Gordon Brown today threatened to close failing schools - in this case secondaries where fewer than 30% of pupils achieve five A* to C grades at GCSE - as a series of education ministers in England have done before him.
It's the political equivalent of that advice to young teachers faced with a new class - "Never smile before Christmas". And like that advice it usually gives way to a more considered approach to the persistent baddies at the back of the class.
The Tories have made much of a series of past statements from Labour ministers about cracking down on failing schools - David Blunkett was particularly prolific in this respect - but they might also have mentioned the previous Conservative education secretary Gillian Shephard who said exactly the same.
But does it work? Mr Blunkett's "Fresh Start" scheme to replace failing schools with shiny new ones has dropped out of sight, although academies are in many cases achieving the same objective.
Ofsted reports a steady stream of failing schools improving and coming out of special measures, as well as a steady stream of new failures.
Of course parents are impatient for results, and rightly so, but closing a school is enormously disruptive for the unfortunate children involved and, in the case of academies, enormously expensive. The millions spent on new buildings would pay for a lot of teachers and smaller classes.
Closure is also poison for teachers' careers. If Mr Brown wants to get the "brightest and best" into tough inner city schools - one of his most interesting ideas today - then they need to know that the job is secure even if the kids are unpredictable. As John Bangs, of the National Union of Teachers, put it: "There have got to be incentives for the best teachers to stay in tough schools and one incentive is that the school is not going to close down next year."
The negative and positive sides of the prime minister's message today struck me as typically conflicted.
