Ask either presidential campaign about any fraught issue in the ideologically riven realm of education policy and ye shall receive an answer in the form of a question or a “hold that thought”—mutterings about “school choice” and “results!” notwithstanding. For now, anyway, all we have is a consistent pledge from Donald Trump to “end Common Core,” which is likely impossible to execute several years into the standards’ strained implementation. And, on the other hand, from Hillary Clinton we get a trumped up history of engagement with children’s rights advocacy, a philosophically trendy movement in the years before a younger Hill’s transition to corporate lawyering.

Given a shallow glance, the Clinton camp’s ed cred checks out: After all, the nation’s largest union, the National Education Association, endorsed Hillary Clinton last fall, a significant snub to labor-loving Bernie Sanders. Eleven months later, when pressed to answer where Clinton stands on contentious questions of school choice for low-income families and expanding public charter schools, however, all that NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia could tell reporters on Tuesday afternoon was what went on back when her organization was weighing its endorsement. At a panel discussion of the education policy and the election, sponsored by the Education Writers Association, she told us: “I said, ‘So what’s the plan?’ And she answered me with questions.” This was a promising approach, Garcia said, because it was new and different. “That’s what they didn’t do in 2002 when they passed No Child Left Behind. They never asked an actual educator, ‘How will this work?'” (Er, Hillary’s campaign website lists her support for No Child Left Behind in 2002 as elemental proof that effective education reforms await us under another Clinton.)