Candidates vying to be teachers' pet

Fifteen minutes before Illinois Sen. Barack Obama was scheduled to speak yesterday, teachers in the audience were crawling across the floor, trying to get closer to the lectern for a better camera angle.

When the Democratic presidential candidate finally took the stage, cheers from the delegates to the National Education Association were deafening, and nobody booed or hissed when, near the end of a 40-minute appearance, Obama endorsed the idea of merit pay for teachers.

Merit pay is a no-go for most in the teachers union - members say they are concerned it would not be implemented fairly - but Obama softened the blow by promising he would not propose "arbitrary measures" to link pay to performance.

"I want to work with teachers. I'm not going to do it to you, I'm going to do it with you," the Illinois Democrat told the crowd of 9,000 at the Convention Center. As he spoke, cameras flashed around the hall.

That faint endorsement of merit pay, on the last day of the national assembly, was the only deviation from the buttering-up attendees got this week from Obama, six other Democratic candidates for president, and one Republican. Everybody was for higher teacher pay, financial incentives to lure teachers to low-achieving rural and urban districts, smaller class sizes, and a retooling of the No Child Left Behind law that requires states to measure student performance with standardized tests.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a conservative Republican, brought the crowd to its feet with his call for every student to have access to music and art classes in every grade. Many creative-arts programs nationally have been cut as schools try to hike student performance in math and reading to comply with the law.

"We're leaving a lot of kids' talents behind by denying them the opportunity to experience their creative self and to have a complete education," Huckabee said. "An education is more than simply a data download from an information source to a kid's brain."

He also drew cheers by proposing to "unleash weapons of mass instruction" and calling an uneducated population "a form of terror."