Grading Obama's Education Plan

President Obama's latest initiative, education reform-specifically, merit pay and early childhood education-has some merit. The teachers unions need to get behind the old-fashioned idea of pay for performance. The second part, early childhood ed, seems more like a liberal shibboleth. But it probably can't hurt too much, and might even help at the margins, if it doesn't become yet another welfare state bureaucracy. Now Obama needs to take the next step and support vouchers so that kids in failing schools can have the same kinds of quality options that his own daughters have.