With public education now spending more money than the Pentagon and still delivering suboptimal results, you might think that two guys with a lot of money to throw around would call for some major changes. Sadly, such is not the case.

Eli Broad and Bill Gates have announced that together their foundations will spend $60 million to influence the 2008 presidential election through a project called "Strong American Schools." (Here's one article on the subject from the New York Times.)

Broad said ""I have reached the conclusion as has the Gates foundation, which has done good things also, that all we’re doing is incremental."

And he's right. They have made incremental changes. They're incremental because they have not challenged the quasi-monopolistic model of school governance that funds schools rather than students. With compulsory education laws, parents must see to it that their children are schooled, and without school choice, they have (with some too-infrequent exceptions) no option, short of moving, of where to send the children.

Charter schools, private scholarships, public vouchers, and tuition tax credits all have a track record in boosting student achievement. This is true of students who use the funds to attend alternate schools as well as of students who don't switch but who attend schools that are subject to a greater than usual amount of competition. If you want to boost student achievement, that's where you put your money.

So will Broad and Gates promote those reforms? No. As the Times notes, "the effort is shying away from some of the most polarizing topics in education, like vouchers, charter schools and racial integration."

Instead, Broad and Gates will promote same-old same-old changes: a national curriculum, a longer school day and school year, and some changes to teacher compensation.

As Carl Olson writes in the current issue of Education Next, "the greater the centralization of school decisions nationwide, the lower is the possibility of student achievement."

A longer school day and school year, meanwhile, will certainly increase costs. It will benefit some children, and harm those who are already ill-served.

Merit pay for teachers, which is one measure that the pair will push to increase teacher quality, is a fine thing in itself. But given the rigidity of the rest of the system, it's of limited value. Given the political power of teacher unions, advocates of merit pay stand to get rolled, meaning that across-the-board pay raises become the rule. And those, in turn, will attract the mediocre to teaching.

The only thing notable about this effort is the amount of money that will be wasted.