In his Class Struggle blog this week, Jay Mathews explains why Romney and Obama are “education twins”, noting that the “two major parties mostly agree on education policy”, something that goes back at least a generation.

Then he claims “this is good for schools”.

Both presidential candidates believe in bleeding off public money for less accountable charter schools of wildly uneven quality.

Both want to swamp students with even more standardized testing schemes and then tie those inaccurate assessments directly to teacher evaluation plans.

Each endorses the concept of merit pay for teachers (which even most businesses have found doesn’t work outside of their sales staff) instead of funding real professional improvement programs.

Neither seems to understand that we need fundamental changes to a basic classroom structure that’s been in place for more than a half century, along with an even more ancient curriculum.

And all that is “good for schools”.

It’s this kind of policy, based on a simplistic, nostalgic view of school and uniformly supported by most candidates, and then accepted with little or no analysis or questioning by most media outlets, that’s not good for anything, much less improving American education.