That’s an easy one. It’s education, stupid.

Or it is once you parse the political pablum, thankfully at a minimum but repeated in the Star-Ledger (Bloomberg’s willingness to “cross the arbitrary lines of partisan politics”) and in the New York Times (Booker’s belief that “Mayor Bloomberg is simply the model in America”).

Here’s the real reason: education reform. Both Booker and Bloomberg are signatories for an organization called The Education Equality Project, a think tank started by odd couple Reverend Al Sharpton and N.Y.C. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. Other signatories include such politically disparate figures like Jeb Bush, Henry Cisneros, John McCain, Michelle Rhee, Margaret Spellings, Newt Gingrich, and Richard Daley. Where’s Laverne and Shirley?

What binds this group together and makes a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat like Cory Booker join hands with the likes of Gingrich and Bush? A belief that the only way to truly raise the level of American education is through a complete overhaul of the way we train, evaluate, and reward good teachers. In fact, EEP’s first position paper, just published last week, is called “On Improving Teacher Quality.” Here’s the abstract:

The position paper “On Improving Teacher Quality” specifically calls on lawmakers and policymakers to focus efforts on:

1. Recruiting the best possible candidates for teaching jobs;
2. Giving aspiring and veteran teachers the right incentives and targeted training to perform well in the classroom;
3. Evaluating teacher performance fairly but rigorously;
4. Dismissing incompetent instructors after they have had an opportunity to improve their performance; and
5. Placing the best teachers where they are needed most

Read it. Here’s a few tempting tidbits:

Low-income minority students, who already struggle with the burdens of poverty and the vestiges of discrimination, should, by all rights, be taught by the nation’s most effective teachers. But in a travesty of the American creed of equal educational opportunity, access to the best teachers is now more a matter of zip code than need.

From the moment a prospective teacher enters a teachers college to the day of his/her retirement party, a teacher’s ability to elevate student learning is poorly assessed (if at all), and virtually never linked to consequences-either positive, as in the case of awarding merit pay, or negative, like being dismissed for poor performance

To be sure, many union leaders and education school professors still oppose efforts to move the teaching profession in the direction of a meritocracy, and some do not take seriously the notion that educators should be held accountable for student learning. But urban school reform and closing the achievement gap can no longer be about protecting the prerogatives of union representatives, district bureaucrats, and professors at teachers colleges.

This movement to change the profession of teaching from an industrial model to a meritocracy is not a new idea. But the confluence of high-profile and serious reformers in EEP is new and encouraging. Hats off to Mayor Booker for signing on. Mandates and regulations and high school redesign won’t get it done, with all due respect to Governor Corzine and Lucille Davy. That’s just window dressing. We need a whole new infrastructure ballasted by the very changes in the teaching profession outlined by the Education Equality Project.