HILLARY TO EARN TEACHERS’ ENDORSEMENT? According to Alexander Russo at This Week in Education, Clinton and her staff were seen at the National Education Association building for a meeting. “She’s got the NEA endorsement all but wrapped up, it would seem,” he writes.

I wonder how hard John Edwards lobbied for this one. He’s certainly been careful — unlike Barack Obama — not to talk about merit pay for teachers, even in high poverty schools where great educators are badly needed. Clinton, on the other hand, opposes merit pay for individual teachers but supports school-wide incentive pay, meaning every teacher in a building would get a bonus if the school improved on state assessments.

—Dana Goldstein

Dana Goldstein, a former associate editor and writer at the Prospect, comes from a family of public-school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwarz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at the Marshall Project.