"Everyone loves education reform. President Obama loves it. Governor Romney loves it.

'The problem is that education reform as we currently understand it is, well, terrible.

'The debate is basically structured around how to structure teacher incentives so that they will get better results. Ten years ago, this was about linking pay to test scores, it was the era of No Child Left Behind, now remembered as insidious right-wing skullduggery even though the law was co-sponsored by Ted Kennedy. Now it appears that if you pay teachers to teach to the test they will do that, and further that this is too crude a metric because pupil progress is also affected by his environment, and how do you even define 'results', and so on. So now we’re talking about how to build a better model to get teachers to do their work better."

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