(cc photo by kevindooley)

Dana Goldstein offers some skepticism about so-called “merit pay” for teachers:

Consider this TED talk on career motivation from Dan Pink, a former Al Gore speechwriter who is now a business journalist. If you can get past the MBA lingo, there’s a lot here that is really consequential for education policy. Forty years of psychological research demonstrates that when someone is faced with a complex, creative task — like teaching — money is an ineffective motivational tool, and may even delay progress. Professionals engaged in creative work are more likely to be motivated by autonomy, and by the feeling that they are part of a larger, socially important enterprise.

That seems plausible to me. But I think it mistakes the purpose of offering higher salaries to more effective teachers. I don’t think the idea is that ineffective teachers are going to suddenly will themselves into becoming great teachers in order to grab some incentive pay. The point is that if you’re employing a bunch of teachers, any of whom might depart in favor of employment elsewhere, you want to make sure that it’s your most effective teachers who are least likely to quit. And one way to do that is to make sure that it’s your most effective teachers—rather than simply your longest-serving ones—who are getting paid the most money.

Indeed, for all the controversy around differential pay schemes at some level I don’t think even the most old-school of teacher’s union leaders seriously dispute this logic. After all, it’s extremely common for collective bargaining agreements to offer enhanced salaries to teachers who have more educational credentials. The logic here, presumably, is that more educated teachers are more effective teachers and thus it makes sense to pay extra to retain them. The diplomas, in other words, are a proxy for quality. Similarly, veteran teachers get paid more than brand new teachers on the theory that a more experienced instructor is a better instructor. The principle that it makes sense to pay extra for quality isn’t seriously in dispute. The problem is that diplomas and time served turn out to be bad proxies for quality: “Recent research, however, suggests that such paper qualifications have little predictive power in identifying effective teachers.”

The reform proposal, ultimately, isn’t all that radical. Rather than paying extra for very weak correlates of effective teaching, why not just pay extra for effective teaching? To the extent that such a compensation scheme creates incentives for teachers to improve their own performance, that will be nice. But the real benefit to paying for quality is that, over time, it will encourage effective teachers to keep teaching while encouraging ineffective teachers to find jobs to which they’re better-suited, thus improving the overall quality of the instructor pool.

John Nichols quotes Representative Anthony Weiner, who’s emerged as a leading advocate of a Universal Medicare approach to health care:

And the New Yorker suggests that, “The real reason we haven’t seen the Democratic Party embrace the obvious and simpler idea is that it boils down to pure beltway politics. We’ve been reluctant to tackle the real inefficiency in the current system, namely, the very presence of the private insurance companies. Too many in Washington would rather stay friends with the insurance and drug companies when real reform probably can’t be achieved in a way that makes these powerful institutions happy.”

Noting that insurance companies skim 30 percent profits from the current system in order to satisfy shareholders, Weiner says: “Let’s leave it to the Republicans to defend those actions. I, and most Democrats, should not join the chorus that sounds like we care more about insurance companies than taxpayers.”

Given my softness on the Baucus Plan, readers may be surprised to learn that I largely agree with what Weiner is saying here. Certainly if I could crank up a time machine to 1995, what I would say is that rather than spending 14 years trying to build support for a wide lens but incremental transformation of the American health care system, progressives should just focus on incremental expansion of public programs. More and better Medicare and Medicaid, in other words, aiming to create a single-payer system. Heck, that’s what I was arguing back in January 2007 when the Democratic primary was first starting to evolve in the direction of a mandate/regulate/subsidize consensus.

That said, that was then and this was now. Anyone advocating that progressives take a completely different approach to health care at this point is in effect arguing that we should delay action on health care for a good long time. The current strategy isn’t one I liked when it was first being outlined, but it’s the strategy that won the day, and it’s the strategy that’s brought universal health care very close to being enacted. You can’t at this point just switch. Instead, you can lose and start all over again. But starting from scratch would leave you taking a good long time to get anywhere.

The other thing to say about this is simply that it’s naive to think that insurance companies are the only special interest that would fight vigorously against a Universal Medicare plan. Universal Medicare could save us a lot of money. But not merely, or even primarily, by squeezing out insurance company profits. It would also squeeze the profits of hospitals and doctors and medical device makers. That’s a lot of interest group opposition. And while politicians taking on “big insurance” will almost certainly win, taking on doctors and hospitals is a good deal harder.

The NYT’s Jeffrey Gettleman reports on drought conditions in Kenya:

So much of his green pasture land has turned to dust. His once mighty herd of goats, sheep and camels have died of thirst. He says his 3-year-old son recently died of hunger. And Mr. Lolua does not look to be far from death himself.

“If nobody comes to help us, I will die here, right here,” he said, emphatically patting the earth with a cracked, ancient-looking hand.

The same climate change that’s causing a surge in wildfires in California is also going to give us more droughts, more crop failures, and more famines. Human societies have, over the years, located their farms and population centers based on certain expectations about rainfall patterns. Upsetting those patterns upsets all those human arrangements and leads to starvation and death. Alternatively, as people try to relocate themselves to more viable land we’ll have war and death (and probably starvation too).

The World Food Program says there are four million Kenyans in need of assistance. That’ll cost $576 million but less than half the required amount has been raised. This is the sort of thing that makes it hard for me to take seriously the neoconnish mindset that’s extremely interested in international humanitarian issues if and only if humanitarian problems can allegedly be ameliorated by bombing someone or deploying American troops somewhere. The total bill for saving millions of people from starvation would be tiny compared to any military adventure. And yet the folks eager to wave the banner of “idealism” on behalf of launching wars are going to be nowhere to be found on this issue.