parents - the core constituency for school-age children - are not rushing to the polls to try to improve conditions for their kids.''
That's not to say the opinion polls aren't reflecting something new and important, said Deborah Wadsworth, executive director of Public Agenda, a nonpartisan research organization in New York. The American public, she said, has reached a ''significant consensus'' on the need in education for higher achievement, holding children and teachers accountable for learning, ending social promotion, and maintaining a zero-tolerance attitude for violent student behavior that disrupts the classroom.
Robert Schwartz, president of Achieve Inc., in Cambridge, an organization funded by corporations to help dozens of states implement academic standards, said parents have made the connection between education and prosperity in the new economy. ''While the economy is booming along now, there is an underlying anxiety about how long it will last and whether we have equipped our kids to survive a downturn,'' Schwartz said.
Pollster Celinda Lake said as a political issue, education is gaining momentum with the approach of the millennium. ''People are wondering, `How do we raise our kids better, how do we solve our problems, how do we compete in a global economy?''' Lake said. ''Education is always the place that can make a difference.''
A recent Gallup poll found that 71 percent of Americans want public schools improved. But the same survey, conducted for Phi Delta Kappa, an advocacy organization for public education, shows that if the government paid tuition, 39 percent of public school parents would chose a private or parochial school instead. ''Parents want to see results,'' said Nina Rees, an education policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. ''They don't care if it is private, religious, or public, as long as it is accountable.''
While voters historically have viewed Democrats as stronger on the issue, Lake said, Bush has the experience of a governor and the image of a moderate to make education a competitive battleground. ''A surprising number of voters remember that his mother was strong on education, and they think he comes from an educated family,'' said Lake, who is advising Gore.
Faith Webster, a Dorchester mother with three children in Boston public schools, says parents are deeply committed to improving public schools and are becoming very sophisticated about standards, test performance, accountabiility, and professional development for teachers. It is not adequate, she said, for political candidates to expect these families to be satisfied with platitudes and posturing on education.
''Every candidate for president needs to sit in a classroom and see for himself what kind of learning is going on,'' said Webster, who is parent coordinator for the Boston Plan for Excellence in 61 city schools. ''Then they should sit down with parents and say, `What are your standards, and are they high enough?'''
