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[Tyrone Slothrop]

This education proposal from the Kerry campaign sounds a lot like the compromise I described a while back -- more spending on schools, but tied to a deal to cut the power of the teacher's unions:

• Kerry's second pitch is the real winner. His education plan makes use of federal incentives to succeed precisely where NCLB failed. Like a good liberal, Kerry dishes the carrot. But as Jonathan Schorr's excellent article from the August Washington Monthly documents, Kerry's proposal is also "quietly radical."
  
  The plan focuses almost single-mindedly (and wisely) on recruiting good teachers with a whole new pot of federal money. The catch is, most of the cash can only be used for standardized, merit-based salary increases, and only in concert with a streamlined process for firing bad teachers.
  
  Linking teacher pay to performance has angered the teachers' unions. But that's the genius of Kerry's plan (politically and policy-wise). Unlike NCLB, where unions, districts, and state lawmakers can find common ground opposing heavy-handed federal mandates and threats, Kerry's plan simply dangles a pot of money for any school district that's willing to devise a new system. If the teachers unions don't want performance measures, they're left in the tough position of having to "explain to their members why they're walking away from potentially federally funded salary increases."
  
  Kerry deserves a lot more credit for these Sister Souljah steps. He's confronted a traditional Democratic ally to help bring, as Schorr writes, "the American way" to public schools, "a straightforward inducement to hard work and results."

TNR