What can it be called other than an October surprise? As last night’s vice presidential debate was nearing its close, none other than Governor Sarah Palin steered an unrelated question to education—and even managed to mention No Child Left Behind in the process. And boy, did she have a lot to say, even though much of is was, how to put this, a little off message (from the perspective of both the McCain campaign and the newly defunded Ed in ‘08 effort):

You mentioned education and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? I say, too, with education, America needs to be putting a lot more focus on that and our schools have got to be really ramped up in terms of the funding that they are deserving. Teachers needed to be paid more. I come from a house full of school teachers. My grandma was, my dad who is in the audience today, he’s a schoolteacher, had been for many years. My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here’s a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School, you get extra credit for watching the debate.

Education credit in American has been in some sense in some of our states just accepted to be a little bit lax and we have got to increase the standards. No Child Left Behind was implemented. It’s not doing the job though. We need flexibility in No Child Left Behind. We need to put more of an emphasis on the profession of teaching. We need to make sure that education in either one of our agendas, I think, absolute top of the line. My kids as public school participants right now, it’s near and dear to my heart. I’m very, very concerned about where we’re going with education and we have got to ramp it up and put more attention in that arena.

Funding needs to be “ramped up”? Teachers need to be paid more? We need to put more of an emphasis on the “profession of teaching?” Who let Reg Weaver write her talking points?

To be fair, this is pretty consistent with her record in Alaska, where she did boost education funding (which, of course, is sometimes a reasonable thing to do). But it doesn’t jive with John McCain’s plans to freeze federal education spending—a fact that didn’t slip by Senator Joe Biden:

Gwen, I hope we’ll get back to education because I don’t know any government program that John is supporting, not early education, more money for it. The reason No Child Left Behind was left behind, the money was left behind, we didn’t fund it.

Not that it would matter if McCain supported spending more money on schools. One sure lesson from the early years of the Bush Administration is that Republicans can never outbid Democrats when it comes to education funding. No matter how much the GOP puts into schools, Dems will always call them miserly.

And what about Palin’s NCLB comments? She’s right—the law was implemented. I for one am glad she didn’t say (as she probably meant to say) that “the law is great but implementation was a problem.” Because implementation wasn’t the problem, or at least the whole of it. And now we know what the McCain-Palin team thinks: NCLB is not doing the job and needs more “flexibility.” (Or wait, maybe that’s just what Sarah Palin thinks...)

One thing is for sure: David Hoff is going to have to write another post this week about No Child Left Behind, after all.