In an evocative excerpt from his 2003 book, The 2% Solution: Fixing America's Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love that is just plain fun to read, Matthew Miller proposes a $30 billion plan for getting the best teachers to agree to teach in the neediest school districts and to elevate the status of the teaching profession. Miller, a former budget official in the Clinton administration, suggests a "Title I for Teacher Pay Act" that would require a 7% increase in the federal share of K-12 spending and would raise the salaries of teachers in high poverty schools in America by a whopping 50 percent.

But true to the title of his book, Miller isn't just throwing bad money after bad money. Unions would have to agree to reward the top performing teachers in these schools another 50 percent more and be willing to shorten the time it takes to fire the bad ones. In other words, in exchange for making it easier to get rid of bad teachers, all teachers in poor schools previously making, for example, $40,000 would then be making $60,000. The salaries of the best teachers in the poorer schools would be raised another 50 percent up to $90,000. Miller pitches his plan to a whole spectrum of well known policy wonks and practitioners ranging from AFT President Sandra Feldman to the conservative head of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, Checker Finn. Ever persuasive, Mr. Finn persuades Miller to tweak his plan yet further, permitting skeptical veteran teachers to opt out of the program in favor of the status quo (i.e. lower pay but more job security.)