At The Plank, Josh Patashnik catches David Brooks oversimplifying Obama's education record and denying the candidate's willingness to push back against teachers' unions. In fact, as Josh points out, Obama has spoken clearly about teacher accountability, advocating for removing ineffectual teachers from the classroom. It's also important to note that he's defied the unions on merit pay; unlike Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, Obama went on the record in favor of pay tied to the test scores of individual instructors' students. The union line is that merit pay should be school-wide. In other words, if an entire school improves the academic performance of its students, every teacher and administrator within that school would get a raise, regardless of their individual track record. That plan, of course, has the benefit of avoiding penalizing teachers working with especially challenging or underprivileged groups of students. But it's more complicated to explain. --Dana Goldstein
