Polls ignore important education election

Here’s something strange. Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction race may be one of the most consequential on the ballot.

Because education is the issue this year.

And there are a ton of candidates running for the seat, from both sides of the aisle, with diverse opinions about how to run the department that oversees our public schools.

If you want real choice this year about the future of education, this race offers it.

Yet no one has publicly released any kind of polling to measure who’s leading the pack for the seat.

I know. Polls don’t really matter anymore because too many people refuse to answer them (I mean, honestly, who answers calls from numbers they don’t know these days?).

Their conclusions haven’t matched reality for the past few years in several key races, and voters nationwide are already electing people that traditionally shouldn’t have a chance. The tea leaves have all gone murky.

That only increases the likelihood that year's polls will be wrong.

But polls often are an indicator of how contested races are — and which ones matter most to people with the money to hire pollsters. (Don’t believe me? Look at how many gazillion polls there are in Arizona’s Senate race.)

To not have one for such a consequential race tells me that it is not on the radar of most politicos — or voters (seriously, can you name all seven candidates?).

Which makes sense, really.

The superintendent doesn’t make education policy.

He or she alone can’t raise teachers’ salaries or kill AzMERIT or rewrite how we teach evolution. Those duties belong to the Legislature, local school districts and the state Board of Education.

I’m sure plenty of political types think whoever wins the seat is inconsequential, particularly because the superintendent has been a politically inconsequential office for a decade.

But it matters immensely for the district — and charter-school administrators who must work regularly with the state’s Department of Education the superintendent oversees.

And it should matter to voters, even if most candidates have little name recognition. I don’t know about you, but I want the superintendent to represent where I think that department should be going.

Precisely because so many people are fired up about where education is going this year, whoever gets chosen in August (and later in November) will have an opportunity to ratchet up the office’s bully pulpit and effectively advocate for policies that directly affect students.

To not see at least one poll shows me how few people understand any of this.

And that’s ... just ... strange.