IN A PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN dominated by foreign affairs and the economy, both candidates have made a point of endorsing one controversial education proposal: teacher merit pay. Barack Obama even http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDgwNDcwMGYwNDcyZWQwMzMyNTUxMWNlOTR... target=_blank>braved the boos of a core Democratic constituency, the National Education Association (NEA), with his exhortation "to reward those who teach in underserved areas, learn new skills that serve their students better, [and] consistently excel in the classroom."

Merit pay is an idea that just won't die. On the school reform agenda for over 30 years, it has been defeated outright or negotiated past recognition in most school districts where it's been tried--yet, in 2008, the candidates for president apparently believe it has voter appeal. More important, it is still being pushed at the local level, where control of schools actually resides--notably in the president's backyard, Washington, D.C.

Washington's dynamic new schools chancellor Michelle Rhee is currently leading the District's public schools in contract negotiations with the Washington Teachers' Union. Rhee was given unprecedented autonomy as Mayor Adrian Fenty's appointee after Fenty assumed control of the school district in 2007. She's young, and her only previous experience inside a school system was a three-year stint as a Teach for America elementary instructor in Baltimore. However, she has been engaged since then with the New Teacher Project, a "social capitalist" organization that works with school districts to streamline their hiring procedures in order to attract and retain high-quality teachers.

As D.C. schools chancellor, Rhee has proposed offering teachers dramatically higher salaries and plentiful bonuses, rocketing their pay to six figures, if they sacrifice tenure and seniority. While negotiations are underway, details are meant to be confidential; however, leaks have been abundant. According to the http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/02/AR200807... target=_blank>Washington Post, under a two-tiered system current teachers could choose to remain on the traditional union salary schedule (the "red" tier) or switch to the higher-salaried scale and defend their jobs yearly in an individual evaluation and assessment of their effectiveness in raising student test scores (the "green" tier). All new teachers would be admitted on the green tier.

It isn't the first time merit pay has been suggested in Washington. The District has seen six superintendents of schools in the last decade, and more than one has advocated merit pay, with indifferent results. A behemoth central bureaucracy and vicious local politics hobbled superintendents' power to effect sweeping reforms. The District has long been infamous for combining one of the country's highest per-pupil spending rates with some of its lowest student performance. In 1998 General Julius Becton, a veteran of three wars and wounded in Korea, resigned after less than two years as D.C. schools superintendent, calling it "the toughest job" he'd ever had.

Actual corruption was part of the problem, in both the union and the city government. In 2003, the president of the Washington Teachers' Union, Barbara Bullock, pleaded guilty to stealing $5 million from the organization she had been elected to lead. She had been respected in some quarters for holding a hard line for teachers' rights--the kind of hard line that dragged out their contract negotiations for half a decade while teachers went without a raise.