On the morning of Friday, June 6th, the Association for Educational Publishers will host a summit on the state of American Education…with, for the first time ever, the Education Policy advisors from the McCain and Obama campaigns. To date, the Clinton campaign has not responded to the invitation.

So far, between the war in Iraq and gas prices and health care, education hasn’t received much attention on the campaign trail, but the AEP Annual Summit is out to change this with what it is billing as “The Great Education Forum: the first exclusive head-to-head presentation of the education views of the presidential candidates” or, as I like to call it, “the reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic rumble.”

Jeanne Century, Director of Science Education, University of Chicago, from the Obama campaign, and Lisa Graham Keegan, former Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction and representative from the McCain campaign, will be on hand. Century and Keegan will be fielding questions from a panel of education experts–including Margery Mayer, President of Scholastic Education, Frank Catalano, Senior Vice President Marketing, Pearson; Dr. Sara Davis, Manager of Education Resource Development, USA TODAY; Neal Goff, President, Weekly Reader Publishing Group; Joel Packer, Director of Education Policy and Practice at the NEA; and Bernice Stafford, Consultant, Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration. The questions will run the gamut of ed topics and will almost certainly provide the education world with some food for thought running up to the 2008 Presidental election.

All of us at OOM are looking forward to hearing what’s on the minds of the campaigns. If you’re a reader of the blog, in DC on Friday and interested in attending the forum, drop me a line at strabucchi [at] scholastic [dot] com. Otherwise, stay tuned and we’ll try to report some highlights of the conversation early next week.