Two interesting education conversations on MSNBC’s Morning Joe this morning:

1) Walter Isaacson speaks some truth about NCLB, charter schools, mayoral control and teachers unions, but his argument that deep down Duncan supports the D.C. voucher program coupled with a sunny outlook on the affect $timulus money will have in the classroom raised this viewer’s eyebrows.

2) D.C.’s Mayor Adrian Fenty lays it out for Joe and states unequivocally that real change will come to public schools when principals are given control of a hiring/firing process based on merit. Be sure to watch the Mayor dance around Pat Buchanan’s assertion that what he is endorsing is union busting.

The best note of the morning, however, was hit by Joe when he shook his head in an attempt to understand the BLOB and their efforts to thwart true reform, saying: “It’s like these people are like holdouts, like those Japanese soldiers that kept fighting for 20 years on remote islands. They didn’t realize the world had changed.”

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe this morning, TIME’s Joe Klein discussed the proposed stimulus package - with an early focus on the education portion:

KLEIN …Things I’d love to see in this: I think you have over a hundred billion dollars in education, but no quid pro quo from the teachers unions. If you’re going to give a hundred billion in education, at least we should get one extra month of teaching a year. Or, those funds should only be available to districts that eliminate teacher tenure.

Joe Scarborough jumped in with this sarcastic aside:

SCARBOROUGH …With a provision in there, as you suggest Joe, that says absolutely none of this one hundred billion dollars shall be spent to allow poor children to go to the same school that rich Senators send their kids to.

(The education chatter begins @ 1:20 in the video below.)