(FORTUNE Magazine) – You can hardly venture onto the campaign trail without stumbling over some candidate's education proposal. They're everywhere, like lice on a second-grader's head. But pick the nits of this issue, and you'll find that everything you thought about it is wrong. Because parents, who are supposedly so worked up about schools, vote less than ever. Because Republicans, who are such big champions of vouchers, aren't talking about them on the campaign trail. And because black voters, traditionally Democrats, are the biggest champions of vouchers.

Let's start with the things the parties used to believe. Republicans are the skeptics known for wanting to wipe out the Department of Education. Not anymore; none of the GOP contenders wants to eliminate it. Democrats are known as apologists for the teachers' unions, opposed to anything undermining the job security of the group that traditionally provides the most delegates to the party's national convention. Not anymore; Vice President Al Gore wants tough teacher evaluations that weed out the ones who aren't performing.

While none of the candidates is exactly a revolutionary, each has staked out a distinct position. "The candidates have real differences," says Denis Doyle, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. "The schools could be much different in four years, depending on who is elected."

Bill Bradley, whose mother taught elementary school, is talking about "lifetime education," continuous teacher training, national standards, and measures to hold teachers and principals responsible. Gore wants no more than 18 students per teacher in the early grades, grants for each state to develop preschool programs, paid leave for parents on their kids' first day of school and for parent-teacher conferences--along with the Clinton Administration's school-construction initiative.

And Bush is proposing to divert federal money from "failed" schools in poor areas and give part of it to parents to spend on educational alternatives--not quite vouchers, but close. "The Democrats want to centralize control of education," Bush told me in New Hampshire. "I want to talk about results--and doing things differently if kids are trapped in failed schools."

Is anyone listening? On the surface, the public cares desperately about education; a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that Americans rate improving education a higher priority than handling the economy, managing the budget, fighting crime, and protecting Social Security.

But you can expect this issue to fade. The politicians got all lathered up about education a dozen years ago; candidates from each party gathered at a conclave at the basketball arena at Chapel Hill, N.C., a year before the 1988 election, delivered impassioned speeches--and changed nothing. It might happen again, once the strategists discover that the number of parents is at a historic peak, but that their political impact may be at a historic low. Parents of schoolchildren, who accounted for a third of the electorate in 1972, accounted for barely a quarter of the voters in the last race. "A lot of the people who are not parents will drop off the education bandwagon as the election nears," says Ralph Whitehead, a University of Massachusetts professor who studies education and elections. "By next year, the people who care most about education are going to be the parents--and that's not going to be such a big group after all."

DAVID SHRIBMAN is Washington bureau chief of the Boston Globe and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter.