Your last point about "white paper" candidates underscores for me how timid and cookie-cutter HRC and BO really are. Wouldn't it be nice if either of them gave off a palpable sense that they had to do certain specific things once in office? Instead, it's vote for Experience and the 3 AM CINC, or Vote for Change! Vapid bullshit.

I strongly support Obama, but his toying with the idea of so-called "merit pay" for public school teachers, like the pandering to Tim Russert on Social Security (no biggie, they all have to do it sometimes), is not one of his finer moments.

The concept of merit pay is one of the colossally stupid ideas of our time foisted on us by people who are fundamentally hostile to government of any kind and in particular, the god-awful, dirty-fingernailed unions. Don't even go to thinking about the massive nationwide bureaucracy that would be required to administer such a system for organizations that are fundamentally flat because that's the way they are supposed to be -- lots of teachers doing the same basic things, a few supporting specialists, as few administrators as possible.

Instead, just consider the fundamental assumption behind the concept: where, oh where, is the slightest inkling of empirical evidence that problems in our educational system can be attributed in any respect whatsoever to an inadequate incentive structure for teachers? Let's see: teachers largely go into the field because they like the idea of teaching kids, and knowing they will never make a lot of money. Flash: making them compete for money will solve our problems! They will just teach their little butts off (and screw the teacher next door who hasn't figured out how well this exercise works for these kids).

Of course, we know -- know -- that teachers protected by unions are just lazy as hell because -- well, because everybody knows that. The CATO Institute's been telling us that for 30 years, and if they can keep saying it for that long, they must be right.

I think they should have unions for job security and baseline collective bargaining *and* and an incentivization program.

I hope we get merit pay that *isn't* based on test scores. A couple of friends of mine are public high school and junior high teachers here in New York, and had some very interesting things to say about merit pay in general.

They're basically all for it. As they say, it's very easy to be a crappy teacher, and a lot more work to be a good teacher. But there's no pay incentive to be good rather than crappy, and much as we'd like human idealism to fill the gap, it's easy to get burnt out and end up just doing the minimal work you need to get by when there's no personal reward for doing better.

The problem is that merit pay based on test scores creates all kinds of bad incentives, particularly in terms of making it really undesirable to teach low-scoring kids who need help most. So they support a plan that's apparently being tried in Denver, where merit pay is accorded as a series of bonuses based on a broad set of actions---start an after school program, you get $X, raise kids' scores by a certain amount (not to an absolute level, but by a percentage), you get $Y, teach this understaffed subject, you get $Z, and so on.

That seems like a good way to get the incentives of merit pay, without the negative consequences. And it's the hope for that sort of program that has my friends bucking their union to support Obama (and working quietly to change their union leadership, which they have a lot of other problems with).

One thing I like about Obama is that he seems much more in tune with an SEIU vision of unions, where they try to overcome some of the endemic corruption and goldbricking that's been such a problem for traditional unions, while still keeping the ideal of collective worker bargaining front and center. If he can pull it off, we might see the first real uptick in unions' prestige and power in many of our lifetimes, and that'd be just great.