Brooks on Obama on Education. The hard part of any reform is that you must take on entrenched interests. When those entrenched interests represent a voting bloc that can affect your electability, you may face a real hard spot. So it is with education reform and Barack Obama. Private industry embraced pay for performance decades ago, public education has not. Attempts to do something about that have largely failed. Notable in that respect: California's centrist Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, lost badly in the attempt a couple of years ago. David Brooks offers a review of the topic worth reading, but leaves unanswered the question of just how much education reform is achievable.